FBM wrote:Gawdzilla wrote:FBM wrote:Gawdzilla wrote:Deep Sea Isopod wrote:Regardless of the price, I still have to drive the same distance to work each day. Higher fuel costs only leave me with less money to spend on the economy and makes oil companies richer.
Also, as the transport costs go up so do the cost of the goods in the shops.
Yep, we're all fuck, even FBM.
How ya figure?
When the transport costs go up, who pays them? Your scavenged fuel comes by ship/train/truck to the stores. If it's bio fuel the farmers use petroleum based chemicals to grow it, even if they don't have tractors to cultivate it.
WASTE veggie oil is priced based on what companies are willing to pay for raw materials from which to make soap, not on how much the veggie oil cost in the first place.

Wait until the demand for veggie oil, doubles, triples, or quadruples, and then watch economics 101 kick in fairly quickly:
Supply and demand is perhaps one of the most fundamental concepts of economics and it is the backbone of a market economy. Demand refers to how much (quantity) of a product or service is desired by buyers. The quantity demanded is the amount of a product people are willing to buy at a certain price; the relationship between price and quantity demanded is known as the demand relationship. Supply represents how much the market can offer. The quantity supplied refers to the amount of a certain good producers are willing to supply when receiving a certain price. The correlation between price and how much of a good or service is supplied to the market is known as the supply relationship. Price, therefore, is a reflection of supply and demand.
http://www.investopedia.com/university/ ... omics3.asp
Veggie oil costs what it costs now in part because the demand is what it is now. Increase the demand, and that is pressure to increase price.
A good example is the corn ethanol debacle we've gone through. 10 years ago, many people were like, "wow, look at all this corn we can grow here in the US, let's make it into ethanol and then we can burn cleaner fuel for less money!" Well, when massive amounts of corn started being used for ethanol, the price of corn went up because the demand for corn went up, and the total supply could not be increased sufficiently to offset the increased demand. First, E-85 ethanol was a lot cheaper than gasoline, and then it went up and settled in, as I recall, at about 10-15% more than gasoline. So, people got to spend more for an E-85 burning vehicle and pay more for the fuel....yay....
...oh, and more for just about any product made with corn....