I’ve got the business channel on; oil has risen more than 10 bucks today, and is at $138 a barrel. At the Chevron near campus, I filled up the Volvo (which likes premium gas) for $4.74; regular was 20 cents lower.
I have mixed feelings about the rise in oil prices. On the one hand, I like the fact that more people are using public transportation. I like disincentives to environmentally destructive behavior, and I like incentives for conservation. That sales of large trucks and SUVs are plummeting, and sales of hybrids and smaller cars are rising, strikes me as a very pleasant and helpful consequence of skyrocketing fuel prices. The real hope, of course, is that the high cost of gas will lead to more rapid development of alternative, renewable, environmentally sensitive fuel sources. (I have mixed feelings about biofuels, both because I’m worried about the conversion of more undeveloped land for agriculture and because of the impact on food prices for the poor.)
On the other hand, I have no interest in seeing oil company profits skyrocket, and certainly little enthusiasm about seeing the likes of the house of Saud and Vladimir Putin get richer and richer. I worry too that some folks will draw exactly the wrong lesson, and use the rising price of gasoline as an excuse to advocate for driiling in ANWAR or off the coast of California. Conservation and the development of sustainable alternatives, not increased petroleum production, is the only viable long-term answer. Fortunately, all of the major candidates for president, including the unreliable and mercurial John McCain, oppose drilling in the Arctic. With the likelihood that the Democrats will continue to control Congress after the fall election, the chances are good that we can restrain the desires of the oil companies to expand drilling.
I am also keenly aware that the rising cost of gas has a direct and deleterious impact on the lives of my students. Public transportation networks in the San Gabriel Valley are poor at best, and many of those in my classes have little choice but to drive to and from school and work. The cost of filling up hurts them. It’s deeply insensitive for me to wax eloquent about “price disincentives” when those who consume the least and live closest to the margins are the ones being most powerfully affected.
So as I see the prices rise — 50 cents a gallon in the past four weeks alone — I have mixed feelings. I’m excited and enthusiastic when I see the numbers go up, because I’m thrilled about the increased reliance on public transportation. I’m pleased that the American love affair with big cars is showing signs of fading, perhaps for good. And I’m delighted that the often-ignored voices that counsel conservation and alternative energy sources are at last being heard. But rising prices — and rising oil company profits — are blunt and ineffective instruments for lasting social change.
What alternative fuel sources are you completely on board with?
I’m sorry to see that your awareness of how rising oil prices hurt those at the margins most gets such a cursory mention, Hugo. Your students are not just paying to drive to campus; they’re paying increased prices for everything from milk to clothing because fuel prices are up.
Bill, we don’t have any perfect solutions — biofuels (like Willie Diesel) are better in some ways, but affect food production and put more land under cultivation. Increasing fuel efficiency dramatically with smaller engines, hybrids and electric power (with assiduous care in battery production and protection) is vital. In the meantime, conservation, conservation, conservation is the answer.
And yes, going vegan helps. As we gradually reduce the number of animals in ag (through stopping reproduction, not slaughter), land used for grazing can be used for biofuels. Reducing animal population means less corn needed for steers and pigs, and more for the tank.
And mythago, you’re right — it’s driving up the costs of many things. To the extent that it encourages thrift, terrific — to the extent that it exacerbates the problem of making good, healthy food choices, it is indeed a serious problem.
As one of your students who doesn’t drive, please know some of us do use public transportation. I ride the Gold Line from South Pas to Allen, and take the shuttle to campus. It’s not just gas but insurance and car payments that are too expensive right now. I know some students come farther, but it is easier to get around without a car than you realize.
It’s not just about food prices, Hugo. In many parts of the country, public transit is simply not an option, period. So that means families that are squeezed financially, often driving cars that do not get great gas mileage (because they can’t afford a Prius).
Furthermore, even those who have access to public transit are probably losing hours every week taking a bus thirty minutes when the drive is five minutes. That means less time with family, less time to be there for their kids, etc.
