By Michael Snyder
Article Source
Are you ready for what is coming next? Are you ready to pay six dollars for a gallon of gasoline? Are you ready to pay much higher prices for everything at our major stores as the price of diesel goes haywire? Are you ready for widespread blackouts all over the U.S. this summer? Unfortunately, we are being warned that all of these things are coming. The worst energy crisis in U.S. history is poised to get even worse in the months ahead, and there is no “silver bullet” on the horizon which is going to magically solve our problems. The refineries that we need are not being built and the drilling that needs to be done is not really happening. Of course energy supplies are getting tighter and tighter all over the globe, and things will go to an entirely new level once the next major war starts.
Needless to say, things are bad enough already. On Sunday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States set a brand new all-time record high of $4.61 a gallon…
Gas prices in the US soared to record heights again Sunday, reaching an all-time high of $4.61 per gallon.
The number is more than 50 percent higher than the cost of a gallon a year ago. It comes as gas prices have continued to climb during Joe Biden’s presidency, and as millions of Americans are poised to travel by road for Memorial Day weekend.
A 50 percent increase in just one year.
Just think about that.
To my knowledge, we have never seen anything like this before.
If you can believe it, the average price of a gallon of gasoline has jumped 25 cents over the past six weeks.
That is crazy, but we are being warned to expect significantly higher prices “by the end of the summer”…
Experts say that number will likely surpass the $6 mark by the end of the summer – as pump costs in West Coast cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco already meeting that mark earlier this month.
I still remember when I could get 20 gallons of gas for 20 dollars.
Soon, 20 gallons of gas will cost all of us 120 dollars.
Who can afford that?
The price of diesel has been increasing at an even faster pace.
In fact, it has risen a staggering 75 percent since last Memorial Day…
Diesel prices are up as well – by a whopping 75 percent from Memorial Day last year – at around $5.50 a gallon, also an all-time record.
The rising cost of the fuel – commonly used by truckers for their rigs – has further hampered America’s embattled economy, driving up prices of good being transported cross-country by truckers, who are now electing for shorter routes due to the ‘unprecedented’ increase.
‘I can pretty much count on setting on fire $5-$700 a day…minimum,’ 22-wheel driver Eric Jammer told NPR Saturday of the rise in diesel costs seen over the past 12 months.
The trucks and trains that bring our goods to the stores run on diesel.
Diesel is only going to get more expensive from here, and America’s companies are going to pass those costs along to the consumers.
Yes, that will be quite painful.
Thanks to the soaring cost of fuel, airline fares are also shooting up dramatically…
Domestic airline fares for summer are averaging more than $400 for a round trip, 24 percent percent higher than this time in 2019, before the pandemic, and a full 45 percent higher than a year ago, according to travel-data firm Hopper.
One survey that was conducted just a few days ago found that approximately a third of all Americans say that their travel plans for Memorial Day were affected by high energy prices.
Joe Biden promised to do all that he could to drive down gasoline prices, and in order to try to keep that promise he foolishly took enormous amounts of fuel out of our strategic reserve.
Obviously that didn’t work, and now we are being told that Biden is running out of options…
President Joe Biden has vowed to do everything in his power to fight record-setting gasoline and diesel prices, but he’s up against a stark reality: There are few options for taming the surge.
While Biden has unleashed an unprecedented amount of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, other tools at the administration’s disposal would come at the expense of environmental protection and have little effect on fuel costs stoked by strained crude supplies and a global shortage of refining capacity. And the one sure-fire fix — for Americans to stop driving so much — is largely outside his control.
In case you haven’t figured it out by now, Joe Biden is not going to save us from this crisis.
In the short-term, nobody is going to save us from this crisis.
We need more refineries, we need more drilling, and ultimately we are going to need some major technological breakthroughs because the way that we are currently doing things is not even close to sustainable.
On top of everything else, our rapidly aging power grids were never designed to handle so much demand. According to CBS News, we could potentially be facing widespread outages during the summer of 2022…
In its annual summer assessment released this week, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation noted that the Upper Midwest is facing a capacity shortfall leading to a “high risk of energy emergencies.” The entire Western U.S. also could face a power outage emergency in the event of spikes in energy use.
“We’ve been doing this for close to 30 years. This is probably one of the grimmest pictures we’ve painted in a while,” John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment and performance analysis, told CBS MoneyWatch.
What will you do if the power in your area goes out for an extended period of time?
We all know that California has been experiencing problems for years, but in 2022 we are being told that the middle of the nation is actually at greatest risk…
In a large swath of the grid stretching from Illinois to Minnesota, the summer’s power demands are projected to exceed the grid’s capacity. That’s because this area of the grid — known as the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO — has lost about 2% of its generation capacity since last year as plants have retired; a key transmission line is also down for maintenance.
Perhaps you think that my headline is a little too dramatic.
Perhaps you do not yet believe that we are facing the worst energy crisis in U.S. history.
If that is the case, give it a few months.
By the end of the summer, I think that everyone will understand that we truly have entered a nightmare with no end in sight.
