You can. Drive less. Make each trip count. Live closer to whatever you actually need. Buy and drive smaller vehicles when you do drive.

Everytime the price of gasoline goes up, demand goes down. Everytime the price goes down, demand goes up. If we only drove based on necessity, consumption wouldn’t change. Since consumption of gasoline does change, it means we have options.

David loving oatmeal and peanuts and life
(among many other things and people)

I don’t know what the history of peanut butter prices is prior to January 2001 but the monthly prices are listed at:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000716141?data_tool=XGtable

The price for peanut butter was $1.959 pound January 2011, dropped to a low of $1.619 in February 2005 down to 82.6 percent of the January 2001 price), has been over $2 per pound most of the time since November 2007, was $2.134 in September (9% higher than in January 2001) but that is still lower than it was December 2008 or the first six months of 2009.

This assumes you can trust the government workers who put the history together and you can check the site to see if I just made it all up or check my math to see if I messed up.

Wait a minute, I just checked, you can change the starting date back to 1984 and see the monthly data as well as a graph showing it going up and down from a low of $1.476 at the beginning to a high of $2.208 in April 1991 then down, then up, then down, then up, with lots of jiggles along the way but with April 1991 still the highest cost/price.

David in a changing world

I said…Aw heck,Craig. Surely the price of peanut butter will fall right back down as soon as a good harvest comes in. Won’t it…..?

If a farmer does something which does not make sense to you, that doesn’t mean he is stupid.

It would be funny if it were true that farmers lose money every time they plant cotton. I guess they do it just to get rid of all that excess money they all have?

AND:
“South America does it, with no chemicals”

Actually, nobody grows plants without using any chemicals at all. Water is a chemical, carbon dioxide is a chemical.

David made of chemicals

One would assume set demand drives the difference.

Some users will only use peanuts if they are cheap. Others MUST have peanuts to put out their product so they are willing to pay more to keep their share from being reduced.

For examples, peanut butter cups and Reese’s Pieces can not be sold if they don’t have peanut butter in them. Cooking oil might be peanut oil or safflower oil or canola oil or whatever but producers will only switch if the price goes above that of the alternative which might well be 40 percent higher or the total supply of oils might be more limited since draught will effect other plants too. Thus, both sets of users will try to continue to try to use peanuts at the previous rate but can’t.

Cooking oil users have more flexibility but not unlimited, Reese’s doesn’t have anywhere near the flexibility. They can’t switch to almonds or walnuts or cashews and still sell the same product.

They figure if the price rises that amount, demand will drop in line with supply. it isn’t a linear thing. (And of course, they could be wrong. This is just economists estimating.)

David in a nonlinear world