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She Don’t Use Jelly
By Jeff Fecke | May 9, 2008
Tim F. from Balloon Juice muses about fuel scarcity and the ongoing price squeeze:
I don’t feel particularly smug when I stand next to my Honda Fit watching some SUV owner near tears as she puts more than $100 of gas into a car she doesn’t need. It just feels sad to think about how long it’s been since it became obvious to anyone who cared to look that we won’t be able to scare off problems like fuel scarcity and climate change by closing our eyes and wishing.
That lead time was an opportunity to make changes, some painful and some merely sensible, before huge numbers of honest Americans get caught with their pants down. Instead we blew it out the tailpipe of cars that average 15 MPG. Now, instead of a planned transition, we get to see what happens when stubborn denial meets inescapable change. It’s simply unsustainable to live in suburban car country with a negative equity on the house, $6-7 gas (wait until you see what that does to property values in outlying suburbs) and expensive SUVs that nobody wants. The saddest thing for me was that most who will get fucked the worst had no idea this was coming. There was that one guy who warned us, but he had a snooty laugh.
Also, he grew a beard and got fat. Clearly, he was crazy.
Seriously, of course, we’re in deep trouble; we’re pretty much at Hubbert’s Peak, and demand from India and China continues to skyrocket. Had we been thinking ten, twenty years ago, we would have invested in transit, invested in electric and hybrid plug-in cars. We never would have turned to SUVs as a sane method of travel, not for the masses. We would have build denser cities, would have built freeways with rail along side them from the get-go.
But we weren’t thinking. We were hoping. Hoping we’d always have cheap gas, hoping the environment would always be sound, hoping that the scientists warning about greenhouse gasses were wrong. We hoped, in the words of Ben Folds, that you don’t pay the tab ’til the last stop, and we all ride for nothin’, ’cause this train never stops.
But the station’s approaching, folks. We can continue to ignore it even as gas breaks the $4-, then $5-, then $6-a-gallon barrier. We can continue to pretend we don’t see it and continue to pass on chances to build a transit infrastructure now, while we still can afford to. We can continue to ignore it and hope that we die before the bottom drops out. But that’s the height of irresponsibility — sticking our kids with the collapse, sticking their kids with the fallout.
We have the chance to be remembered as the greatest generations of humans, those who sacrificed to make the future better — or as the worst generations, too selfish and self-centered to prevent the inevitable. It’s our choice. And we’re still making the wrong one.
Topics: Peak Oil | 3 Comments »
May 9th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Well, look at it this way. There don’t need to be any more intellectual or political arguments made by elitist alarmists like Al Gore.
“The magic of the market place” is about to impose all those terrible policies Gore advocated. The debate is over.
Consumers will act rationally, as they always do, and severely reduce their consumption of gasoline, leading the an eventual decline in the price of oil.
It could have been cushioned with better policies, but the first law of economics is about to again reveal its power: That which must happen, will happen. Tthere will be a few painful years for a lot of families, though, as they amortize the cost of that stupid SUV before they buy a new car that gets 30 miles per gallon.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Consumers will act rationally? When did they ever do that? When they kept maxing their credit cards, continually spending more than they earned? When they took out loans to buy houses and cars they obviously couldn’t afford even before things went pear-shaped? You must be kidding. How, when, and why would they all of a sudden start acting rationally?
At best they will stop one or another of their irrational behaviours before the economic reality forces them to do so. This is not exactly what I call acting rationally, it is coming to one’s senses just before disaster strikes. If they are lucky.
May 10th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
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