By Stein X Leikanger
May 9, 2008 -
Who do you think is doing the greatest damage to the US dollar? The Chinese? The European Union? OPEC? Brace yourself - it's you, every time you press the gas pedal on your gas-guzzler. With today's oil prices, US oil imports represent $1.5b per day leaving the country — make that $548bn per year. "This represents the single largest contribution to America's balance-of-payments deficit, and is a leading cause for the dollar's ongoing drop in value," writes Michael T Klare, author of "Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet," over at Tomdispatch.com. Hindsight is 20/20, but things would have been a lot different if the automakers had realized where things were headed, when things were headed that way. Meanwhile, motorists unlucky enough to be stuck with land barges are seeing second-hand values take a torpedo in the bow. Yes - gripe, gripe, gripe. But this is serious. If T. Boone Pickens is right, the price of oil is going Polar North, which means the dollar is headed for the antipodes. Klare thinks the yearly US tab for gas could easily reach three quarters of a trillion dollars soon. Do the patriotic thing. Go easy on the pedal, will you?
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POWERED
May 9th, 2008 at 9:28 am
I leave my 12 year old XJ6 in Sport mode all the time. Just doin’ my part.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:30 am
I KNEW it was my fault.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:44 am
The authors of
A Solar Grand Plan
figure it could be a reality for $20 billion a year for the next 20 years. A comparative drop in the bucket. Put some more money into EV encouragement and, in a few years, we’d be able to put a dent in that deficit.
Pay for the programs with a carbon tax and all the pieces for a green future, with good jobs and a more reasonable trade deficit fall into place.
By the way, the $548 billion figure makes Minnesota’s wrangling over a 5 to 10 cent per gallon increase in the gas tax look awfully silly.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am
I’m seriously considering converting a good portion of my savings to euros.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:46 am
I thought we had the Federal Reserve act of 1913, Nixon’s nixing of the gold standard, and Greenspan’s use of the Fed as a printing press to thank for dollar devaluation.
After all this time I find out it was me after all.
Sorry, guys; my bad.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Yawn…in the 1980s it was the flood of Japanese cars that were going to force us to mortgage the country to those smarter, harder working Japanese.
In the 1970s, the first two energy “crises” were going to result in a takeover by Arab sheiks.
In the 1950s, the threat came from within - rock ‘n roll and steamy movies were going to weaken America and make it ripe for a communist infiltration.
I guess this is the threat du jour that will keep the chattering classes occupied for at least this year…
Although if Mr. Klare really believes that, “America’s wealth and power has long rested on the abundance of cheap petroleum,” he needs to learn some history.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I treat my go-pedal like an on/off switch!
dolo54
When the Euro was around 82 cents, I searched far and wide for a bank that would cheaply allow me to buy them and deposit them (or just hold them in a safe deposit box). No dice, since they all catered only to the $100k+ crowd and didn’t want the hassles of small depositors.
Now I’m heading to Europe in 3 weeks with the Euro at nearly double that price. Good times.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:57 am
So the environmentalist have stopped the USA from drilling for and producing the huge offshore and Alaska oil fields and prevented the building of nuclear, hydro or coal production of energy while foisting the ethanol scam on the public. And you wonder why you have really expensive offshore oil?
May 9th, 2008 at 10:22 am
The only validity in the claim that fuel consumption is causing the plunge in value of the greenback is that it takes a lot of fuel to fight a war.
The dollar sharply and solidly reversed it’s upward trend in February 2002, immediately following the Cheerleader in Chief’s State of the Union address introduced the world to the concept of an Axis of Evil. Speculators understood exactly the consequences of that statement and the buck never looked back since then.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Right on the heels of this article:
Autoblog has announced that Hyundai has decided not to bring the unibody pickup idea to fruition.
Here.
Possibility of 24 mpg gas mileage, with the truckish body that Americans desire, and naturally we won’t get it. Thanks Hyundai.