Topic: Gas Prices

So you are in a funk …

By Rev. Charles Moreland | June 29, 2008 |

A headline boldly declared “We middle class Americans are in a Funk.” This funk is precipitated by events in our community and our nation.

We are in a funk because of economic conditions. This economic “recession,” “depression,” or “regression” is taking its toll on our optimismand depleting our enthusiasm, reducing our hopes and smashing our dreams for personal achievements.

Life for the middle class is tough (it’s that much magnified for the poor) and the outlook is more setbacks in our plans for the future. A house in our neighborhood in foreclosure, the house with the knee high weeds in the yard. Somewhere a couple has now moved on and away from this personal tragedy.

Will life for the middle class improve soon? The majority of Montgomery County residents are middle class familiesand they are being adversely affected by tooday’s sky high oil prices, falling home values, declining employment and rising prices for food and utilities. «Read the rest of this article»

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Laying the blame for high gas prices

By David W. Shelton | May 23, 2008 |

Memorial Day weekend has long held significance for people everywhere: high school graduation, the end of the school year, holiday travel, and high gasoline prices. In 2008, while graduating seniors look toward their future, the rest of us are looking at those gas pumps. As I write this article, the national gas price was at a mind-blowing $3.83 per gallon. Clarksville pumps were as high as $3.80.

We Clarksvillians do love to gripe about how our city government is being run, and we love pointing fingers even more. But where do we point our fingers in blame for these stratospheric gasoline prices?

The first place many of us often look is to those evil oil companies. After all, ExxonMobil netted a profit of $40 Billion (yeah, that’s billion - with a ‘B’) in the first quarter of 2008. Those “evil moguls” just keep sticking it to us, don’t they? Well, of course they do.

“Big Oil” has long since been the bad guys in our current political atmosphere, and they’re often painted as fat-greedy pigs who have their flunkies in governmental power. Oh, we all know the line. “Bush and Cheney are in cahoots with Big Oil, so we’ll get higher prices, blah, blah, blah.”

Before I go any further, I think it’s appropriate for me to point out that I’m usually a little more progressive (read: liberal) than most of my neighbors. So it might come as a bit of surprise that I might have some great amount of disdain for the entire “Big Evil Oil” party line. «Read the rest of this article»

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Gas price increases another 2 cents a gallon

By Bill Larson | April 22, 2008 |

High cost of food. High cost of fuel. One topic or the other is headlining the news everyday, with the per barrel price of oil topping $117, and gas prices in some parts of the country topping out $4.00 a gallon today, economists are predicting $4 a gallon here in Tennessee by summer. Tonight the Shell station on South Riverside Drive was adding another two cents to the price of regular unleaded. The cost of premium will really widen your eyes, just before it takes an even bigger bite out of your wallet!

Sheryl Pace of the Shell Sudden Service gas station located at 1070 S Riverside Dr increases the price of gas by 2 cents a gallon. She said she expects the gas prices to continue to increase.

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Gas prices: Consumers driving the pain

By James Butler | March 26, 2008 |

As of March 24 2008 the cheapest listed price of gasoline available in Clarksville was $3.08 per gallon for regular grade unleaded (courtesy of TennesseeGasPrices.com) with the indication that, for at least the moment, prices can be expected to remain stable. With the price of oil estimated at approximately $101 per barrel at the current moment, one gallon of gasoline costs approximately $2.61 to produce (figures courtesy of Bloomberg MarketData), meaning that there is a 15.26% profit margin being split amongst the relevant parties (and here we thought they were out to get us with unfair profit margins). Unfortunately for the rest of us, prices are likely to continue to increase for the foreseeable future for a variety of reasons which producers are largely powerless to stop. «Read the rest of this article»

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Sticker shock: Regular gas hits $3.07

By Christine Anne Piesyk | February 19, 2008 |

Oil prices reached an all time high today, topping $100 a barrel. It didn’t take long for that price to impact the consumer market: by 7 p.m., a drive northbound on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard showed the price per gallon for regular unleaded hitting a high of $3.07.

Clarksville Online began checking downtown, where prices hovered below that psychological punch of $3.00 a gallon, but once a driver moved from College Street toward St. Bethlehem, the price inched upwards to $3.03, $3.05 and finally topped out at $3.07 just north of I-24. Wal-Mart always discounted gas rested at $2.99, pennies shy of their competition.

We’ve been watching the price of oil and gas for months, noting that the price (for regular) always seemed to stop shy of $3.00 a gallon. Tonight our city joins others around the country in a collective gasp of sticker shock even as executives at places like Exxon are jumping for joy over record setting profits, an announcement that dovetailed neatly with the rising cost per barrel of oil.

If you are driving a Ford Explorer SUV, it will now cost you $69.07 to fill that tank (@$3.07/ gallon). Something to think about.

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Global Warming is everyone’s responsibility

By Beth Robinson | February 14, 2008 |

Unlike 1999, tornadoes spared Clarksville this time, but ripped through Tennessee and neighboring states on February 5th. In Madison, WI, where my sister lives, it snowed one foot in less than 24 hours. They’ve had over six feet of snow so far this season, so severe that she and others were told to leave work because snow came down so fast that the plows weren’t going out until it stopped. When it comes to climate change, we have our heads in the sand.

The cold and snow is also a symptom of global warming: more heat causes the air to hold more water vapor and more heat dries out some areas — then dumps snow/rain on others. The weird result is both floods and droughts — and snowstorms. The United States hasn’t yet recovered from Katrina, but the United States and the rest of the world will have many ‘Katrina-like’ storms if we don’t make huge changes now. I keep writing my senators and congress to pass sweeping legislation to lower carbon emissions (Kyoto). I wrote them recently to make investments in clean energy and ‘green’ rebates instead of the across-the-board tax cuts. «Read the rest of this article»

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High oil and gas prices, a sign of market manipulation?

By Bill Larson | July 26, 2006 |

$55,000 per minute or $7.27 billion. That what the profits for oil giant BP in their second quarter breaks down to. Profits for BP are up over 30% from last year, a record high for them in any single quarter.

In Kuwait, government financial assets have reached $166 billion, mostly due to the their record oil profits. So, they have issued plans to give each citizen of the country a gift, of approximately $690 US dollars each. Kuwait has had a surplus for each of the past seven fiscal years of more than 50 billion dollars a year. They are also headed for record revenues for this year as well. «Read the rest of this article»

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