It’s worth noting that while both candidates oppose drilling in ANWR, neither has a meaningful sustainable energy policy. Obama panders to the Midwest by supporting ethanol and other biofuels that are not only bad for food prices, but actually cost more to create than they provide in energy. So we’re looking at another four to eight years of brain-dead energy policy that will continue to hurt poor families.
Rising prices are a considerably more effective tool for social change than anything else we have seen. Which is more likely to incentivize changes in behavior, gaseous rhetoric, or high gas prices? History provides a fairly clear answer.
In addition, market prices reflect physical reality in a way that political rhetoric does not have to. Al Gore’s followers can change their minds and decide that genocide in Darfur or biowarfare or an ABBA reunion tour is the greatest threat to mankind, and *pfft* goes the political incentive for energy policy changes. Prices continue to tell the grim story: this stuff costs more now, guys, so change your behavior.
If you examine your own preferences, I think you will come to the conclusion that - whatever your own rhetoric - you actually want your poor students to remain poor. (In fairness, you also want the rest of us to become poorer.) You oppose things (drilling in ANWR, opening the continental shelf to exploration and development) that would reduce their costs of living and make their lives more viable, in favor of a nebulous vision of a more “sustainable” world. Which, fine, but then don’t talk about how much you care for the poor. You don’t; if you did, you would put their material well-being ahead of your preferences.
We have two choices, fossil fuel or day-to-day energy.
That is, fossil fuel laid down by the sun for millions and millions of years, all available now. Or today’s sun energy used today.
The problem with the latter is that it takes so huge a program to capture enough of it that the investment is prohibitive.
Is ANWR sacred ground? What skin is it off Hugo’s nose if the oil companies make money? Better ours than Saudi and Russia.
Offshore drilling is not as bad a deal as Hugo thinks. After all, the Chinese and the Cubans are drilling closer to our shores than we are and nobody seems to mind. Maybe if we used Chinese engineers…?
The other fossil fuel was laid down even earlier than rotting dinosaurs. I mean nuclear.
The use of energy prices to force people to live as their betters demand–those betters being college professors–is obscene.
And don’t think the “betters” are going to allow themselves to be inconvenienced. See the Kennedys and others and an offshore wind farm that ruins their view.
You’d just better hope you are in the class that gets to give the orders to the proles.
Y’all pose a false dichotomy, just like the energy companies: terrible poverty on the one hand, or increased petroleum production on the other. Fortunately, even John McCain rejects that — one of the reasons why I wanted him to win the GOP nod was to ensure that at least a moderately reasonable person on global warming won. Our next president will be on record as believing that global warming is real and has a primarily human cause; that president will not drill out of this problem. .
As for nuclear, a lot of European Greens, including some fairly radical ones, have embraced it — I’m torn, but prefer “safe nukes” (assuming that isn’t an oxymoron) to fossil fuel burning.
What’s false about the dichotomy? Energy is expensive, or energy is cheap. If energy is cheap, people are able to move out of poverty. If it is expensive, they can’t. That’s an oversimplification of the entire socio-economic picture, obviously, but the basic principle is true.
You want expensive energy. That makes people poorer.
It doesn’t make them poorer, Robert, if they can drive around for less. If you double the mileage that a single car gets, the rise in the cost of fuel is correspondingly less onerous. If you get someone to give up their car, and discover public transportation, they are not “poorer”, unless you want to insinuate that only the poor ride the bus because they have no other choice.
It makes them poorer, because they could drive around for less with a MPG-doubled car REGARDLESS of the cost of oil. And as other commenters have noted, gas prices are only the most trivial, first-order cost. High energy costs make EVERYTHING expensive. Have you got a calorie-doubler to give poor people the ability to get the same nutrition from their reduced food purchasing power?
You want expensive energy. That makes people poorer. There is no escape from this.
And working to transform our nation’s energy policy towards renewable, reliable resources — and in particular, moving away from the huge drain that is animal agriculture — is the best way to reduce energy costs long-term. ANWAR, even if it were to be exploited (and it won’t be), would be a temporary fix. I want solutions that are renewable for centuries.
