EnergyMiser101

Subsidies Abroad Support Higher Oil Prices at Home

    Oil prices haven't reached $150 a barrel yet, and actually dropped around $2 a barrel today (July 29) after government statistics indicated that American oil consumption declined in June.  But, before we speculate on whether today's oil price decline is the beginning of a downward trend in prices, it's good to flesh out the picture of why oil is so expensive to begin with.                 

     We've already talked about the precarious balance between world supply and demand, and the fact that much of the world's oil supply comes from politically unstable regions.  Then there is the fact that depressed equity markets are giving many financial players  reason to pause and, as a result, they have shifted some of their trading interest to commodities—particularly oil.

               

 

               

                  

                   

                     

 

                   

                  

               

                             

This Audit Will Save You Money

   I've been thinking a lot about heat lately—not the humid, 90-degree type we're having in the Northeast in late July-- but the kind we're going to be paying our fuel oil company a bundle for come November 1 (that is if we can hold out that long).  Con Edison's full-page ad in the New York Times this Wednesday had several Energy Tips for operating your air conditioners, so I figured they must offer similar penny-saving advise for winter. Their Web site (www.ConEd.com) didn't disappoint. (It even has a great educational section on energy for children).                

    Click on the section called Conserving Energy, and you'll find a very useful list called 100+ Tips to Help You Go Green and Save Some Green. The first item, under weatherization, is to conduct a do-it-yourself energy audit.  Our fuel oil supplier offered a free audit, so I took the lazy way out, called them, and asked them to send someone over.

Labor Department Confirms Electric Bill Pain

   The pain you felt when you opened your  electric bill this month was substantiated by Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which were released today for the month of June.  This Department of Labor Web site is very thorough, and if you have the patience to wade through it, you can tailor a search of  the average cost of almost anything from housing  to food to health care in your region, or the entire US and you can compare this year  with previous years.                

   As for energy, the rise in cost from May to June for the New York, Northern New Jersey and Long Island region was the largest monthly gain in at least ten years (probably longer, but that's as far back as I did my search). The Department of Labor Statistics data are expressed as consumer price indexes (CPI) and those indexes are measures of the change in the cost of a fixed basket of products from year to year.  

Book Review: Exposed by Mark Schapiro

    Since I spent eighteen years of my life as a journalist writing about the petrochemical industry, I was really intrigued one day when I turned on NPR and heard an interview with Mark Schapiro, the author of Exposed—a concise, informative look at how toxic substances permeate our modern lifestyle and how the United States is taking a back seat to the European Union in controlling peoples' exposure to such chemicals. It's informative and depressing at the same time, but definitely worth a read.                

A Tale of Two Light Bulbs--What Does It Cost?

    I got up one night about a month ago and, looking out our bathroom window, I saw that our neighbor directly behind our house had illuminated his entire back yard with two powerful floodlights. Well, I thought, that's odd. Why have these lights on so late?

    We're not living in a high-crime area, and there haven't been any reports of burglaries, so why the lights were on was a mystery. The next morning, I looked out and saw the lights were still on. And that's the way it went for more than a month, two lights on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

    That got me thinking: What does it cost to leave the lights on? I decided to do a little research.

High Oil Prices Will Boost My Electric Bill, Right?

    The price of crude oil on the futures market jumped to a record over $145 a barrel this week, and that got me thinking about electricity. If the price of oil is going up so dramatically, surely that will affect the price of power. What's going to happen to my electric bill?               
    The answer is yes, your bill is going to go up, but not for the reason you might expect.