Results tagged “oil”

Last week a driver for Ferrantino Fuel made a delivery of 100 gallons of oil to a Queens home, which obviously wouldn't be noteworthy, if not for the fact that the house doesn't even have an oil tank. And it has never had an oil tank; the heating oil was just funneled through an outside pump, flooding the basement. Now homeowner John Byas's newly renovated basement is ruined, his carpet yanked up, his furniture piled outside in a heap, and wife hospitalized from the fumes.

Flush with socialist bailout money, General Motors is now trying to destroy the oil industry with a car that will get 230 miles per gallon in city driving! GM calls it the Chevy Volt and classifies it as an "extended-range vehicle" powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile range. (After that, a small internal combustion engine takes over to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles.) Toyota’s Prius, the most fuel-efficient hybrid sold in the U.S., gets 48 miles per gallon and looks like a Hummer 3 by comparison. GM CEO Fritz Henderson promises that at the U.S. average cost of electricity (approximately 11 cents per kWh), a typical Volt driver would pay about $2.75 for electricity to travel 100 miles, or less than 3 cents per mile. Of course, big oil still has some time to assassinate Henderson and burn down GM's R&D labs—the first-generation Volt is expected to cost about $40,000, which most consumers might not swallow even if gasoline returns to $4 per gallon. And the E.P.A. still has run its own tests to confirm GM's assertions, but the company says Volt is on schedule to reach showrooms late next year. But whatever happened to the P.U.M.A.!?

Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a 400-point-drop bath, prompted by rising oil prices and higher unemployment numbers, and stirred up more recession fears.

With the weather warming, this will likely become less of a visible concern, but the City should also view the spring and summer as an opportunity to crack down on buildings who spew oily black smoke across the New York's skyline. The Gay Recluse has been concerned for some time about the cluster of chimneys in his Washington Heights neighborhood that spew plumes of noxious smoke into the air.