We can also ameliorate the hit on the poor with a more progressive tax system than we already have. The high cost of fuel forces GM and Ford to stop building trucks and SUVs (I am delighted that GM is closing four truck plants), in order to build more hybrids and small cars. The poor need inexpensive high-MPG cars that are widely available, and they — like all of us — need an incentive to downsize. Downsizing is good for the planet, for the pocketbook, and the high cost of gasoline is having a positive effect on consumer choices when it comes to the kind of cars they buy.
But in the end, changing consumption patterns usually does only happen as the result of pain. I grieve that that pain is being felt unevenly, but cheap gas causes the earth more pain in the long run. And thus my partial happiness when I see gas climb towards $5 per gallon.
The earth, being an inanimate physical object, does not feel pain. Nor does environmental damage on the human scale damage the earth in the slightest; the earth has been hit by meteors with the power of 10,000 nuclear bombs, and shrugged it off. The earth is huge, and essentially indestructible.
What is vulnerable are the particular metabalances of ecological conditions that we, as humans, find convenient and comfortable. It is worth our time and energy to keep our ecosystem within those parameters; it is counterfactual and provincial in the extreme to imagine that we are doing this for any reason other than our own convenience.
When we (we = wealthy Westerners with access to gobs of capital) decide to tolerate high energy prices, we are in essence saying to those people who have not yet achieved our level of prosperity, “Your comfort, health, and survival are less important to us than are our ‘green’ ideologies. It is critical to us that your next increment of power usage follow the environmental designs that we want to see - even if the increased capitalization that requires means that your children, like you, will grow up without electric lights, even if it means that your children do not have a car to serve in case of an emergency, even if it means that you can no longer afford healthful food for your children.”
You can feel as bad about this as you like, but the fact is that you are privileging your ideology and your preferences above the material well-being of the poor.
Robert,
The earth doesn’t possess bottomless resources to exploit, pollute or contaminate without consequences for future generations. There are not bottomless resources of oil to deplete without consequences for future generations. Improvished conditions exist for many reasons, something past generations understood well as they fought with each other for their resources. Limiting family size has been espoused by many cultures as a means of alievating poverty.
I don’t get this response, “The earth, being an inanimate physical object, does not feel pain.” I don’t believe Hugo is suggesting that the earth feels pain. Environmental damage is very real and the earth and its inhabitants is NOT “essentially indestructible”. Where do you get that???
No one wants expensive energy. Recognizing that it may make some people think about their consumption choices is an entirely different issue.
Where do you get that he is priviledging his ideology and his preferences about the material well-being of the poor.
Robert, wealthy Westerners have a moral obligation, as you suggest, to radically reduce their consumption — and to make fundamentally different choices. You and I are in complete agreement that reducing consumption among the most prosperous is a precondition for demanding sacrifice among those who are less so.
“…blunt and ineffective instruments for lasting social change”, Hugo, you contradict yourself. Blunt, undoubtedly. But far from ineffective. The current prices are doing more to affect consumption and travel patterns in the US than anything in the 30 years has.
We should be happy that the prices can and will spur investment in alternatives, if for no other reason than simple relative prices and opportunity costs.
If I were to set a government-level energy policy for the US today, here’s what I’d do:
1) Go absolutely medieval on CAFE standards, aimed at 2012 or 2015, rather than 2020. Make, at a minimum, “soft-hybrid”-level (35+ MPG) standards the REQUIRED manufacturer average for all passenger vehicles, light-trucks, everything. Also, mandate that a hefty percentage of all passenger vehicles (domestic and imported) sold in the US by 2015 be “flex-fuel”, and preferably flex-fuel plug-in hybrids, able to run on ethanol, methanol, gasoline or whatever. This is possible right now with off-the-shelf technology.
2) Grant an ongoing tax rebate as a permanent part of the federal tax code for junking (NOT selling) SUVs and other fuel-inefficient vehicles, pegged to the value of the vehicle and how many MPG it is below current CAFE standards, and adjusted for inflation in line with each year’s Consumer Price Index (I’d envision it topping out at, say, $1500 in 2007 dollars for a relatively new Hummer, plus the owner getting the salvage value of the wreck).
