Letters to the Editor
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Where are the calls to conserve?
My next door neighbor works at the same business park that I do. In a more logical world, I would have been encouraged by my government to carpool to work, thereby cutting my gasoline bill in half, supporting the troops, curtailing terrorism, and all that really boring foreign policy stuff. Have I heard so much as a peep from Bush, Cheney, and company about this? Hell, no. A more courageous administration would have at least asked us to do these things, but not his feckless bunch.
When I go to work tomorrow, I will probably still see people driving SUVs and pickup trucks alone to work. Why? Do we all despise our neighbors that much? I don't see eye to eye with my neighbor, but I'm sorely tempted to bring up the subject with him any day now. Would I get up half an hour early and subject myself to his godawful Christian music 40 minutes a day on odd weeks to save forty bucks a month? Probably, as long as no one is offended when I turn on my iPod. The question is whether he would subject himself to my godawful-to-some 70s progressive rock. I would still be a tiny minority of such commuters if I were to do so, even as the price of gas goes north of four bucks.
The worst thing of all is that public transport is either nonexistent in most American locales, or is woefully insufficient to the point of virtual nonexistence. In one small Upstate New York city (Rome), the buses run nearly empty every time I see one. Why? Probably because they only run between the nursing homes, the hospitals and clinics, and the various shopping centers. One never sees a bus stop in Rome where one might expect a bus stop to be. All the infrastructure there is set up for the automobile, and if you'd rather not use yours for every small trip, you are out of luck.
We could easily solve our energy problems with ride sharing and public transportation, but the leadership and the will to do so simply isn't there. If we go down the tubes as a nation as a result, I'm afraid we will deserve this fate.
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@djansing
Interesting observation.
I've believe I've observed something slightly different. I have noticed that, in the increasing number of articles about high gas prices, people talk about how they're learning to conserve by not just jumping in the car each and every time they think of one single item they need at the store across tone; instead, they wait until they have two or perhaps even three items to purchase before firing up the truck--but they talk about it in an aggrieved tone, as if it isn't something we should have to do. As if our birthright is everything we want.
Even worse, there's no indication that people are realizing how debilitating this excessive dependence we have on oil truly is. Whenever the government stops mistreating us and prices come back down, the articles imply, we'll be able to return to our more natural and blessed state of--let us not call it "wastefulness", but instead "carefree innocence and joyous youthful thinking".
We live in such a different world now than the one in which we were all encouraged to plant victory gardens to help win World War II, it's almost surreal.
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Its Not Just About Cars
Our culture will be known as the Age of Oil. It has been the lifeblood of transport of people and goods, growing and harvesting of food, heating, cooling, and all of the extras like entertainment and communication. Virtually every invention patented in the 20th and early 21st century has implicitly or explicitly assumed as cheap and limitless supply of energy.
We are going to have to "change on a dime" to survive as a culture. We will be really lucky if this is not resolved in a terrible war of attrition--where a paring down of the world population is the objective.
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Deadbeat Nation
At a current price of about $115 per barrel, that's $1.5 billion per day, or $548 billion per year. This represents the single largest contribution to America's balance-of-payments deficit, and is a leading cause for the dollar's ongoing drop in value.
True. However, the United States has always been a significant user of energy. This isn't new, even with an illegal war underway and another on the way in the next few months. This has been true for decades.
What has changed is that we're adding massive government deficit spending and unprecedented consumer borrowing and consumption to one side of the equation when we no longer produce goods that the world wants to buy on the other side.
What does China get out of U.S. consumers purchasing millions of new flat screen televisions and stainless steel appliances to furnish overpriced homes? These same Americans are most often employed to shuffle money, property, or goods around in the service sector, which doesn't produce a thing that they can buy. The scale of this imbalance is not sustainable even if we were completely energy independent tomorrow.
We send hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars overseas each year on this spending. Nations that export oil to the U.S. or actually manufacture goods (primarily China and Japan) have nothing to exchange dollars for. For years these productive nations have just lent these U.S. dollars back to us so that we can spend more and they can produce more. Now, instead of lending they are beginning to purchase larger equity stakes in US companies. Why not? The debt securities they hold aren't paying high enough returns to keep pace with our destruction of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, nor is there much hope that we are beginning to profitably produce enough to repay these obligations.
This cycle ensures that not only will we leave our children in great debt for their lifetimes to pay for comforts we are enjoying today, but also leave them destined to work for firms that are owned by foreign interests, including foreign governments. There will be great outrage over this trend among our politicians. The reality is that this can only be reversed when we begin to control government overspending on both military escapades and entitlement promises, and we abandon artificially low interest rate policies and a monetary system that creates so many incentives for the consumer to borrow today instead of work and save for tomorrow.