Sorry, but the comparison is not helpful. You mentioned the key reason. Because of manufacturing and transportation costs, an increase in the price of gasoline will increase the price of every other liquid mentioned on your list. A price increase of any other liquid on your list will not increase the price of gasoline.

Apples and oranges.

...if I could get a car that could make a gallon of gas stretch as far with as much efficacy as I can stretch a gallon Dawn Dish Detergent.

And what Guest @ #1 said.

This is a good comparison...though, who is going to use a gallon of Krazy Glue or even milk as fast as they use a gallon of gas?

Gas is $3.50 a gallon, I use about 10 gallons per week costing roughly $35 per week. I buy milk by the 1/2 gallon for roughly $3 and it lasts 2 weeks--that's pretty cheap compared to the gas. Then, if you look at the Krazy Glue...it'd take me two lifetimes to use that much glue--making that $2300 number look pretty small.

Summer

but...the same will become true of water before terribly long.

Gasoline may be cheaper than Windex, but I'm not buying 15 gallons of Windex every other week.

I bet if I could buy 10 gallons of krazy glue at a time I could get it at a price point much closer to gasoline... For that little glue I'm also paying for the packaging.

http://greasypc.blogspot.com for ways to cheaply (oftentimes free!) ways to keep your aging computer running years after your friends have already moved on because theirs were running so slow.

Any self-respecting Italian will tell you if you actually buy olive oil by the gallon (And yes you can buy it that way, in the big metal squares on the bottom shelf of your grocery store) it costs much less than $77 per gallon.

Maybe if you buy a small bottle and multiply the cost up to a gallon.

Everyone is taught about 'supply and demand' and yet something that should be more important doesn't cost as much as Coke... Granted, I like my cans of pop, but still. You're not going to see a potential war influenced by the threat to sugar and caramel colour.

We must have some pretty hefty subsidies.

Excuse me while I search for signs of intelligence on this blog.

Obviously things like monetary policies, inflation, and general economics are not even considered. Possibly because you are drinking too much tap water and the fluoride has killed off too many brain cells. Probably are oblivious to that too.

However let's just take a common sense approach...

what is value?

has the cost to produce and manufacture gasoline increased or decreased with technology over the past century?

does the demand exceed the supply?

has the price of gas really changed all that much?

or just the amount of gas you can buy with with a dollar?

how much gasoline could you buy with a dollar a century ago?

how much was gasoline could you buy with an ounce of gold a century ago?

how much gasoline could you buy with an ounce of gold today?

You can't make a horse drink, only lead it to water...

To be honest, $3 a gallon of gasoline a disgrace. Within the next century there WILL be an energy crisis and the US is selling gasoline at those prices.

In the UK, the cost of petrol is currently £3.78541178 (yes, pounds!) to the gallon. So, yes, gasoline to you americans IS cheap.

And, peak oil was reached in the US. Peak oil refers to oil production. It is true that there is (allegedly) enough fossil fuels stockpiled to carry us right up until 2100, but I don't know if this takes into account the predicted population explosion of the developing countries and their inevetable 'industrial reveolutions'.

It's so funny reading these comments from people after seeing the facts of the comparison. You could hold something right in front of their face and they would say no, that's not there. It's the psychology of having something a certain way for so long that it gets ingrained and change can't be accepted. Or maybe we've been spoiled all these years. I would like to know why after a hundred years of the piston engine that there has been no change. That would be like still having propeller airliners. I can't believe that there couldn't be an additive or a way gasoline could be made to stretch further. Or the entire piston process improved. As we've seen, using food additives just shortens that supply. But also we can't change over to something "environmentally friendly" or even different and quit drilling and refining oil at the same time.

I was having a conversation about the gas prices with my boyfriend's dad, from Northern Ireland. He was making the argument that gas really is cheap here and that we're quite lucky. I then made the point that he doesn't have to drive 20 miles to get the nearest grocery store.

Also the availability of public transportation in any place that isn't a major big city is non exinsistant or poor at best. Gas is expensive here and for those of us that live out in the country, it hurts that much worse.

I see it over and over. People astounded at record profits from oil companies. Here's a hint, people: oil companies make money selling oil, not gas. Granted they DO make money selling gas, but only 5 or 10 percent of their total profit comes from gasoline revenues. The other 90 to 95 percent comes from selling OIL.

which dweeb up there was it who thinks that a 7.6 percent profit margin isn't a big deal? especially when it's driving the price of every last one of those products mentioned in the comparison? i would imagine that every last exxon/mobil exec probably owns stock in krazy glue, too -- and can afford to, by the way, because they've stuck it to the american people so hard that their coffers are overflowing. please. come join the party with the rest of us who have cut back on dining out, probably won't take a vacation and are considering changing jobs or moving closer to work.

>NOT true...water is a constant throughout the world, and with >the polar ice caps melting the supply of water is just becoming >more adbundant.

All the polar ice is melting into a body of salt water making it difficult to extract again as fresh water. Desalination takes lotsa energy. The worldwide "distillation" system, the evaporation-clouds-rain system, is already working at a nominal pace so you won't necessarily see any more water that way. Mountain glaciers are also melting and unless someone uses the water before it flows all the way downhill and hits the sea, it is wasted. When glaciers are gone, they're gone. The ice was an excess benefit of rain/snow banking excess moisture deposits over a long period of time in out of the way places.

>whomever thinks that we have reached peak oil, must stop >reading literature from the 80's. why, there is 2 TRILLION >barrels of oil right in the foothills of the american rockies. >plus there are numerous new finds all over the world that are >making the myth of oil scarcity,

The words peak oil refer to peak "easy to pump" oil.

>sure, some of the finds are of difficult extraction quality, >but most of them are not

I doubt if it is most. Right now the price of oil is an auction price. What are you willing to pay vs how much work and profit someone else is willing to deliver. Lotsa players especially on the supply side. Even some Midwestern farmers now pumping oil from their farmlands from low pressure tapped out reservoirs. $100+ dollars a barrel makes it worthwhile. However if someone had a killer process for oil shale that worked at $100 a barrel we would see a flood of crude on the horizon. The fact that few are willing to step in and increase supply indicates the price has not reached a point to make it feasible, give or take the glacial pace of r&d, infrastructure and investment to make it all possible.

If we are looking for something that could go together quickly and take some of the heat off oil, Google methanol economy.

The oil companies want you to forget about alternative energy by temporarily lowering their prices, and force the those new alternative fuel companies out of business, thus we continue to be oil dependent. Keep on pressuring your political representatives to invest in clean energy and do what you can to live as green as possible by the choices you make. You can make a difference.
http://www.oilwatchdog.org/articles/?storyId=23949