Sooo High on Gas
D July 28th, 2008
Everyone talks about gas prices. Some people get angry about high gas prices. They get mad at the government for “letting this happen”, the oil companies for “gouging” and occasionally take it out on the local service station attendants.
I need gas just as much as any other commuting Joe in North America – the difference is, I want to see it change. I’m a little disappointed that gas prices have leveled off from their meteoric climb. I was hoping for at least a sustained $1.30 – $1.40 per litre. Why?
People resist change, even when it make complete sense. We need drastic changes to deal with the diminishing supply of energy, and to secure our energy independence from foreign (and sometimes hostile) nations. We need to stop printing cash, and shipping it in containers direct to China, and Dubai.
One of the weakest points of failure in the materialistic gas-fueled culture we live in is the gas price. If that goes up, everyone feels it. All of a sudden, everyone is thinking about gas, where it comes from, and why is the price going up? Then mass-media gets ahold of it, tapes some old dude who is ranting about how it’s terrible, and they spread fear, doubt and misinformation about the topic. Now everyone is thinking – maybe I should be scared too.
Seems like an intelligent way to live our lives – doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, it seems to be the way we think. And there is a positive side to this lunacy. When we’re scared, we take action. Often they are stupid actions, but before we realized that we were scared we didn’t have any cause to take any action at all.
Within the last two years renewable energy sources have become normalized to the public domain. We now recognize that ‘solar energy’ is a good idea, not a specialized silly interest only pursued by research scientists and backyard engineers. “Ethanol” is a household word, and despite the stunning stupidity of the concept even little Johnny learned in school that it comes from plant matter. People are more aware – thanks to high gas prices – of the effect that Dubai and corporate interests have on our energy infrastructure.
But when the price of gas drops back to that ‘temperate’ zone, the area where we can prevent withdrawal symptoms, we sit back and conveniently forget that it was ever a problem. Even to the point of asking ourselves, “Why did we want this solar plant again? It’s so expensive.”
I want gas prices to stay high. I want municipalities to stop converting farmland into cookie cutter carbon copied suburbs that require more and more cars and more and more kilometers. I want to see higher population densities, increasingly walkable and cycle-friendly cities as a result of those higher densities. I want our governments to make intelligent energy investments, and not sell them to the highest bidder. Grow a pair and nationalize some of our crucial energy industries, or at the very least subsidize them in the name of foreign energy independence. And maybe realize that wholesale shipments of currency to foreign nations just might make us… well… poor.
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