Ok I did a little bit of research... A typical truck gets about 4-11mpg -- just based on a little google searching. Here are Diesel prices including tax.
U.S.
1.388
East Coast
1.374
New England
1.429
Central Atlantic
1.449
Lower Atlantic
1.337
Midwest
1.380
Gulf Coast
1.344
Rocky Mountain
1.419
West Coast
1.506
California
1.586
Now say a truck has to drive 600 miles -- do the math in my head here... At 6 mpg -- that's 100 gallons. Let's say Diesel is $1.50 -- that's ONLY $150! Divide that by how many thousands of oranges -- we're not talking about very much increase in the price of an orange if you double or triple the cost of Diesel fuel...
Looks to me like running out of oil is the least of our problems:
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Jacques Giddens can't sell all his oranges because the orange cartel's quotas are converted into marketing orders by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and enforced by the Justice Department. There are, in fact, 109 Federal marketing orders in effect in 25 states for fruits, vegetables, nuts, and dairy products. In 1972, for example, growers left 14,000 tons of cherries to rot in orchards because of a Federal marketing order.
The trucking industry is also controlled by cartels. Brooks Jackson and Evans Witt describe how these cartels collude with the Interstate Commerce Commission:
The ICC tells truckers precisely what kinds of goods they can carry, precisely what highways they can use and what they can charge.
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The major trucking firms band together in "rate bureaus" that decide what to charge for hauling. These cartels, exempt from antitrust prosecution, then challenge any attempts to have lower rates approved by the ICC.
This keeps shipping prices higher than they could be.
An Agriculture Department study found that shipping rates for frozen fruits and vegetables dropped 18 per cent when the courts ruled those products exempt from ICC oversight. Another Agriculture study showed rates for dressed poultry plummeted 33 per cent when ICC regulation was lifted.4
The waste wrought by ICC regulations is enormous:
For example, a Department of Transportation study discovered that a big manufacturer of building materials in New Jersey ships three truckloads of goods a week from its main plant to Tampa, Florida. The trucks make the return trip empty.
This company has a subsidiary in southern Florida that sends three truckloads of goods a week to eastern Pennsylvania. But the subsidiary's trucks make the return trip south empty-because the ICC will not let a subsidiary's trucks carry goods for the parent company or vice versa.
The DOT study, which did not name the firm, concluded that this one company could save 360,000 miles of useless travel and 90,000 gallons of fuel a year just by running trucks in a circuit from New Jersey to Tampa to southern Florida to eastern Pennsylvania.5
According to a report co-authored by Robert Fellmeth and members of the Ralph Nader research staff, regulated truckers travel empty an estimated 30 per cent of their miles-three times the percentage for unregulated truckers. Empty trucks, ICC-mandated roundabout routes, and artificially high rates cost the American public tens of millions of gallons of fuel and billions of dollars every year.6
http://www.libertyhaven.com/regulati...iraciesin.html