The federal government paid out as much as $51 million in green car subsidies for Volkswagen diesel vehicles based on falsified pollution test results, according to a Times analysis of the federal incentives.
After a credit-fueled energy boom and a punishing downturn, U.S. shale drillers now spend the vast majority of their operating cash flow paying off the debt they took out to expand their drilling.
California still is the only major oil-producing state that doesn’t tax the goo as it’s pumped from the earth. Yes, high-tax California. But never has there been a better time to change that and start making the oil companies pay their fair share.
For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18. Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.
The Obama administration signaled that it would not back legislation to authorize widespread crude exports, as a Republican-led effort to lift decades-old restrictions on foreign oil sales gained steam on Capitol Hill.
While the massive Bakken oil boom drew hordes of job seekers and international attention to the remote prairies of North Dakota and Montana in recent years, it’s turned into a money loser for most cities and counties in the region.
Goldman lowered its forecast for 2016 WTI to $45 from $57 while allowing “the possibility” of $20 oil. Naturally, that lower number is what made headlines: business as usual isn’t news, major change is.
Falling oil prices put groups with high costs under a severe financial strain.
Americans love their freedom to choose. Someone invents something, and competitors rush in with their own similar products to fight for a market that didn’t exist before.
This is what Tesla has done with the electric vehicle: The Model S is making cold-eyed journalists swoon, and the next few months are huge: The company will soon release its eagerly awaited crossover SUV, the Model X, followed by its more-eagerly awaited “affordable” sedan, the Model 3.
But Tesla shouldn’t get too comfortable, because the established auto-makers want to steal some of its quiet, zero-emission thunder with EVs of their own: In the past week, Toyota unveiled the new Prius, trying to assure everyone it can be cool as well as get 10 percent more miles out of a battery charge; Edmunds gave its blessing for the 2016 Chevy Volt; there was a possible sighting of the 2016 Nissan Leaf, the best-selling EV in the U.S.; and there were rumors that Mercedes-Benz is working on an electric car than has a range of 311 miles.
It’s a basic rule of economics: Competitive markets are good for consumers. Which is why drivers should be demanding fuel choice as well.
Gasoline is cheap now, but it doesn’t take much to cause a price spike: The threat of a supply constriction overseas; a refinery going down (and staying down, in California’s case); output quotas in OPEC nations. Anything can cause volatility in the global market. Businesses don’t like uncertainty, and it’s bad for consumers as well.
The only way to reduce the cost structure of fuels over the long term is to create fuel choice, something the United States has never known. To quote former Shell Oil president John Hofmeister: “We will never get past the volatility of oil until we get to alternatives to oil.”
We’re not advocating an end to fossil fuels. We just want fuel choice: Ethanol, methanol, CNG, LNG, biodiesel, hydrogen and, yes, electric batteries. Anything that reduces our dependence on oil is good for America.
If gasoline, the same fuel we’ve been stuck with for more than a century, is the superior fuel for vehicles, let it compete with other choices at the pump. If oil companies don’t want competition, what are they afraid of?
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Google searches for “MPG,” shorthand for the fuel-economy measure miles per gallon, decreased 32% in the last week of August compared with two years earlier, according to the data from the technology giant.
