Certainly we all hold part of the blame due to our lavish ways and gas guzzling suvs vacationing habits etc.
My thought – or question is – how did Europe end up with such high gas prices – what’s their story?
Perhaps we can learn some from the history it provides.
Regardless of the outcome this I do know – we can’t just sit here watching as little old ladies on fixed incomes end up dead in their homes for the lack of having enough money to get to the store and back.
We live in a society built around the car – the entire structure of our cities, towns, rural communities have roads as their backbone. We are expected to have a car and be able to get from point a to b. At $1 per gallon people decided to live x miles from a town or a store, a job etc. at $2 bucks they adjusted to it and made due. At $3 we all get concerned and have to rethink everything. (I know – many of you don’t even care. You love your Escalades with their shiny rims and don’t care how much it costs, wastes, or impacts the price of gas on the rest of us). At 3 dollars I ask myself – Am I working too far from home? Am I too far from the nearest wholesale club, shopping center etc. For those on very tight budgets, the poor, maybe they are too far but can’t even afford to invest in a move which would save them money. Many are stuck. At $4 bucks a gallon many people who commute more than a few miles will see some serious financial impact. At $5 many more people will feel the impact. And on and on until we have a major problem – we already have that major problem – I can’t walk to work – its just too far away. I can carpool – I start Monday. On CNN today they had a gas station manager from the rural country area on and he says they don’t have mass transit – they can’t carpool. The nearest store is many miles away. What do the poor do then? They may just curl up and waste away, die. Seriously – that will happen to a few – and hopefully not too many.
If our prices are to go as high as 5 or 6, 7 or more per gallon we need to play a mass game of musical chairs. We can do it – but not the way we are structured today. The poor need to live within walking distance from the store, church, job etc. The low middle income need to live a very short commute from job, store etc. The upper middle class a little farther out etc. And all that just can’t happen overnight.
I don’t believe the government needs to step in the middle of everything and bail out people left and right – I firmly believe in self reliance and that is what needs to happen. If the price can not be stopped I plan on switching some things up in my life. I do not plan to spend a thousand bucks a month on gas. I’ll move or do whatever it takes to avoid all that. But, like I said – not everyone has the capacity to do this. Look at the old, the poor, the incapacitated – we have to prepare to at least help them move on if they don’t have any family, friends, church members to help them do it. This is the message I send to the oil execs, the politicians, McCain, Bush, Obama, Clinton – what are you going to do about this – how can you lead the national effort to help us move on with rising prices in a country that was built around the car?
I have had the chance to live in two foreign countries. One was quite third world and we walked everywhere and took a bus when we commuted any distance more than a few miles. I also lived as in intern in Spain where compact cars are the norm. Yet even with those smaller cars the structure for the most part supported great mass transit or in smaller towns a city center and homes on the outskirts. The US – at least the parts I have lived in is not set up in this way. I can’t walk to the Smith’s grocery store about 4 blocks away from my house. The road leading to it is 50 mph and there is no sidewalk. I would be killed if I tried – I drive.
Let’s try really hard to stop the further rise of gas prices. But, in the meantime let’s also figure out what we need to change real quick to keep people from curling up in their homes and dying due to lack of money to get to the store where they buy overpriced food.
Tags: bush, clinton, economics, exxonmobil, gas, gas news, gas prices, mccain, News, obama, oil execs, third world gas
April 27, 2008 at 2:31 pm |
I personally think all this whining about gas prices is ridiculous. The fact of the matter is that we have put ourselves in our current economic situation, and now we don’t want to be held accountable for our actions – typical modern day sentiment, it seems.
Gas prices are very much based on simple economics. As long as the demand is high, producers will charge what the market will bear. We have been bearing comparatively very low prices for years, and in recent times our demand has skyrocketed due to our “need” to drive vehicles that get very poor gas mileage. None of this was forced on us, it was a CHOICE! No one forced anyone to buy a Suburban to commute 80 miles a day to and from work, but yet we see a lot of that in our society. We have to face it that this type of behavior was not only irresponsible, but it was also unsustainable. In that light, anyone who didn’t in the last year or two trade in their gas guzzler for a more fuel efficient vehicle has no room to complain.
Europe’s gas prices have a lot of taxes and fees included in them, for environmental impacts, etc. It seems like most other parts of the world see driving one’s own vehicle as more of the privilege that it actually is than we do here in the US.
Personally I wouldn’t mind watching the gas prices creep higher still. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only way to wean Americans from their entitlement mentality and to force American auto makers to step up to the plate and give us good quality fuel efficient vehicles that Europe has been enjoying for decades. In the end we all benefit from such changes, both economically and evironmentally.
The people that need to be blamed are the ones who, domestically, are profiting from our unending thirst for oil…
April 27, 2008 at 5:33 pm |
Thank you for the great comment – I do agree with you and sure hope I am not coming across as a whiner.
What I am doing is trying to get people to act – not just the government or the oil execs but all of us.
I asked a similar question over on Linked In today and It has some really good examples of people adapting to life based on the price of gas.
