284
US average fuel price passes $4 a gallon for first time in four years amid Iran war
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
284 points (98.6% liked)
News
36867 readers
2856 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In the US gas companies are subsidized to keep prices down. We pay in tax dollars in other ways, whether we drive or not. This impacts regular gas, but also groceries and other goods traveling across the country bigger than the entirety of Europe.
Also outside of a few cities, there's very little public transit.
Part of the reason that there's little public transport is that gas is subsidized
Not really. If gas subsidies stopped, public transit isn't going to just pop up. It would require a complete overhaul of the entire geographic placement of buildings and zoning rules.
Trillions of dollars over many years would have to be spent to make the US like the EU. Not just on infrastructure but also on businesses. There'd have to be incentives to open a grocery store in walking distance when box stores still exist. Thousands of people would be required to open a small business or manage a store.
In reality, if gas subsidies stopped the cost of everything would just increase astronomically. The US was developing when cars were becoming more popular. It's too far gone.
Yup. Doesn't matter what you do to gas, the US seems to hate public transportation. We each need our own bus to drive around. It's infuriating. I would love to take public transportation. But it simply doesn't exist in most of this country. We have to have a vehicle to get around, and I'm sick of it.
I reslly like that framing device, "we each need our own bus to drive around", going to adopt that line in my arguments against car brained people
This is misinformation. US cities were built with extensive streetcar networks, so much so that the first suburbs were called "streetcar suburbs." They were ripped out because of the misguided notion that they needed to be profitable (a double standard that only applied to rails and not roads, BTW).
They also had vibrant, dense, walkable downtowns, which were demolished circa the 1970s to "make room" for parking lots for car commuters.
Do not try to pretend that that was inevitable or irreparable, because it's not. European cities, like Amsterdam, were also demolished in the middle of the 20^th^ century, and guess what, they were rebuilt for the car too! But unlike us, the folks in the Netherlands realized their mistake and demolished and rebuilt again to put back the the infrastructure you see there today.
We can fix car dependency.
Im not saying turning them off would suddenly create a walkable paradise. But they do continue to create inertia from pushing for change.
That's completely irrelevant, yet Americans keep using that argument.
USA consist of 50 states, the distance of transport is determined by whether it's profitable, with higher gas prices, the longer transportation would increase prices on groceries from further away, and stimulate more local production.
Building more train transportation would also lower CO2, but USA is doing none of the things that could help.
In Europe Sweden has probably the longest transports in Europe, yet their CO2 is almost half (3.43) the average of EU (6.276), with USA (21.03) at more than triple the EU average!!
Europe has worked way harder than USA since the 70's to reduce unsustainable use of fossil fuels, the enormous difference now is because of half a century of failed policies of USA to do the same.
For instance on solar USA has less than EU, despite USA has way better conditions for solar than EU has.
Why are Americans keeping making excuses for the inexcusable?
USA is a shit country endangering the entire globe with their irresponsible CO2 emissions.