3) The capital side of production in a good number of energy alternatives is starting to approach competitive levels. For example, technology improvements and economies-of-scale are starting to make solar panel production much cheaper, and the near-term trends here look good. The labor required to install the infrastructure has not caught-up (e.g., properly installing and maintaining the solar panels, which is a trickier proposition than most people realize). This is the real, on-the-ground level of the “green-collar jobs” BS slogan you hear from presidential campaigns. Fund the training and education, including relocation costs, that will get this off the ground (there are at least 10,000 soon-to-be unemployed GM employees who could use a break this year…)
4) Bring a rapid end, now, to USDA agriculture subsidies, trade restrictions, and price supports, particularly for the “big five” crops (corn, soya, cotton, rice, and wheat), and also for cane sugar. The mischegoss surrounding corn ethanol is fueled in very large measure, both politically and economically, by the ugly little industry of lobbying that’s grown up around these subsidies and by the uneconomic surpluses they create. Cane sugar is a much better, thermodynamically and economically, source of ethanol. We can import it from Brazil (rather than having the Brazillians cut down more of the Amazon to grow corn), which is better than importing oil from Russia or Saudi Arabia, and cheaper than corn ethanol. USDA subsidies, despite the little notice they get, are one of the most shameful and highly destructive policies of our government. They provide corporate welfare while making food more expensive and less healthy, promote unsustainable agriculture, and impoverish third-world farmers. And, at current prices, farmers (really, giant agri-businesses like Archer-Daniels-Midland) have no claim on needing government support. Phase them out, on a model following the end of federal tobacco subsidies in the 1990s, within 5 years. (No chance any Presidential candidate, campaigning in the Midwest swing states, will ever say such a thing).
5) Create a single, expedited administrative and judicial-review process to handle ALL environmental and local-impact questions on ANY infrastructure or land-use project that promotes either alternative energy and/or alternative transportation methods, either solely at the federal level, or one-local/state-level, one-federal-level review. Give it authority over any project that meets reasonable standards as to alternative energy or transportation. (Given the intransigence of NIMBY and post-Kelo eminent-domain critics, this may not have a prayer).
6) Mandate that a certain percentage of ALL fossil-fuel supplier corporate profits, from domestic or foreign producers, be reinvested in alternatives. Either they can investigate, select, and establish those projects themselves, invest that percentage, and retain the patents and resulting profits from those discoveries, or be taxed to fund public-domain projects.
I’m in favor of using fossil fuels prodigiously. While we’re working on things like controllolable fusion, for example.
“Sustainable” means “replaceable”, which means we use the only source for that, the sun, as it comes in. Whether it’s biofuels, windpower, tidal power, hydro, we can only capture a fraction of it.
Fossil fuels are concentrated sunlight (energy).
I’m not sure how the poor are going to accept demands that they sacrifice. I mean, some of them are practically dead already.
Prosperity requires energy. Frugality requires a bank account, which the greens have, being westerners, and the rest of the world doesn’t.
The world was running out of wood for energy, but then came economic mining of coal, and then oil and natural gas. We now have some good heads working on future projects.
Tom Wolfe, some years ago, did an essay in which he suggested that the progressives of that era thought the workers should be living in small apartments, wearing corduroy and sandals and doing handicrafts after work. Joe Lunchbucket isn’t going there voluntarily. We need a crisis to force laws to force Joe to do as the Alphas insist.
BTW, we ended global warming for no investment at all. It ended in 1998. The only expenditure was Soros’ quarter mill to Hansen to keep NASA cooking the books. But they’ve been busted.
Oh, well. Maybe if we keep the energy in the ground–see Bakken–we will have the necessary crisis.
Hugo, If I may suggest another thread, I was wondering what you think of that French annulment case. I posted on it here. I’m sure you would have a different view, but perhaps not a completely opposite one.
Actually Hugo, wealthy Westerners have a moral obligation to increase the wealth level so that we can lift poor people out of their circumstances, or make it easier for them to do it themselves. I do agree that if we are asking the poor to sacrifice, it has to come after we have sacrificed; I disagree that we can sacrifice our way out of the problem.