Several people speak of downgrading from SUVs to more economical cars. I have also done the same thing – from Pick Up to car and now beginning Monday on to carpooling. Those of us on the internet asking and answering the questions will mostly figure out how to cope and adjust on our own even if the price gets to 15 bucks a gallon. Its those that are not as educated and up to speed on adaptation that I worry about. Look around your entire neighborhood and you will find people who already struggle at 2 bucks a gallon – what are we asking of them at 6 dollars.
I don’t want or expect the government to save us from the upcoming prices but I do think there needs to be some major planning going on.
We see a lot of government sponsored ads telling people to do this or that stop smoking etc. Is it time an organization is formed to specifically help people relocate, carpool, find a new job with a shorter commute?
Here is the link to the Linked In question and answers.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/blogging/TCH_BLG/219492-5226607?goback=%2Eahp
Mark
April 27, 2008 at 10:52 pm |
Mark,
It sounds like now you’re asking the right sort of questions; for instance, what is the price elasticity of demand for gasoline? There are a number of papers on the short-term price-elasticity (in layman’s terms, knowing the elasticity will tell you if prices rise by $X per gallon in a month, then demand will fall by Y); however, for the more important long term question of long-term elasticity (what happens to demand if gas prices rise–say–$5 over 5 years?) our understanding is much murkier due to the complex nature of the question. In other words, no one really knows how usage patters will change if prices rise over the long term.
But that isn’t to say we can’t put constraints on what the answer might be. For instance, given the long lead-times in oil well development, we have a pretty good idea of what the *supply* of oil will be in the short- to medium-term. If the price mechanism is allowed to operate then demand will roughly equal whatever that future supply is–and so, the price at which supply equals demand will be the price of gasoline at that future date. Thus, if one makes an assumption of what the future supply will be and looks up the price of gasoline on the futures market for that date, then one can get an idea of what the market-predicted long-term elasticity is of gasoline. If the efficient market hypothesis more-or-less holds (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_market_hypothesis), then that predicted elasticity is our best guess of the real value.
Changing gears, another comment that deserves to be made is how the impact of inflation and rising living standards have rendered the current spike in energy prices relatively benign. If one adjusts for inflation and for per-capita income, the picture of what is happening looks dramatically different:
http://tinyurl.com/4l4ju2
Now, one immediate criticism I can level against the informational value of that graph is it does not differentiate between high- and low-earning households. I’m sure if we saw the same graph for only the lowest quintile of wage earners in the US, the recent run-up would seem more significant. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that even the poor are–in terms of energy prices–by and large better off now than in the early 80s (let alone, earlier in the century). Increases in energy prices do lead to hardship and difficult decisions, but fortunately, in the US, it’s hardly ever a matter of life and death anymore.
Ah well, it might be a failing of mine that I’m an optimist.
April 28, 2008 at 6:53 am |
Everyone is caught up in the frenzy of blame, fear and panic regarding gasoline prices AND climate change.
Can anyone here recall what gasoline cost per gallon WAYYYYY back in 2000? $1.29! A year ago it was $2.19 and today on the way to work it was $3.49.
September 11th, 2001 caused some global panic that affected everyone economically through unstable financial markets and concerns about oil availability.
Even with those concerns gasoline pricing, by comparison have not increased as fast as they have within the past year or so.
The war in Iraq is not helping, civil conflict in Nigeria is not helping, China’s and India’s booming economies are not helping, the rush to corn ethanol is not helping.
People need to step back and quit drinking the Koolaid.
Climate change is happening. That is unarguable. The causes are definitely arguable. I live in the Ohio River Valley, formed when the last glaciers receeded, oh say 10,000 years ago AND THE ARE STILL RECEEDING! We were not burning fossil fuels, there were no cars. What caused it? Maybe it was increased solar flares (an alternate theory to greenhouse gases) or maybe it is just the natural evolution of our planet.
Many have data showing several ice ages and warm ups over the life of our planet. We listen to too many alledged experts.
Stop and think, really think before you blame the oil companies again.
Just about every major city in the US has electric buses or street cars up through WWII.
Then Dwight Eisenhower, impressed by the German autobahns thought we should develop an interstate highway system. oops
Then in the 1950s GM had a targeted program to replace all the metroploitan rail systems with diesel buses. They gave dealerships to city council members and lined the pockets of many politicians and one by one the street cars went away. ooops
Now we elected a president whose family fortunes are tied to oil, whose advisors are tied to no-bid contractors and who has entangled the US in its biggest mistake to date.
What is gasoline so expensive……..because it is and because too many people go with the flow and there are too many people behind the scenes lining their pockets at our expense.
Transcontinental high speed rail between major population centers, with stations at airports for transoceanic flights and transcontinental flights when necessary.
High speed rail connections to regional electric light rail and a rapid expansion of pebble bed nuclear reactors to cleanly produce the needed electricity on a grand scale.
There are alternatives, there have been for decades. People have just been waiting for some one to tell them it is a problem.