Maine gas prices jump another nickel to 13 percent above national average

You left out our dictator wannabe in Augusta.
Which party do you think big oil wants in the White House? They will keep raising the rates so that their right wing cronies  will have an opportunity to discredit the president about them. Then miraculously around election time, they will start coming down again.
 

The hard historical fact is that hard realities have often caused people to move. Marginal land and location drove Mainers out before, and we’re not exempt from that simply because we feel entitled to forever live here on the cheap. No one ever said the unregulated market was a nice disciplinarian. Nothing at all warm and fuzzy about it, but maybe we can come up with a better system of production and distribution of what we truly need. Maybe. 

I am truly sorry for the predicament that rural folk find themselves in and I agree that Obama could never make it in a rural area, lol. Still, it’s not going to get any better. 

Worldwide, oil production has peaked.  In fact, despite near record high avg. prices, world oil production has been flat for 7 years now.  The easy oil is long gone.  (Tar sands, and oil buried 20,000 feet below another 5,000 feet of ocean water, ain’t easy, cheap oil.) Oil prices are high due to geological and worldwide oil market realities, not due to conservationists promoting higher gas prices and such market realities will not alter themselves simply because some of us (me too) wish to live in a rural area.

Living in the country in the not too distant future means driving less, combining errands, perhaps driving a soon to be on the market electric (some improved range ones are coming, but they’re still not 300 mile range things as gas cars are), or not driving at all.

The fact is, that even though US oil production is up a wee bit due to Bakken oil in North Dakota, other US fields are pretty depleted.  Worldwide, it’s even worse, as oil production nearly everywhere is flat to down.  At the same time, new oil consumers are coming online everywhere, but especially in China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and US drivers are now having to outbid those folks for oil.

I know Peak Oil is a bit of a secret…certainly looking up and down this comment thread today, I only see one other commenter mentioning or understanding it, but worldwide Peak Oil is here.  Speculators, Democrats, and Republicans only push the price around a little bit.  Economic booms and busts push oil prices around a bit more, as we’ve seen, but even then, the long term trend is UP.

Living in the country is still possible, but the days of driving a large 4X4, four hundred miles a week, are possibly, very numbered. (And of course, for many of us, driving even an ordinary car 200 or 300 miles a week, will be very costly, if possible at all.)

Oh, also, three oil refineries on the East Coast have been recently shut, probably for good.  They were closed because they aren’t profitable, given the high cost of their input stream (crude oil.)  This suggests that gasoline and diesel prices are headed even higher.  We all can expect gas stations to start closing as well.  As peak gasoline proceeds, the infrastructure associated with it will shrink, making there even less competition for our gasoline $$ and putting the distances between stations even higher.

I recently upgraded the buried electric line to my garage in anticipation of having to buy an electric car in the future.

I suggest others start looking past gasoline and diesel too because THAT time HAS arrived.

Lastly, as hpmcg says elsewhere, “hard realities” have forced people to move before and this may apply to rural if not suburban, living. Suburbs were *created* by cheap oil and automobiles. Of course people lived in rural areas before cheap gas and diesel, but they tended to work at home and go to town once a week or so. We may be headed towards such times again, tempered somewhat by electric cars, though their higher purchase price and somewhat limited range may still limit rural and suburban lifestyles compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to in the past 40, easy, years.