Featured 3 States Drop Gas Tax as Prices Soar

It turns out to be a flawed policy. Switch to registration fees and the problem is solved.

Bob Wilson

 

They are! It is called (partial) road maintenance.

Mike

 

Sure, except ..."social distancing" will be something that affects a high percentage of people for the rest of their lives in the same way that people born just before the Depression had their behaviour changed for their whole lives.

Mike

 

times up:
now-or-never-only-severe-emissions-cuts-will-avoid-climate-extremes-un-report-2022-04-04

 

that just makes them buy hummers

 

I don’t know, are people still speeding at the same rate as before?

 

5 bucks isn't doing it here. is 6 doing it there? is gasoline usage down? i read memorial day weekend could break records

 

That's what you get when everybody says everyone else needs to do something about this.

 

US Refinery output is lower than normal, we have actually increased the amounts of imported finished straight run fuel.

There is also an excessive amount of crude stuck at the depo waiting for refining.

We might end up with out of gas signs during the holiday

The local Marathon had bags over the pumps last week stating the fuel trucks were held up.

I’m still of the opinion that if Refiners don’t want to do basic repairs the government should use imminent domain and have the military run the mothballed facilities as apart of national security concerns

 

Would the refineries then be exempt from environmental regulations?
Some were shut down because bringing them up to current codes was deemed to costly.

 

Eminent domain

I can already imagine the resulting explosions and fires.

 

So no different than a BP run plant?

A Former maintenance manager at one of their older facilities claimed they had daily unintentional fires every day he worked there, they were just very good at rapid detection and mitigation so no real damage occurred

 

In my region, a close relative worked her entire career at an ARCO / BP refinery. The biggest fire I heard about there was during her first month, long long ago, long before acquisition by BP. Spectacular but no injury. Though it should be noted that an investigation into a serious BP 'incident' elsewhere, much later, rated the legacy ARCO plants as significantly safer than the plants that BP acquired from other sellers. And this one was the safest of that ex-ARCO group.

Essentially, BP didn't much alter the existing safety culture of the refineries it acquired. It bought refineries from three different companies, each with quite different cultures, and good or poor, each group mostly stayed on its previous course.

The big fatal incident here was at a Texaco / Shell plant (now acquired by yet another new owner), where another close relative works. It occurred during a restart after a multi-day power outage.

I'd expect the military to do much worse. Running refineries (and numerous other operations not under Admiral Rickover's purview) to civilian safety standards is not among their core competencies. And restarting retired refineries is much more hazardous than continuing operations of any ordinary current refinery.

 

I guess it’s a moot point given the shuttered refinery’s want a bailout and exemptions to restart

Government refineries in either event

Hundreds of articles like this one every year

Forget About Climate Change, America's Refineries Make Keystone XL A Bad Idea

 

The military does not have the skills to do this, and socializing refineries has actually hurt production in countries like Venezuela.

The problem is in regulated environments like California oil refiners have higher profits if they cut back on maintenance and simply pay fines. In 2020 with large losses Marathon closed down the 4th largest refinery in California instead of maintaining it. The investment back then looked bad when california regulation appeared to make that facility uneconomic.

A past proposal was a higher gasoline tax, with some revenue going to refiners to keep excess capacity. Of course this never happened. Poor regulation and bad incentives are there. I expect the situation will get worse, but proper regulation and incentives could solve the problem, socializing the facilities has failed in other countries. Asian refineries look to be in worse shape than US right now, making importing finished fuel more expensive. In the meantime the few major oil companies are making large profits.

 

Record profits can’t keep the refinery running because they might have to do maintenance?

Solution is bailouts to the bad actors to keep the equipment running?

That’s similar to increasing registration taxes because the budget never includes road funding.

The threat of Removing said profits and placing them into repairs for them outside their will seems like it could motivate them

 

BP isn’t efficient they just put out fires and haven’t done maintenance in 20 years, and run the company into the ground to place big profits into a couple folks pockets.
pick your poison.

The problem is the government has never actually made anything in the last 30 when “it” runs a project

Proper accountability and the government actually not contracting 100% out to private industry would remove most of the graft, the trouble is you need oversight and neither private industry nor the government have any oversight.

Most businesses are so poorly run and dependent on bailouts they have no business existing.

Sun capital and it’s ilk are the worst examples of this, couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag but they do know how to rip off the public using legal usurpery to loan big profits into their pockets as everybody else is run into the ground

The sad part is government is mirroring what is common in private industry, everybody is out to burn down the system if it puts a penny in their pockets because there are no legal repercussions against the individuals responsible.

 

Isn't that basically American Capitalism?