Prepare to pay more

It seems that within four years –if nothing is done to prevent it (and nobody really knows what to do)– we [americans] will be paying $7 for a gallon of gasoline.

A very interesting post over Wired explains some of the reasons. A brief summary of them:

1. Oil companies getting tax breaks, and not passing those savings down, but pocketing them.
2. The economic development in China and India, which increases the demand.
3. Oil is priced in dollars and with the Federal Government preparing for yet another interest cut, the dollar value is simply decreasing. You need to pay more, for everything.
4. Traders (stock exchange, etc) are acting on fear, or greed, or both, keeping and raising the oil’s stock current value.
5. Suppliers have decreased their output. Non-OPEC countries would normally boost their output when OPEN prices have gone too high. This time they have decrease it instead, due to political instability among others.

Go read, interesting article about something that affects us all.

Mental note

The use of a local URL shortener —now defunct— has made all links on this post worthless. Do not be that stupid again, and use Google’s. Or better yet, do not use any shortener at all.