A pleasant surprise this afternoon at my local Union 76 station — regular is at $3.69 a gallon, down six cents in three weeks, the last time I put gas in the Jeep.
Despite a suicidal side-effect, we’re loving our oil.

From the New York Times on Monday: The report predicted that the increase in United States production would contribute to a decline in the world oil benchmark price over the next few years to $92 a barrel in 2017 from a 2012 average of $112 a barrel, which should translate into lower prices at the pump for consumers.

Up here in Humboldt County, we’re still the highest in California. The state average is $3.59 a gallon for regular, and we’re even higher than the $3.54 a gallon that’s the average for the northern part of the state. The cheapest in my driving area is $3.50 a gallon, found at (of course) Costco in Eureka, about 10-12 miles south of where I sit.

Oil prices, however, rose slightly today: Light, sweet crude for January delivery gained 21 cents, or 0.2 percent, to $97.44 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange…Brent crude for February delivery on ICE Futures Europe was up 4 cents at $108.48 a barrel.
And how that translates at the gas pump, I don’t know. Prices are down all over, though.
From USAToday:

Rising wholesale and crude prices may have dashed hopes that retail gas prices could dip below $3 nationally for the first time since 2010.
Eight states — including Missouri, with a national low of $2.86 — currently have average prices below $3.
But those numbers may be fleeting.
More than 20 states reported retail prices rising Thursday.
“There’s still a potential for overall prices to move lower, but I don’t see a whole lot of downward movement, and we may have already seen the bottom,” says Patrick DeHaan, senior energy analyst with GasBuddy.com, a price-tracker which had forecast the national average to fall to about $3.15 a gallon by year’s end.

Gas and oil prices are crazy, but everything’s crazy — cars are killing us, not only in wrecks and shit, but is helping to fry our only living place. How long?
Also from that New York Times piece above — crazy:

According to a separate report by the International Energy Agency, also released Monday, global consumption of coal, a major source of the greenhouse gases blamed for rising global temperatures and other pollutants, is likely to continue to grow at “a relentless pace” through 2018.
The report, released in Paris, underscored the problem facing the world with regard to coal.
Because coal is relatively inexpensive and abundant, it remains the dominant fuel for the generation of electricity, especially in developing countries like China.
Yet burning coal is also highly polluting, both in producing smog and greenhouse gases that have been linked by many scientists to climate change.
“Like it or not, coal is here to stay for a long time to come,” Maria van der Hoeven, the agency’s executive director, said in a conference call with reporters on Monday.
The agency said that the consumption of coal for electricity generation and heat accounted for more than three-fifths of the rise in global carbon dioxide emissions since 2000.
Coal use increased by an average of 3.4 percent per year from 2007 to 2012, faster than the increase in either oil or natural gas.
Consumption through 2018 is expected to increase by 2.3 percent a year, the I.E.A. said.

Buckle-up. How insane can we get, just wait and see, or not.
Earlier this month, a flash-warning of crazy and our planet’s sensitive side (via Climate News Network): But what the GSL now says is that geological evidence from palaeoclimatology (studies of past climate change) suggests that if longer-term factors are taken into account, such as the decay of large ice sheets, the Earth’s sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 could itself be double that predicted by most climate models.
And by all means, keep up that incessant tempo.

(Illustration found here).