TodayHow about those high gas prices?
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Now that the weather is starting to look more like spring than winter, casual checkout line conversations are starting to move toward that other small-talk staple: gas prices.
I’m sure readers have already noticed them climbing toward the magic $3-a-gallon level over the past couple of weeks. Over the last few days every gas station I drove past had two of the three fuel grades priced above $3 while regular hovered in the $2.83-$2.95 range.
Elsewhere, those gas signs have hit the trifecta, with a picture Saturday showing one station’s prices starting at $3.09 at the Web site of The Detroit News. Their story quotes an oil industry expert as saying the new hand-wringing threshold price is now $4, and that a Katrina-type event this summer could get us there in a matter of days.
I’d like to say this is why our friends in the federal government are talking about ramping up offshore oil drilling, as the Associated Press reported over the weekend, but hey, this is all in a day’s work for the Cheney Energy Policy. He’d insist on spoiling manatee habitats with derricks if gas prices crashed to 50 cents a gallon.
Now I’m fully aware that the feds have funded any number of energy-efficiency initiatives in recent years. Top government officials have done the photo-op thing with hydrogen-fueled cars, solar-paneled houses, biodiesel trucks and buses, natural-gas vehicles and ethanol refining plants, to name a few among many.
But the fact remains that the federal government still maintains huge commitments to the petroleum industry. President Bush said it himself: “Our nation is addicted to oil.”
And our commitment to that addiction far outweighs our efforts on behalf of new technologies.
This is understandable, up to a point. Our society runs on petroleum now, and those other technologies maybe later. Nevertheless, a cursory look at the financial page will tell you that the petroleum industry — the Seven Sisters Minus Three — is making all kinds of money in the Bush-Cheney years.
Last year, we learned that ExxonMobil granted its outgoing chairman a retirement package in the mid-nine figures. If he were a country, he would have had the world’s 29th highest gross domestic product — ahead of Saudi Arabia, according to the CIA World Factbook.
So we can probably afford to let the oil producers fend for themselves for a few years while the government puts more of a push behind reducing our demand for petroleum.
Of course, energy saving initiatives eventually come down to each of us individually. When $3 gas looked like it was going to be a permanent feature of the American landscape, car buyers started moving back to cars from trucks, from larger vehicles to smaller ones.
But as gas prices started to recede from that earlier peak, buyers began giving the big SUVs and pickups a second look.
Europe solved this equation more than half a century ago with significant taxes on cars and gasoline. The English say it costs them in pounds to operate a vehicle what Americans pay in dollars.
Under that rule of thumb, a midsize sedan selling here for $20,000 would cost an English driver $39,930. And then there’s the price of fuel, hovering somewhere around the equivalent of $6 a gallon.
Needless to say, a law requiring all of us to drive on the European plan would put a lot of politicians into new careers. So instead, we legislate against the manufacturers, with the CAFE — Corporate Average Fuel Economy — law.
That law was passed in the early 1980s and required car builders to make sure the cars they sold averaged out to 25 miles per gallon across the fleet. But there’s a lower figure for trucks, so the popularity of less economical SUVs hasn’t caused the carmakers many problems under the law. It has ensured, however, that we’re burning more gasoline than ever.
Now there’s a bill moving in Congress to gradually raise the CAFE average to 35 mpg by 2018. But if the rules remain the same, reducing gasoline usage will still depend on car buyers.
Fortunately, it isn’t all that hard to make an improvement. It doesn’t require a wartime-level ramp-up to build more hybrid cars and trucks. Just use the vehicles you have now as a baseline, and resolve to buy a more energy-efficient model the next time you’re in the market.
With the help of http://www.fueleconomy.org, you don’t even have to be in the market for a new car to do this. Only two of every five cars sold in the U.S. are fresh from the factory.
Your efforts won’t be obvious to most people, but they will help make a difference. And it will make your complaints about $4-a-gallon gas that much more sincere.
