Dear Solitary Reader:
Remember when gas companies used to try and tell us that rising gas prices weren’t their fault?
Way back when we had a planet for every Nazgul, when the threat of $1.00/litre gas was on our doorstep up here in the Great White North, peeps at the gas companies were telling us any number of things to justify the increase.
The most common reason given was the fluctuation in the world price per barrel of oil. This was caused by:
- The revelation that there was no such thing as the brontosaurus had a huge effect on the fossil fuel industry and negatively impacted the Estimated World Oil Cache (EWOC) as they could no longer count on the fossils of Brontosaurus in the B/B ration (bones per barrel).
- The US Oil Reserves were invaded by oil drinking aliens from another dimension.
- Storms in the Gulf of Mexico
- US Oil Reserves were low (for non oil-drinking alien related reasons).
All the players danced about the world stage – OPEC, that lovably affable conglomeration of the richest people in the world, governments on all levels and the media (rising gas prices were always a good story when no celebrities had died and/or people killed) – offering us various reasons why it would cost us so much more to fill our tanks than the reason before.
Up here in Canada, gas companies like Petro-Canada had this nifty little graph telling us how little profit they made in the whole gas guzzling business. “Woe!” These graphs often cried: “Look! For thou that hast the eyes to see! Lousy are the profits made by this company herein; small are our profits – a paltry 2% even!.” You could, though, easily see an article saying that profits were up in the 100s of millions – you didn’t even have to look that hard to find them.
But times have changed.
The relationship between the gas company and the consumer is like marriage. In the early stages the gas companies were doing their best not to fart in front of us afraid that we would go to some other miracle place for our fossil fuel; eventually the gas companies realized that we’d grown fat and bald and no one else would have us and they could fart in front of us to their hearts content. A crude analogy, but oil too can be crude. Really where else are we going to go for fuel? Diesel? Yeah right (you know you suck Diesel, admit it).
So now gas prices at the pump fluctuate and gas companies no longer bother to go into the next room; they don’t bother to explain the rise and non-fall of prices with the excuses listed above (though I would totally respect any gas company exec who threw down the brontosaurus excuse); now when you roll up at the pump and find prices have increased 5 cents from the night before there’s nothing you can do but say “Bastards” and figure out how much gas you need for the rest of the week and hope a) you estimate right and b) that when you go tank up again two days from now you hit the jackpot and the price is lower.
Gas companies will, of course, always have that tax card to play. Municipalities and provincial governments always like to throw down a tax on gas because it a) makes them look environmentally conscious and b) most people have a car. Taxes aren’t going away – and they probably aren’t going any lower. But that tax card never did make up for the fact that when they raised their at the pump pricing in response to a butterfly flapping its wings in the Bay of Fundy it never came back down to the same level once the imminent threat was gone.
What makes the entire situation worse is that companies like Shell even found ways to dilute the silver lining in this cloud: air miles. It used to be that when you tanked up you’d get 20x the air miles for your trouble. Always nice to get something extra for something you had to do anyway. Well when the price of gas went up so did the amount of air miles you got – small bonus eh? Not so much.
Within a month of prices reaching above $1.00/litre (again in Canada, us whacky metric folk) the mile per litre ratio had changed… some executive had a dead faint at the amount of air miles being given away. People were flying for free all over the place. This is a crisis that must have stopped. And stop it they did, because now we are lucky to get 5x the rewards. So now we’re not only paying more for the benevolence of gasoline, we get less rewards for it.
I need to find me a vehicle that runs on my acerbic nature … I could fuel that one for a while.
That’s me – the man with the moon in his eye. Take a look at that whacky shape, that’s because the bottom of the iris is stuck to the front of the eye.
This is the ankylosaurus. Notice the fused spine? So if my faith in science is correct, this is what I’m going to look like in about look like in about 40 years. At which point I will become a crime fighter… or an armadillo with an attitude.