Let Them Knit Afghans

People who heat their homes with natural gas aren't dealing with horrifically higher fuel prices this winter. But what do you think is going to happen when the price of home heating oil drives those of us with oil burners to finally convert over?

Because we have an oil burner and an electric stove, we don't even have a gas line coming into the house. So when our old furnace went a few years ago, converting wasn't an issue -- we didn't want to have the entire yard torn up to run a gas line. We're on an equal payment plan with a price cap, so this winter we're paying a "mere" $3.09 a gallon for home heating oil. We probably pay more than the going price when prices drop, but playing arbitrage with home heating oil is for people less busy than I am. But if you do have oil heat and you pay on a per-fillup basis, you are in for some serious ticker shock next time you fill your oil tank:

The U.S. average retail price for home heating oil soared 5.4 cents over the past week to a record $3.40 a gallon, the government said on Wednesday.

The national heating oil price was up 98 cents from a year ago, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in its weekly survey of heating fuel costs around the country. It was the fourth week in a row that heating oil hit a record.

Heating oil prices are rising because of higher crude oil costs, which topped at a record above $100 a barrel last week, and tight supplies.

While distillate fuel inventories, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, increased by 1.5 million barrels last week, stocks are still down almost 15 million barrels from a year ago and are in the lower half of the average range for inventories at this time of year, according to the EIA.

Washington D.C. again had the highest heating oil price at $3.77 a gallon, up 8.7 cents from the previous week. The next-highest prices were in New Jersey at $3.55, New York at $3.52 and Connecticut at $3.50.

The lowest price for heating oil was in Nebraska at $3.01 a gallon, up 2.3 cents, followed by Iowa at $3.04, Kentucky at $3.08 and Ohio at $3.09.

Northeast households that rely the most on heating oil are expected to pay a record average $3.34 a gallon for the fuel this winter, up 84 cents from last winter, according to the EIA.

Heating oil costs in the region, where one out of three households use the fuel, are forecast to average $2,078 for the winter, up 38 percent from last year.

If that 1/3 of households switches to natural gas, the price advantage of natural gas disappears. For houses like mine, the options are few and far between. It's clear that additional insulation is on the home improvement menu for this spring, and remodeling the basement family room to deal with the problem of the previous owners of the house finishing it by just slapping up some paneling WITH NO INSULATION has to be added (thus pushing the kitchen work off yet ANOTHER year). Many homeowners in my area are adding wood stoves, but you need more tree-free clearance than we have. We looked into a pellet stove, but they are horrifically expensive, the pellets are nearly impossible to get, and you need to be able to store a ton of them. I don't know about you, but to me the thought of a pile of wood product sitting in a corner of a basement that has already seen its share of mice, in an area where termites and carpenter ants are a problem, is not a thrilling one.

So far George W. Bush has refused to release 586 million in emergency fuel-assistance funds provided by Congress. People like me can pay increased heating bills by cutting back elsewhere. There are many people who can't. It should not fall upon Hugo Chavez to be able to make political hay out of providing oil assistance to Americans who need it. If you live in the New York area, you've heard the radio spots in which Joe Kennedy's Citizens Energy Corporation advertises heating help from Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company. Predictably, the wingnuts are having fits about this, since Hugo Chavez seems to have replaced Fidel Castro as the western hemisphere boogeyman of choice. Whatever you think of Chavez or Kennedy or these ads (I find them primarily just peculiar), the fact remains that if our own president would recognize the effect of high fuel prices on real Americans with limited resources who have to often choose between feeding their kids or keeping them warm, Chavez would have no room to play on this particular field.