re: #254 Obdicut

No, dude, you’re not getting it.

The true costs of the fossil fuels are the pollution in the air, the streams, and AGW. Burning oil to produce energy costs little because we’re not forcing the industry to pay the costs of that pollution. AGW is going to devastate the world, is going to raise prices on everything, is going to destroy wealth. And it’s a direct result of fossil fuel use. I mean, never mind the rest of the pollution they cause, the asthma they create that they don’t have to pay for.

Fossil fuels are like letting a guy make money by sitting in our house and running a generator that slowly fills up the house with smoke, and fucking paying him for the privilege of letting him be there.

And costs are not always passed down to the consumer. That is one of the biggest fallacies that corporations attempt to foist on us. Even in the true free market, the price of a good is set by what the market will bear. It is not production cost + x. It is what people are willing to pay for it. So when a company says they ‘have’ to pass a cost down, they’re lying. What they mean is they’ve run the numbers and figured it’ll profit them to jack the price up. That is all.

The oil companies figured out they could hike the price of gas up to $3.50/gallon, any higher and there would be backlash, but they cranked it all the way up to more than $4/gal and then when they dropped to $3.50 the consumers thought they were getting a “break.”