The Oil Drum | How much is too much for gasoline?

27 comments on How much is too much for gasoline?

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Sam Foucher on October 17, 2005 - 11:10am

It shows how disconnected the US lifestyle is from the rest of the world! For the sake of the discussion:
picture

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Gloomy on October 17, 2005 - 11:48am

I wonder if there is a graph of gas price as a percentage of disposable income. I could not find one anywhere but I strongly suspect that only in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait gas prices will have lower impact on personal income than USA.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking of Peak Oil as "Peak USA". This is the only country in the world which has not recognized yet that oil is depletable resource and that relying on it is equivelent to digging your own grave.

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GreyZone on October 17, 2005 - 2:12pm

CNN compiled this data from spring of this year:
http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lists/global_gasprices/price.html

IEA follows certain countries going back for years. Here's their graph:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/gas1.html

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Stuart Staniford on October 17, 2005 - 12:40pm

Fascinating graph - it makes it pretty clear what's going on. Almost all the places with really cheap gas are oil exporting countries. The US is a former oil exporting country and the culture about gas use/prices was formed during that era of plentiful domestic oil, and resists easy change.

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porsena on October 17, 2005 - 12:43pm

That's an interesting picture. It would be nice to see how or if the baselines for subsidy have shifted with oil near today's price.

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Sam Foucher on October 17, 2005 - 1:00pm

I forgot to give a reference:
International Fuel Prices - 3rd edition (May 2003)
A more recent document is this one:
International Fuel Prices 2005, 4th Edition, Dr. Gerhard P. Metschies, GTZ, 2005
warning: big pdf files!

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Sam Foucher on October 17, 2005 - 1:23pm

Here is the new graph from the last edition:

picture

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porsena on October 18, 2005 - 11:45pm

The interesting difference to me is the list of countries above the EU threshold (the price in Luxembourg) in 2003 (47) compared to 2004 (29). Countries as diverse as Israel, Cuba, Chad, and the Cote d'Ivoire have obviously done more to cushion their residents from the rising price than has the EU group as a whole. In the EU, Malta and Greece, not among the economic mainstays of the union one thinks, have kept their increases below Luxembourg's.

I'm still trying to grasp the national policy advantage of keeping the price of transportation high.

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William on October 17, 2005 - 7:29pm

Iraqi's pay less than 8 cents a gallon!?

Is that economically correct or coming at our lossb (are we subsidizing their gas price)?
Isn't that going to make them ridiculously inefficient?
Would it be too much to ask for them to levy a bit of a tax to take the burden off of us? They could raise a ridiculous amount of revenue and still have some of the lowest gas prices in the world.

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