Love your spunk Robert,I agree in increasing wealth and debunking the elitism found in many “green” arguements. Believe me taking a bus even in San Francisco is a third class ticket.
How to distribute wealth is a discussion saved for another day. However conservation does not have to necesarily mean we have to live less abundantly and you do have to marvel at the stupidity of Detroit or of an economic structure that rewards inefficiency and the failure of government investment in energy as a matter of economic and national securiy despite the decades of warnings. Every decade we have a new prototype of an electric car advanced only to be swallowed up,its patents bought only to be filed unused in cynical manipulation of the market.
Who here would not sgree with Hugo that we would not be better off returning Saudi Arabia to the beknighted little kingdom it once was, or Russia to the budding democracy now thwarted not to mention eliminating the quaqmire oil wars of Iraq or the bleak future of a nuculear Iran. When the price of oil falls to 10 cents a galleon you can be sure the regime change would be all homegrown.
There is great opportunity in developing a more livable world. The first green revolution attests to this which is my level of expertise. Presently we are experimenting with increased CO2 absorption in plants that if successfully implemented would not only reverse global warming but increase the cleanliness of the air we breath.
great link for thought..http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm
seamus.
I don’t see ten cents a gallon. It would cost more than that to capture the output of a petroleum version of an artesian well. But I’m aware you’re exaggerating for effect.
We have huge reserves of oil, coal, and gas in this country and for thirty years, the greens and dems have been ratcheting down our ability to use it. This benefits Saudi Arabia, to mention just one.
Oops.
Meant to add this:
If Iran and Israel come to nuclear blows, that means it’s very likely we get no oil from the ME for some time.
It is unlikely that we’ll be able to ramp up other sources fast enough to cover.
It’s one thing for the US. It’s another for poorer countries. I spent a little time in the sticks in Central America in the mid Eighties. One smell that stays with you is the smell of a heavy cast-iron pot over a wood fire. Since wood is not efficient for speedy cooking, the fire is usually kept going in between meals. With the advent of affordable kerosene, the deforestation of huge areas has been, if not reversed, slowed.
Just for the fun of it, try keeping a small wood fire going all day. Multiply that wood by 365. And see how long it takes before you’re walking five miles for wood.
Do you not see the smug, Lincoln-liberal, patronizing tone of your posts?
Public transportation doesn’t run on air and sunshine; it uses fossil fuels, or electricity derived from the use of fossil fuels, for the most part. And “discovering” public transportation (Wow! We had no idea there were buses - thanks, OPEC!) doesn’t do a thing to alleviate the way that fuel costs drive up the prices of everything else. Do you think that long-haul truckers merely need to “discover” public transportation as an alternative means of getting goods from point A to point B?
And having been one of those people who has no choice but to use public transportation because I couldn’t afford a car, it’s much less of a wonderful, Gaia-hugging choice when you have no other option. How about you spend a blindingly hot summer day hauling around a small child on public transport and then get back to me about how wonderful it is to “discover” something beyond the car.
I’ve lived in places that had a great public transportation system and also in places that had nothing of the sort. Public transporation is a blessing when you have it, but it’s short sighted to tell people who live in places that don’t that the increasing gas prices are a good thing because it will make us look for alternative ways to get around. In my current home, short of taking a bicycle on a freeway, I have no other way to get to work besides my car.
So, Hugo, unless you’re speaking only to people in DC, Boston, Chicago, etc. to give up their car and discover the wonders of the bus and the subway, you’re just going to make a lot of us shrug helplessly.
Mythago, better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Best that we all think about solutions rather than throw up our hands and cry “Woe!”, or berate people looking for solutions for their “Lincoln-liberal, patronizing tone”.
