Commentary
Gas prices are nothing to complain about
by Karin WinegarKarin Winegar is a St. Paul journalist and author.
It's time to be indignant about indignation. Each time gas prices rise, shrieks are heard in the land as if somewhere in the Constitution there's a right to cheap and plentiful fossil fuels.
We've been warned for decades about relying on petroleum for our personal transportation, and people are still furious when it happens — again! Threats against President Obama (who announced recently that he will buy a Chevy Volt in five years, when he's no longer president) follow.
Electric cars were created over a century ago, along with cars powered by gas, kerosene and steam, but were subsumed by our collective intoxication with cheap gas. The intoxication has been aided by the mighty oil and gas industry, which spent more than $146 million lobbying Congress last year, according to the League of Conservation Voters.
Is gas really more expensive? Not very, when prices are adjusted for inflation. But Americans, many of whom are more familiar with the price per gallon of gas than with their own blood pressure or cholesterol levels, are outraged.
Without assessing who or what is to blame, or the mysterious coincidence that gas prices (set by the quite conservative oil industry) are elevated in this election year, I suggest we finally get past our need for it.
First, I bought a battery-powered lawn mower: no more smelly, loud, messy gas and oil. No more yanking starting cords and cursing. No more roar. It is like vacuuming the lawn.
Then I watched hybrid cars over the past decade or so as they morphed from homely legless waterbugs to something more attractive. Finally, I bought one. Two years ago I let loose of my dear, dusty 1998 Camry with 210,000 miles on its odometer. It was still humming along, and is now serving a college student somewhere, I hear. I am gliding around in a bluebird-blue Prius purchased for a modest price out of a car rental fleet that was turning over.
As far as I can tell, that's all any urban or suburban dweller needs unless he or she has to haul a load of lumber, plow a field or transport more than four kids. It is famously quiet and comfortable and has a 11.9-gallon gas tank. When I drive conscientiously, I get mileage in the high 40s. Once I managed to reach 58 mpg. Not to mention the car's celebrated silence: I can sneak up on wildlife, pull over to watch swans on a pond, deer in a meadow or wild turkeys under a bird feeder.
There is no downside I can see except that, about once a week or so, I find someone tailgating me in a threatening way. It's usually drivers of pickup trucks, big American cars or SUVS, and the hostility in their glares is clear.
If I want to become even more liberated from gas — and I do — Shayna Berkowitz, co-founder of ReGo Electric Conversions in Minneapolis, can convert my Prius to electric for about $5,000 or so. St. Paul has an online list of charging stations and I have an outlet and extension cord in my back yard. And if I want to be purer and freer still, local solar companies offer a partially subsidized program to install roof panels to take care of all my kilowatt needs and sell the excess back to Xcel.
We can stop being victims of pump prices, stop desiring the next Ford Orc, Chevy Kraken or GMC Leviathan if what we drive is about function and not ego or nostalgia. We can wean our psyches from petroleum to lithium, from the vroom to the hush. Maybe even Toyota will stop making the Sequoia and start making the Bonsai.
Comments (4)
And all of this coming from someone who drives a bluebird blue Prius! Get real. Not everyone out there can just go out and buy a Prius or a $40,000+ Volt that'll catch fire or a Leaf that *may* get you up to 100 miles per charge, if you're lucky. Not to mention the unwritten law that every hybrid/electric car must look absolutely horrid. It's like the consequence of owning a fuel efficient vehicle "look at me, I get 50mpg but my car looks like a Jetson's spaceship and a Fiat procreated". The majority of the population utilize gasoline engines and the continual increase at the pump hurts each and every one of us. I understand the need for 'change' to more fuel effecient/green vehicles but it won't happen overnight. Gas prices change literally overnight and we as Americans keep having to shell out more and more money during this rough time in the economy. So to these people who say that gas needs to be higher or that they don't care if it hits $11/gal, just remember that at one time or another, you were just as dependent on gas as the rest of us. And to the people who say get a bicycle; do you work 25 miles from work? Do you want to ride that thing 50+ miles a day in the rain/snow? So I will continue to sit next to you at the red light and vroom my engine over your hush. And while you're vacuuming your lawn I'll wave at ya from my John Deere.
While I applaud the moves you have personally made, nobody including our elected officials have mentioned the 500 pound gorilla in the room; namely that this country has based it's entire economy on the access of cheap energy by burning fossil fuels in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. These are all finite resources that ultimately we as a thinking species will use up until it's gone....then what? Already I have heard 3M announcing their thermoplastics division will be marketing fuel tanks to contain natural gas by the end of this year. GM has recently announced an engine that can burn either gasoline or natural gas. The trucking industry is making the change from diesel to natural gas in order to save $10,000 /truck/year. Once we've burned up all the natural gas for transportation and fertilizer manufacture, what will we he heating our homes with when it's 10 below in January? Or are we hoping that climate change will convert Minnesota to Miami? Just try to think about how our economy would function tomorrow if there was no longer access to fossil fuels in terms of plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food production, let alone transportation and the heating or cooling of our homes. Drill baby, drill is not a long term sustainable answer and while thinking about the future is uncomfortable, I would like to think that there will be something for my grandchildren or their grandchildren.
Oil is traded on a global market--it's price matters not where it is extracted but the cost of that extraction in terms of technical difficulty, ease of transport and refining, and extraction taxes/royalties. Increased U.S. production might carry lower taxes (because we're greater fools), and lower costs of transportation to the refineries, but there is no guarantee the oil companies--the owners of that oil mind you--will pass those savings along to consumers.
From a price standpoint, it hardly matters if we get Keystone to connect Alberta to the Southeast U.S., or a different pipeline that connects Alberta to B.C. and onward to the markets across the Pacific.
Efficiency is something that Americans must embrace because it's the only way we can retain anything like our current standard of living in a finite world with rapidly-growing demand.
"Without assessing who or what is to blame, or the mysterious coincidence that gas prices (set by the quite conservative oil industry) are elevated in this election year"
What an idiotic and all-too-common assertion. Oil prices are set by global traders, not by oil companies. It was true when oil was selling for $8 a barrel in 1998, and it's true now. So long as the American public continues to accept this idiocy, we have no chance of solving the energy problem.
If you're truly concerned about energy supply and cost, you'll stop the corn ethanol scam supported by Minnesota office holders.
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