Quoted Text

Fuel oil to cost more
Winter of discontent predicted as home energy prices expected to soar

By ERIC ANDERSON, Deputy business editor
First published: Thursday, July 17, 2008

If you heat with oil, you'll likely be spending $700 to $1,400 more this winter than last, U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer warned Wednesday.

"Too many families across New York will be feeling the heat, but not the warmth, this winter," Schumer said.


     
National Grid, the Capital Region's dominant utility, hasn't yet issued its cost projections for customers who heat with natural gas. The cost of that commodity also has been climbing sharply this summer, although it fell back somewhat on Wednesday.

Lou Polsinello, president of Polsinello Fuels in Rensselaer, said the typical homeowner uses about 650 to 700 gallons of heating oil in an average season. The price is currently at about $4.70, meaning that the cost to heat a home this winter will run at $3,000 to $3,300 if prices don't rise.

Joe Alonzo of Wever Petroleum, who is also president of the Oil Heat Institute of Eastern New York, said a lot of companies aren't offering plans that in previous years allowed customers to lock in oil prices.

The plans, particularly those that protected consumers if prices fell after they locked in, have become too expensive, Alonzo said. Polsinello, whose firm does offer a cap program, said that downside protection, as it's called, can cost as much as 40 cents a gallon.

Prices on the futures market are up, indicating that heating oil could approach $5 a gallon by January, Polsinello said.

Both Polsinello and Alonzo recommend that customers sign up for a budget plan that spreads payments evenly through the year and gives customers the chance "to get ahead" of their bills.

And Polsinello suggests that consumers at least top off their oil tanks now, before prices rise.

For customers on fixed incomes, and those with lower incomes, the upcoming heating season could be particularly difficult.

Schumer is cosponsoring a measure introduced by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, that would double the amount of money available to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. The bill would boost funding to $5.1 billion from $2.57 billion.

Schumer said the program "ran out of money" in the middle of the past heating season, and that this measure is designed to avoid that problem this year.

Homeowners, meanwhile, should make sure their furnaces and boilers are tuned up and operating properly.

"So many people out there are operating old, old equipment," Polsinello said. Even a furnace that's over 10 years old may be wasting energy. And while the cost of new boilers has risen, due to higher costs for steel and other components, the higher price of the oil you'll be saving has shortened the payback period, he said.

"The return is getting much faster," Polsinello said.

Consumers can also turn the thermostat back even more, caulk and insulate.

"The number one thing we can do is energy conservation," Schumer said.

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THIS IS NOT A DRILL

by Ann Coulter (more by this author)
Posted 07/16/2008 ET
Updated 07/17/2008 ET

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, "the worst speaker in the history of Congress," explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: "We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect."

Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier ... and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.

Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by "oilmen"? Wait -- it doesn't cost pennies to them? That's weird.

In response to the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada, Pelosi blamed: "President Bush and Rep. Tom DeLay's oil-company interests." The blackout was a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing to do with oil. And I'm not even "an oilman."

But yes -- good point: What a disaster having people in government who haven't spent their entire lives in politics! That explains everything. A government official with relevant experience or knowledge about an issue is obviously a crisis of gargantuan proportions.

This must be why the Democrats are nominating B. Hussein Obama, who finished middle school three days ago and has less experience than a person one might choose at random from the audience of "American Idol."

Announcing the Democrats' bold new "plan" on energy last week, Pelosi said breaking into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve "is one alternative." That's not an energy plan. It's using what we already have -- much like "conservation," which is also part of the Democrats' plan.

Conservation, efficiency and using oil we hold in reserve for emergencies does not get us more energy. It's as if we were running out of food and the Democrats were telling us: "Just eat a little less every day." Great! We'll die a little more slowly. That's not what we call a "plan." We need more energy, not a plan for a slower death.

But there's more! Pelosi announced that the Democrats also plan to push for "an historic investment in biofuels, efficiency, conservation and the rest." The "rest" is apparently what she called our "important and essential" investment in alternative energy.

That certainly would be historic: We would make history by throwing our money away on unproven energy boondoggles that have eaten up untold billions since the 1960s without producing a single net kilowatt of power while we all starve to death.

The proposal to use energy sources that don't yet produce any energy is like the old New Yorker cartoon with Obama in Muslim garb -- no wait, that was a different cartoon. The cartoon is: A scientist has written out his extremely complicated theory on a blackboard and is showing it to another scientist. The theory consists of numbers and characters and takes up the entire blackboard. About two-thirds of the way across, reading left to right, appear the words, "then a miracle happens," followed by more numbers and characters.

That's the Democrats' plan to run cars on biofuels, solar and wind power: Then a miracle happens. The current Democratic mantra on energy is: "We can't drill our way out of this problem." Apparently their plan is to talk our way out of this problem.

Democrats are also alleging that the oil companies are sitting on millions of acres of oil but are refusing to drill -- presumably because oil company executives hate the American people and perversely don't want to make money. Manifestly, those acres are being explored for oil or have already come up dry.

If the Democrats really wanted oil companies to find more oil, they'd allow oil companies to drill offshore and to drill in ANWR, which we happen to know is bursting with oil.

But they don't. They don't want drilling. They don't want more oil. They want humans to ride bicycles and then to die. We deserve it: We were mean to the polar bears.

It's good to know that in the middle of a crisis, the Democrats are still liars. As long as we're fantasizing about "alternative" energy sources, what we really need is a car that runs on Democrats' lies.

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    WASHINGTON, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Congress' job approval rating hit a historic low Wednesday, according to a new Gallup poll.

    The poll showed that the approval rating dropped 5 percentage points over the past month, from a 19 percent approval in June to 14 percent in July.

    The new record is 4 percentage points lower than Congress' previous historic low of 18 percent last May.

    Pollesters attributed the decline to sliding support for Democrats.

    Over the past month, their support has slid from 23 percent approval in June to 11 percent in July, the poll found.

    During that time, the Republican Party's approval rating has risen, from 15 percent in June to 19 percent in July.

    The survey of 1,106 adults was conducted by telephone on July 10-13.

Quoted from Shadow

Who's fault is it that we don't have the refining capability to process more oil to relieve the gas shortage?? Could it be the far left eco-nuts who have blocked every attempt to build new refineries? Our law makers have rolled over and caved in to the demands of these radical eco-nuts in order to secure votes for their re-election and the citizens of the USA have now reaped the rewards of their misguided policies .