LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

Changing our lifestyle will change gas prices

Frank Musaraca, Henderson

Sunday, May 18, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Readers have done much complaining about the gas prices. We should begin to seriously face the real problems and really try to solve them. After years of warnings, the oil industry has failed to build much-needed refineries in the United States, while those heavily invested in them are allowed to pocket billions of our dollars in net profit, year after year, while suppressing workable solutions to the problem.

Many say we are only “catching up” to the market price, because pump prices in France, England and Norway are more than $8. Baloney! Gas sells for 16 cents a gallon in Venezuela.

We can also blame the greedy U.S. automakers for shoving the gas-guzzling monster vehicles down the public’s gullible throats. The blame also goes to us, the gullible public that thinks it’s “cool” to own and drive a monster truck at 80 mph — lining the pockets of the oil and auto industry moguls and investors while complaining about the price of gas.

The answer is in supply and demand. And the answer is in how much we really care about lowering the demand. More people with more cars, wanting to get there faster, is the problem. Vehicles with gasoline engines will use significantly less gas if they go 55 mph instead of 75 mph. Significantly more gas is used when accelerating than at any other time while driving.

We also should mandate that traffic signals on all thoroughfares be synchronized. It isn’t the stop-and-idle that sucks gas, it’s the start-up-again acceleration. But the ultimate answer to the gas price problem is that we demand that the auto industry give up holding hands with the petroleum industry, and mass produce electric cars again.

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By NVMakz

May 18, 2008

10:20 a.m.

Flag

Blaming the oil industry....

Comparing America to Europe / Norway...

Blame the "greedy" car makers....

Drive 55.......

Blah, blah, blah.... ALL wrong! All tried, to no effect.....

Americans conserving to lower demand won't work either, as the surplus will be sent in a milli-second to the mass-polluting and growing-at-a-hideous-rate nations like China, India and most of Asia. Lowering demand in this global energy market will yield nothing in savings or an easier time of it in America.

The ONLY answer is to increase supply. DRILL, go nuclear (as most of Europe has), develop oil-sands and oil-shale (as Canada has) and bring much more oil home to North America, lowering costs and providing time to develop alternatives == with the economic TAX of liberal-induced high oil-based fuel prices.

Gas doesn't "cost" 16 cents in Venezuela. Chavez subsidizes it to his people as propaganda to give America the what for.

Choking America and killing our way of life IS the way liberals corrode from within in energy politics. THEN, blaming everyone else for the troubles they alone caused.