Years ago, when I had a daily commute from the Mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles to a job in Santa Monica, I spent more than a year driving, by default, about a half-hour each way (in rush hour traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway), than another 10-20 minutes finding parking and walking to work (or else paying exorbitantly for parking). Eventually, I decided to look into public transit. There was a Rapid bus line that ran down Wilshire Boulevard, that picked up three blocks from where I lived, dropped off a block from where I worked, and took an average of 40 minutes each way. It cost $1.10 using tokens each way, versus at least a gallon of gas driving (when gas was about $2.50 a gallon). So taking the bus saved time, money, wear and tear on my car, and frustration. I also got to sit and read the paper or listen to my music or a podcast each way, rather than going ape at the other idiots on the road.
Public transit isn’t always a panacea. I had another job years later down Olympic Boulevard where there weren’t the same attractive alternatives (no Rapid bus line and better parking made driving a better choice). The point is that many people, especially in some places (like LA), drive by default without investigating potential alternatives that would improve their lot all around. It took me a year to figure that out the first time.
And cutting down on single-driver car commutes would cut demand for fuel, that would have an effect on the whole market, which would help out the situation with trucking, and anything else needing fuel. Yes, buses burn diesel, but it’s far more efficient per-person-per-trip to put 20 people on a ten-ton bus than it is for each of them to take a 3000-4000 pound car.
I wonder if the green movement is just another passing trend and people will lose interest. Afterall, this isn’t the first time around for environmental concerns. The NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) got its start in the late 60’s, oil prices soared in the 70’s. And guess what was there a big change in attitudes and consumerism? Seems like it was all talk and short-lived. The 90’s ushered in the trend of gas-hogging SUV’s, giganticsm, scrape-offs and McMansions–good for the mortgage brokers, real estate agents and banks and the bigger is better crowd and not good for the rest of us. I think as soon as oil prices go down, people will be back to their old ways. A few people may get inspired, but I don’t see a lot of concerned people out there willing to scale down for any other reason than they cannot afford it. As for homes, I see a lot of scrape-offs, even of homes which may only need updating and some TLC. Most people want brand new and larger and the older bungalows are scraped off–Now I think that is wasteful.
Sorry, Tom, but gloating about adding financial burdens to people who can ill afford is not “lighting a candle”, nor is it “looking for solutions”. It’s Hugo engaging in his routine of rejoicing in the suffering of the ecological sinners, while giving a perfunctory nod to the fact that some of the sinners don’t have much choice about their wrongdoing. (After all, Hugo prides himself on his compassion.)
And oil companies making record profits is doing zip to increase use of public transit or alternative fuels. Exxon is not suffering along with the rest of us.
The way you write this makes me wonder whether you are even aware of the fact that there are vast swathes of the country with no public transport whatsoever. I, for example, live nearly a hundred miles from the nearest bus stop. Am I supposed to walk the twenty miles to work?
Of course not, F. But it is the low price of gas that has allowed state and local governments to neglect developing effective public transportation systems (light rail, buses, etc) that utilize less fuel per passenger than do private automobiles. I make it very clear that the negative impact on the marginalized is to be lamented. At the same time, I can think of no other way to incentivize a radical drive towards fuel efficiency, public transportation, and conservation than scarcity.
But it is the low price of gas that has allowed state and local governments to neglect developing effective public transportation systems (light rail, buses, etc) that utilize less fuel per passenger than do private automobiles
Yeah. That’s why Montana doesn’t have bus routes, because gas is cheap. Eyeroll. Come on, Hugo, there is life outside Pasadena. Not everyone lives in a dense urban environment.
At the same time, I can think of no other way to incentivize a radical drive towards fuel efficiency, public transportation, and conservation than scarcity.
Really? Best take some imagination pills, then. Scarcity is certainly a good motivator but we have about a dozen other ones that are just as good. Guilt is a good one, as is shame. On the positive side, there’s the desire to be part of something larger than one’s own self.
Humans ARE economic creatures, but that’s not all there is. I’m motivated to be faithful to my wife, and it’s not ONLY because wives are in scarce supply.
Replace my “no other” with “no better” way. The moral argument has its place, I admit, but is more likely to work in the sexual arena than in the driving one.
Mythago, people, “sinners” or not, tend to find solutions and new choices given the new incentives. Some people will go towards public transit, or make the purchase of their next vehicle a fuel-efficient one, or (as has happened in some cases in this country now) switch to a four-day, ten-hour-a-day work week. Those who have absolutely no options whatsoever, however many they may be, are getting it in the shorts. We all are these days, and that’s too bad. But people tend to get creative under these circumstances.
