Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
- Douglas Adams
Apparently congress just voted to stop replenishing the massive federal petroleum reserve just to save drivers 3 to 5 cents a gallon. And, in a blatant attempt to bribe voters, Hillary and McCain are talking about a “gas-tax holiday” which would temporarily (like 60 days) cut the price by a whopping 18 cents a gallon.
It’s quite a shock, whenever I’m in the US, to spend $60 or $80 to fill up whatever car I’ve borrowed, but we all knew this day was coming. I remember the gas crisis in 1979 well (even though I was just ten). In school they told us that in a few years it would be impossible to buy a car that got less than 100 miles per gallon, and that by the time we were adults, we’d all be driving solar-powered cars.
But instead, the crises abated, and we pretended it never happened. Eventually the SUV took over the US market, and many Americans decided that commuting three hours a day was an acceptable thing to do. If we’d heeded the warnings, we wouldn’t be hurting now. If we’d put half the money we’ve spent on oil drilling research into fuel economy and alternatives, we wouldn’t be in this situation at all.
And this is not 20-20 vision in hind-sight. We knew this 30 years ago. The only thing we didn’t know was when it would happen.
Gas prices are going to keep going up. There’s no reason to think that they won’t. We can vote for someone that’s offering to reduce the pain by 5% temporarily, but that’s the same old strategy that got is here in the first place: bury our heads in the sand and pretend that everying will turn out fine. What’s sad is what the candidates aren’t talking about: what we’re going to do to get out of this situation. Really get out. Get out and never get back in.
Sadly, we’re still headed in the wrong direction. And this isn’t strictly an American problem. Even here in Denmark, with its fantastic bike lanes and nice train system, more and more people are buying cars. And when they do that here, they pay a 200% car tax and buy gas that’s currently at $8.50 a gallon.
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