It’s Tough to be Rational Pt. 1

For the three of you who use public transportation or human-powered transportation to the exclusion of internal combustion vehicles, I just wanted to be the first to let you know that gas prices aren’t going to drop anytime soon. You don’t care, so you’re the least likely to flip out and start beating me about the neck and shoulders whilst screaming, “Why? Why? Whyyyyyyy?” The fact is that any increase in prices is eventually accepted by the American public because, simply put, what choice do we have? Do you really think the American people are going to organize a boycott of gasoline in order to force oil companies to reduce prices? Don’t hold your breath.

President Bush is *shudder* right *shudder* when he says that we need to reduce our dependency on oil. That said, there are a couple of ideas I’d like to share with the populace of the United States:

1. There are no quick fixes
2. Alternative fuels aren’t going to make fuel cheaper

Sorry; it’s tough to be rational sometimes.

To point 1 above: we are a nation of people who really enjoy immediate results. We want our wars over in a year, we want our shipments overnight and we want our food in 5 minutes. Unfortunately, there are many problems in this world (most of them, in fact) that have no instant solutions. Dependency on oil is one such issue. We have a huge infrastructure designed wholly around the burning of fossil fuels; does anyone truly believe we’ll be able to just switch over to another fuel in a matter of months or even years? Just remember that everytime you hear a politician spouting off an easy solution to a complex problem, he’s either in someone’s pocket, seeking re-election or both.

To point 2 above: right off the bat, I encourage people to read this article from Popular Mechanics. This will give you an excellent overview of many of the alternative fuels that various groups have been pushing. I find the section on Ethanol very interesting, mainly because I’ve been quite suspicious of the push behind Ethanol-as-fuel-replacement. My belief has always been that we could never grow enough corn to be able to sate our consumption habits without serious consequences (destruction of farmland from growing one crop only, food shortages, importing food as opposed to oil, etc.), and the article backs that belief.

The fact of the matter is that we’re not going to replace our oil dependency any time soon. That doesn’t mean that we don’t research the hell out of these alternatives and find ways to make them supplements to gasoline (which they’re already doing with Ethanol), but it means that there is no immediate solution. Americans would do well to realize this fact and start taking steps to curb their own consumption habits. This is where rationality comes into play, and being rational is one of the things that large groups of people can rarely mange (after all, it’s tough to be rational). But I’m asking you, my fellow Americans, to realize that there are no easy solutions; that we need to reduce our own consumption; that we need to support our scientists; that we need to reject idiotic ploys from politicians to earn our votes and use our brains to realize that it’s a long road to energy independence, but one that we truly can travel.

Here’s a few things I’d suggest in order to help the problem:

1) Stop buying SUVs/light trucks unless you truly have a need for one (not just because you like to sit up high)
2) Buy fuel efficient vehicles (motorcycles get awesome gas mileage and are good 9 months of the year here in the Northeast)
3) Vote out any politician who tries to push through a $100 rebate to soften the impact of gas prices; that’s just idiocy
4) Vote out any politician who tries to roll-back gas taxes; as much as I hate taxes, that’s not a solution and not a real savings (it’s going to be made up somewhere else, folks)
5) Vote out any politician who tries to sell you on the idea that stopping deposits to the emergency reserve will have any effect on prices at the pump (2.1 million barrels-a-month doesn’t even touch our 20 million barrel-a-day consumption)
6) Car-pool, use public transportation, ride a bike, anything to cut down on consumption

The fact is, reducing demand is the only way to reduce prices.

Oh, and don’t be surprised if there is either no investigation into Big Oil price gouging or no results from an investigation. I say this not just because Big Oil owns Capitol Hill (Bush comes from Oil, remember) but because I don’t believe that there is any price gouging. I believe that the oil companies have the corner on a product that is in incredible demand and, therefore, are earning profits based on that demand. This is business, not crime. People immediately look for conspiracies instead of saying, “wow, those guys sure made some smart business moves getting to where they are”. If you want to affect a company’s bottom line, you don’t do it by urging retarded “Windfall taxes” or yelling about price gouging, you do it by reducing demand for that company’s product. Again, I don’t believe the American people will ever organize a boycott of gasoline, so nothing will ever come of that idea, but that doesn’t mean we should be attacking successful businesses purely because they’re successful. That’s the free market, that’s capitalism, that’s the world we live in here in the United States. Again: it’s tough to be rational.

That doesn’t mean that Big Oil isn’t laying down some shady moves in the corridors of politics to keep their power base consolidated, but that’s business as usual for any large corporation in Amercian (and it makes me sick, as I’m sure you can tell from other posts). They have their hands in the back pockets of way too many politicians, but the only thing we can do about that is vote those fuckers out, and the next ones and the next ones until they get the message that we won’t put up with that shit anymore. Whoops, slipping off topic and into a political rant again. Oh well, I’ll keep doing it until the people of this country wake up and realize that they have the power…I’m gonna die disappointed, I think.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 06th, 2006 at 11:24am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.