And the profits are a function of the prices, not the other way around.
At the Chevron near campus, I filled up the Volvo
thrilled about the increased reliance on public transportation.
I filled up the Volvo
reliance on public transportation.
the Volvo
public transportation.
wait.
what?
But it is the low price of gas that has allowed state and local governments to neglect developing effective public transportation systems (light rail, buses, etc) that utilize less fuel per passenger than do private automobiles.
Nope. When gas was even cheaper, back when my mother was a child, there were streetcars and “interurban” trains even in smaller cities. In Illinois, if you lived in a city with over 15,000 people, you had a streetcar system. If not, you had an interurban that ran along the freight lines a few times per day to take you to the larger cities and/or county seat. Public transportation was very popular. Folks looked to personal transportation after those systems were shut down. There was no alternative. (Also, remember—part of the motive of shutting these systems down was union-busting).
Add in the fact that as factories shut down and employment became less dense, a second family car was needed—in the old days, most of the folks in the old neighborhood all worked at the same place(s), where ride-sharing was easy. In any given neighborhood now, folks are driving to the four winds—and consider themselves damn fortunate to have a job. Hard to ride-share when your neighbor is going twenty miles in one direction, and you’re going twenty miles in another.
The price of gas isn’t going to cause people to “look for alternatives” to driving. We (meaning “the United States”) are either going to pump a massive amount of federal dollars into rebuilding the public transportation infrastructure, or we’re going to see an influx of people into the larger cities (where there is still an economy) like never before. There’s still plenty of people who live in smaller urban areas (it’s not all the City or the Sticks, y’know)—those will empty out much like the small towns already have.
Hugo, not everybody lives in the suburbs. I live in the middle of an older, residential neighborhood about a half-mile from downtown. One of the things that appealed to me (besides—duh!—the cheap price of the house!) was how close it was to everything. That has changed. Grocery stores, dry cleaners, all the amenities of city living have shut down and moved to the outskirts of town (in order to get more business from out-of-towners, who don’t have businesses like that in their small towns). You are painting the problem as one of personal failure vs. personal willpower/can-do-ism, but it’s a systemic problem. Yeah, the City Council facilitates edge-city development, but if they don’t, someone else’s City Council will—and reap the benefits while this one deteriorates.
In short, there’s more people scrambling for fewer pieces of pie—not a likely scenario for collective thinking and collective solutions.
I have no mixed feelings about the high price per barrel. This is a disaster. It’s going to get really ugly.
(on a related note, can we abolish the phrase “love affair with the automobile”? Cars have meant many things to many people, but to most of us it’s a means to an end—our job. You might also want to consider what a car means to someone living under domestic violence—cars put real miles between an abuser and victim, where buses and trains don’t go.)
La Lubu, I had never thought of that last bit — about the role that the car can play in helping those who long desperately for safety find it. As a feminist and a movie-goer, I ought to have taken that into account.
Sophonisba, the goal is not to drive the poor alone on to public transportation. The goal is to drive the construction of public transportation that works. I need a car to get around in Los Angeles in a way I never did when I lived in the Bay Area, and was a BART rider.
I too wonder for whose benefit is all this volatility in fuel prices. Fully $30/barrel is due to pure market speculation a bubble that will correct itself as soon as the manipulation is unwound.
My oldest brother suffered greatly in the downturn in the 80’s oil industry where he worked where oil was down to (not 10 cents) but 10 dollars a barrel.
Solar energy is now competitive with coal with the new thincoat photovolatics, as well as solar thermal(CSP) surpassing coal in 10 years if not sooner at the power plant level. These are all welcoming developments how we can get there without great dislocations is yet to be seen.
