Last Monday, after pulling away from the Hess station on Friendly Ave, I taped my gas receipt on the front windshield of my car. On Friday, I documented another receipt, revealing a 10-cent increase in five days: $1.95 to $2.05 per gallon. Rising gas prices make us all cringe: from people who drive to school and work every day, to grocers paying more to transport food and landlords struggling to pay tenants’ utilities.
Every local news channel in the last week has assembled an on-scene investigation of the gas station, placing a reporter below a looming price sign or pumping gas himself. The station’s patrons are distressed: a small business owner says that his shipping costs have never been as high.
One woman says that she and her co-workers decided to carpool downtown every day. Another man says he is looking for a job closer to home because he can’t afford his daily commute.
Watching the news, I share the customers’ outrage – I have my own story of inconvenience caused by the rise in gas prices, a measure I can’t help thinking has more than a casual connection to Bush peddling his energy plan in Congress right now.
Bush wants Congress to “get the job done” – encouraging legislators to permit drilling in Alaskan wildlife reserves, action that Bush promoted but could not legitimize without the urgency of a gas crisis.
But at the same time, maybe Ms. Suzy Carpooler’s story has a point. Is carpooling really such an inconvenience? Should it take a national gas crisis to encourage consumers to use resources wisely?
According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. consumes around 178 million gallons of gasoline every day, a bill that breaks down to $200,000 per minute of foreign oil.
Personal vehicles use 65 billion gallons of gas and diesel fuel each year, a number that is expected to increase by 2.6 percent every year. Today we drive almost twice as much as we did in the 1980s when gas prices were at their highest.
The price increase is caused by a collision of factors: high demand, tight global supplies, the declining value of the dollar, and conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. is heavily dependent on foreign oil, and military conflict often affects the drilling and shipping of crude oil.
The conflict in the Middle East may be out of our hands, but thinking twice about buying an SUV is not. We can decide to ride bikes to school instead of cars, use public transit, carpool to work, even use discarded fast food oil (biodiesel) to fuel our cars. With gas prices not expected to level off till Memorial Day, a French fry-scented car is starting to look enticing.
Americans are not accustomed to inconvenience. If gas prices continue to rise and consumers forced to surrender their Hummers, we will have no choice but to adopt fuel-efficient and environmentally-friendly technologies, most of which already exist but are sadly used only by Leonardo DiCaprio. So bring on the gas prices -it’s about time.