Just when you though all of the national news was bad…
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE4964JK20081007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. household heating fuel costs will rise 15 percent this winter from last year, the government’s top energy forecasting agency said on Tuesday, citing more expensive fuel and the likelihood of much colder weather than last winter.
Heating oil and natural gas customers face the steepest price jumps, although double-digit percentage increases also are in store for users of propane and electricity, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its latest winter forecast.
The cost to heat a U.S. home this winter will average $1,137, up $151 from last year, the EIA said. Heating oil bills for the October-through-March heating season will be up $449, or 23 percent, at $2,388. The retail price for heating oil should average $3.89 a gallon, up from $3.31 last winter.
“The projected increase is consistent with higher crude oil prices and projections of lower distillate inventories than last year going into the heating season,” the Energy Department’s forecasting arm said.
Officials said the winter heating cost estimate would have been much higher three months ago, when crude prices hit a record $147 a barrel. Oil now trades around $90 a barrel.
“I do think that as challenging as the times are, 15 percent is different than 40 percent, which is what we were looking at a short while ago. The reduction in the value of a barrel of oil is being directly translated into savings in heating oil,” U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said.
Households using natural gas will see costs jump 18 percent, or $155, to $1,010, the agency said.
Replies
15% increase on natural gas..................... As they say in Mexico " It's almost free" ;-)
You guys in the great cold north need to pony up a little bit to get my energy stocks back up to par.
There is such an abundance of Nat. gas on the gulf coast, but storage problems, infrastructure and wall street seem to keep the price inflated.
If you need any free firewood, I got tons of it -courtesy of Gustav- I'll swap ya for some dry socks ( I still got mud between my toes from cleaning up down the bayou).
The Nat. gas increase hit home for me this last summer when my elec. bill went from a normal of $150 to in excess of $325.
Ray
Hurricane Ike hit me in Ohio with terrible winds. We've had people out of electric for over 3 weeks. It was weird. 60-70 mph winds for hours. Our trees aren't used to this and just gave up and fell on power lines, houses, cars and a few people and animals. A main high tension line with 80' poles all blew down. Anyone on that will be out for 5 or more weeks total. Lots of property damage from the wind. We had to have linesmen from several states to get us back on line.I'm on level billing, and was paying very low rates. I didn't know my remote reading electric meter was not sending any data to the power company. They figured that out eventually and read it, so now I owe about 700 bucks. They are trying to recover some of the expenses relating to the power outages by raising the rates. It was hundreds of millions of damages. Joy Joy joy.
More old news. The predictions have been out a month or so, though I suppose they keep revising them.
I have my prepaid contract for 2000 gallons of LP. We'll see who makes out better, my supplier or me!
citing more expensive fuel and the likelihood of much colder weather than last winter.
Hm. Lovely.
After last winter, I don't think my body could take one much colder. It were damm cold here, and it started early - like right after Turkey Day - when the real cold/snow usually holds off till after Christmas.
Good thing I'm insulating the basement...if the forecast holds, I'll make my $ back in one year.
Jason
Thought Global Warming was gonna keep us all toasty?
Snowing a bit here, nice breeze to go with it.
Joe H
Frankly if it would turn Minnesota into Palm beach I'd be all infavor of it.. but there is the probablity that storms like Hurricanes and Tornados will get worse and more frequent.
Plus winter storms will casue deeper and deeper temp drops. With resulting high winds and increased snow fall.
Summers will get hotter and winters will get colder..
World wide, this has been the coolest summer in many years.
But, if you're a Global Warmist I guess you're stuck with it as the only answer.
Joe H
feel free to ignore things.. just please make sure any pollution you create stays over you..
feel free to ignore things
Frenchy, it's you Warmists who ignore things.
A refusal to consider solar activity as a possible cause of warming, a refusal to admit that the world is actually cooling since 1998, a refusal to consider any evidence that refutes Al Gores stupid hypothesis that man has caused the world to warm and we will drown when the ice caps melt.
Your head is buried in your Warm buttt, but it's cold out here.
Joe H
So you believe that 6 1/2 billion people on this globe have had no impact?
That we can cut down whole forests and toss whatever we want into the air and water without any repercusions?
Well believe as you want, just don't pollute any air or water I have to breathe or drink..
That we can cut down whole forests
Aren't you the guy who brags about all the huge hardwood timbers you've used to build your mansion on the lake?
Or is it different if it's a liberal Dem destroying our precious forests?
Joe H
On my street, they have been putting in gas feeds to the houses, and taking out the oil furnaces and tanks, as the natural gas people have sold them on the "natural gas is cheaper, more efficient, safer, than oil!". They're doing at least 1-2 houses per week. I do know an elderly couple who converted over to natural gas last year and they are averaging $750- 1000 per month...O
What size house would one have to have to burn $1000 worth of natural gas a month? What size furnace?
Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. --Ambrose Bierce
Old houses lack the insulation that modern houses have. It's not uncommon here in New England to see Large Victorian homes with monthly
heating bills of $800+ per month. I worked on an 1866 Victorian home last year that had a natural gas heating bill of $1200 per month from
November - April. The house has been for sale for 3 years now....
My house is in that range, $800 or so a month, that's why I'm Mooney walling the painting studio currently. A quick and dirty calc showed that I was losing $650 a season from that room alone.
You do understand the differance between sustainable harvest and clear cutting don't you?
You see most white oak trees live around 200 years or so, then they start to rot from the inside out. If you harvest before the rot occurs the smaller trees will get sunlight and grow up nice and straight. This requires selective cutting..
The farmer that sold the sawmill the trees for my house had a wood lot that had never been harvested because it was too hilly and too remote.. mature trees were selected, great care was used in falling them in order to not damage adjacent trees and today you can't find where we harvested.
Now if you understand anything about carbon prints by harvesting them we were able to remover all the carbon from the bole of the tree from the forest and seal it in my house..
Timberframes have lasted 500 years or more as viable homes so I've removed 50,000 bd.ft. from the carbon footprint.. for that long..
One side benefit of sustainable harvest is the diversity of species in a natural forest which makes a massive differance in if a given species of wood will survive an onslaught of an invasion insect or organism..
So, 10 years or so is a trend in a climate model of many thousands of years since the last ice age... or billions since the planet was formed... or a few thousand if you believe that God created the whole shebang in a few days?
I do know that life on this planet functions on something like .000000001% of the total energy output of the sun. Very small changes there will have catastrophic changes here.
If you think of the energy output as 1, then take (1/2 of the area of Earth) / (the area of a sphere with a 93 million mile radius) x 100 should give the percentage... basic principle of the thing. Only 1/2 of the earth is facing the sun at any one time, while the sun is broadcasting energy all around all the time.
I also know that the things humans do on this planet will also have an impact on the climate. No one knows how big of a push is needed to create a disaster that can't be fixed.
Evacuating the planet to greener pastures is, to date, a science fiction story.
Doing what we can to minimize climate impact from man made sources is prudent... while working to change science fiction to science fact before mother nature shakes us off like a dog scratching fleas.
Are your ears warm in there?
"I do know that life on this planet functions on something like .000000001% of the total energy output of the sun. Very small changes there will have catastrophic changes here."Catastrophic? If the output of the sun were to increase by 10%, our energy "received" would increase 10%. That seems pretty equitable to me.
Jon Blakemore RappahannockINC.com Fredericksburg, VA
True, and I suspect that a 10% increase would be bad.
I don't know for sure.
A 10% increase in the output of the sun doesn't sound "very small" to me.
Jon Blakemore RappahannockINC.com Fredericksburg, VA
I don't think so, either... even if you spread it around that 93 million mile radius sphere. I wonder what the solar energy swing is say 1/2 way between the equator and the poles when the seasons change... 10%... more... less?
If +/- 1* makes such a huge difference here, it probably takes a very small change at the sun to influence that.
From what I understand, the phenomenon known as global dimming is responsible for lessening the solar and/or man made climate changes.
I just hope that mankind figures it out before it is too late.
Will cause deeper temp drops?Has that already happened? I thought the opposite had happened, but I don't live in Minnesota.
As I said before, if all we have to do is give up some beach front for nice palm Beach like winters here in Minnesota where do I sign up..
I'd be all in favor of global warming..
It's not that simple though.
Along with the melting of the polar ice we also will breed more violent weather.. more tornado's more Hurrincanes and worse winter storms..
Average temps may increase here in Minnesota but along with those there will be a increase of winter blizzards.. Summer floods etc..
Those 10,000+ lakes we have aren't the result of Babe the Blue Ox and Paul Bunyun's tramping around in spite of what you read in Kindergarden.. They are because we're on the junction of three global weather patterns.. Warm Moist air from the gulf collides with the pressure fronts of the high plains and the reverse draft of the great lakes.. as a result a lot of weather stops and drops weight in Minnesota. Weight in the form of rainfall.
Having grown up on the fringes of your area, I know the general weather patterns.That dissing of Paul Bunyan and Babe has got to stop, though. Dammit, Kiddo, dat's da trute!
Sorry !
;-)
That estimate was based on oil at 90/bbl
Today it is 77 - at least 15% less
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This estimate obviously didn't take into account the economic meltdown induced oil price plummet.
I wonder how many folks out there contract for their oil or LP in advance. I put money aside throughout the year to buy it 100% prepaid (owning the tank and paying the full contract in advance gets the best price). For the last 10 years running, the best deal available. This may be the first year that this might be a losing proposition. May be
I had just given up on waiting for prices to fall and ordered my fill-up a week before this started to fall
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Yer makin me feel good.
Sun's heat is same low price. Five years of wood on hand for supplemental heating.