January 17, 2007

NYT Pipeline: Who Cares About the Price of Gas?

I subscribe to the New York Times Select – the stuff you have to pay for to see on the web. It’s one strategy the dead-tree media are using to remain viable. In this case, it’s worth it.
Here’s a reason: the bloggers who don’t even appear in print. Lisa Margonelli writes one called “Pipeline.”
You can read the whole piece here if you subscribe, but here’s a sample:

An overwhelming number of Americans believe that our oil problems can be solved by better auto technology ….
What we would rather not do is use less gas. Over the past five years, as gas prices have doubled, fuel consumption has continued climbing upward…. We are a country with 140 million pedals to the metal. American drivers buy one of every nine barrels of crude oil pumped from the ground, so we have more power and influence over world prices than any other buyers. Our behavior exacerbates small supply shortages, sending prices even higher. The International Energy Agency now considers drivers’ “insensitivity” to price as a potential threat to the stability of the world oil market…
Why? In 1977 the average family traveled 12, 036 miles a year, but by 2001, we were driving 21,171 miles to and from work, soccer practice and the mall. People bought bigger cars to make the longer drives more bearable, and now they’re stuck with both the cars and the commutes.

[And, I’d say, with the urban environments created by the car: places in which there are no alternatives, and no alternatives wanted.]

Generations of Americans have come to expect a constant flow of cheap gasoline as a right — and they attribute high prices to oil company shenanigans. Eric Smith, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, found that that 85 percent of Californians believe that high gas prices are the result of oil company manipulation, not market pressures. And if there’s no shortage, why conserve?
To really address our overconsumption of oil, we need to fix the drivers along with the cars. And that will require big new approaches. For years, environmentalists have begged for higher gas taxes as a way to discourage people from wasting gas. But we have demonstrated that we can’t or won’t respond rationally to high prices, so taxes will not push conservation. We need to rethink our supply-based energy policy, and ready to start making changes both big and small in the way we consume oil.

That’s a formula for catastrophe – the mechanism a deluded population requires before accepting change. Not exactly a great political platform or policy recommendation. Perhaps it explains why most politicians are not engaging the big issues, particularly climate change, or making the connections to our way of life.

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  1. How can she say that “we” haven’t responded rationally to high prices when North American gas prices (unlike those in Europe) have been artificially held down by direct and indirect government subsidies and other policies? How can she accuse “us” of irrationality when the built enviroment (again artificially directed to favor big oil, highway, and sprawl interests) leave us so few alternatives to driving?

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