Up and up it goes, where it stops, nobody knows — but we’re still hitting the roads this weekend
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Posted on May 24, 2007
Filed Under Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Renewable fuels
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Does it hurt yet? Apparently not enough to keep us off the roads this weekend. I guess plans have been made, so what are you gonna do?
So we have hit all time high gasoline prices, even adjusting for inflation. And this time, it ain’t going down any time soon, if ever. The best that folks who monitor these things can say is that the price may ‘moderate’ some by mid-summer.
Goodness, we are dogged in our addiction to our cars. A Washington Post/ABC poll shows that, even though it has indeed begun to hurt, we are prepared to pay another $1 per gallon before we alter our driving habits substantially.
But that ‘tipping point’ keeps rising, so don’t take this one too seriously either. Used to be $3, then it was $3.75, another dollar would make it $4.25. It’s like a nicotine addict — I’ll quit smoking when the price of a pack of cigarettes reaches $2, then $3, then $4, then…
At the same time, we can cut down on our driving just so far because we also live in a country that has refused to invest in alternative means of transportation. You can’t get people out of their cars if you build suburbs and exurbs for them without mass transit.
At the same time, you can’t build mass transit if people refuse to pay taxes for them. My old home town of Milwaukee is a classic example of this — with many mostly white affluent folks abandoning the city for developments to the west, exurbs that are gobbling up farms and woodland, these folks want still more roads for all their vehicles and all their commutes, and they are complaining about crowded highways, while they have also staunchly resisted public financing for a light rail system. (There is a great account of this battle at this blog post from a year ago.)
The self-interest at all levels of society plays a role in our predicament.
Meanwhile, oil companies rake in profits — Exxon Mobil the biggest in the history of corporations. We are being played for saps here, can we just acknowledge that? The pusher keeps dangling the drug in front of us when what we have needed for a long time is a good rehab program.
This is the other way it could have been done. Years back, the government could have slapped a stiff $2 tax to the price of gasoline at the pump. That money could have gone into public financing of mass transit systems. Then, as gasoline prices approached $4, we’d actually have them in place by now.
Silly me, saying such a thing in a society of disconnected individuals. Well, folks, that is one of the values of this society that has got to change.
Finally, this, from the front page of today’s NY Times. I link to it here because it’s a real education on the complexity of our high oil prices. Fat cat oil companies have resisted investing in more domestic refining capacity because it is very expensive. 
One of the reasons gas prices are so high is because we are way over that capacity. The result is that we have had to increase our imports of refined oil substantially this year. This costs more, and you are paying for that.
This article adds another element to that dynamic. Now oil companies are saying they won’t invest in refineries because of Bush’s call to increase the amount of ethanol in our cars — to 35 billion gallons per year by 2017, as he so famously said in his State of the Union address. So oil companies are saying, if that’s the direction we’re headed, why invest in expanding oil refining capacity?
But as you will see in this article, we couldn’t produce 35 billion gallons of corn ethanol if we wanted to, and other sources, like cellulose or biomass, remain uncertain and very expensive.
So what are we doing here? Do you really want the market and the logic of the corporate world to make these decisions for us? And what in the world is Exxon Mobil doing with all those profits? Why, giving them to stockholders in the form of dividends, which makes some people very wealthy, and the rest of us squirming at the pumps, while doing little to prepare us for a peak oil, or post-oil world.
We need a huge cultural shift here — and that will not come from the oil and gas industry nor from politicians, unless we make them truly beholden to us (the capitulation of the Democrats on the Iraq vote despite the overwhelming sentiment of we voters is a bit disheartening on that score).
That cultural shift will only come about with a change of values on a mass scale. That’s where hope lies for the different world in which we already live, in case you haven’t noticed that yet.
Technorati Tags: high gasoline prices, ethanol, oil industry profits, driving habits, exxon mobil, cultural values
Photo credit: CA Energy Commission, found at Encyclopedia of Earth
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