La Lubu, you have to use a more sophisticated analysis than that to analyze choices relative to the price of fuel. First of all, you’d have to adjust the price for inflation (higher than ever today even adjusted for inflation, but historically very, very low in the 1980s and 1990s, when there were years when it was 89¢ a gallon). Then look at it as a proportion of household income (median income was a lot lower when your mother was a child). Then consider the income effects of greater personal mobility, the ability to find work with fewer geographical constraints (not having to go downtown to work), the ability to buy a house where real estate is cheaper (out of the urban core).
Yes, given all that (even though that is plenty by itself), I’ll concede that there have been quite a few confounding factors (deindustrialization, urban sprawl, white flight, busting of urban transit projects) that have done quite a number. In LA, there’s an infamous story about how the streetcars were bought up and dismantled by a consortium controlled by GM and Goodyear, in order to promote demand for the freeways and for their products.
It isn’t necessarily and either-or phenomenon. Many, if not most households today, would probably still retain one or two private automobiles even if members took some portion of their weekly commute on public transit or by other means (carpooling, etc.). You can keep the car in the garage for out-of-the-way trips, weekends, or escaping an abuser, while doing the five-day-workweek commute, which represents most of the miles that most of us drive, another way.
Those hardest hit by rising fuel prices are absolutely the least able to demand solutions. Advocates for the poor HAVE ALWAYS BEEN pressing for cheap, reliable mass transportation, regardless of the cost of gas.
Driving the construction of public transportation that works would require people to want to put their tax dollars into infrastructure. People are not suddenly going to be less selfish about public spending because they now have to pay $4 a gallon on gas.
Mythago, I was talking about the solutions from an individual and relative basis. Even if the public transit sucks where one lives, eventually, the increasing suckage (and cost) of driving would compel just about anyone to seek whatever alternatives are available (if available). Dropping a nickel in the farebox and sulking out a bus trip, however slow, hot, or nasty, looks better as the gas prices rise and freeways get more congested.
Public infrastructure is a sine qua non of transportation of any type. Tax dollars fund roads too. Whether people want to invest those taxes in more freeways that will be filled back to capacity within 15 years, or in better public transit as gas prices continue to rise, is an open question.
The advocates for the poor haven’t done such a bang up job themselves even when they have had the opportunity. Here in LA, there was a group called the Bus Riders Union that essentially got control over the county’s public transit system for a decade, after the mayor signed a consent decree. They some how decided (it was never exactly explained why) that subways were “racist” and “classist”, and prevented (admittedly, not without a lot of help) money from being spent on subway construction, diverting it to more and more buses. A decade later, we wound up with a lot of empty buses, and still no subway in most of the area that would serve as the backbone of a reasonable public transit system.
Tom, I’ll leave the “sophisticated analysis” up to you. My point is that the lower you are on the ladder, the fewer choices you have—you make your choices based on the impact of the greater forces at hand. People in my mother’s era rapidly shifted into car-buying mode after the streetcars were shut down. The confluence of lower car prices, cheap gas, and the lack of alternative transportation tipped the scales (I’d argue that the critical component was “lack of alternative transportation”). The scales will be tipped another way this time—without that influx of dollars (towards rebuilding infrastructure) as a part of national energy policy, people in smaller urban areas like mine are going to be left with damn few choices. If the price of gas is high enough, and the economy tanks even further (yes, there are places in these United States where the economy isn’t doing well, believe it or not), the most likely choice is going to be an emptying-out of the population of much of “flyover country”. If the choice for a non-wealthy person is “stay-and-be-permanently-unemployed” or “go-and-maybe-have-better-luck”—-I think most are going to pack their bags. Not that the major metropolitan areas are going to be able to accommodate that influx.
Around here, the average new choice/solution that Hugo talks about is cutting back on the family food budget. Less food buying, more reliance on food pantries. That’s not working out too well. The pantries are running dry, the supermarkets have cut back on donations, and individual donations are down. The folks who were just able to make it the year before last have been hammered as their non-negotiable expenses have gone up but wages haven’t. This isn’t really a “solution”—just a temporary method of coping. Considering that what—seventy percent?—of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending (go shopping!), this doesn’t bode well for the future. Less spending means more tanking economy, more unemployment, more downward spiral. Not sophisticated, I know, but hey, I’ve only had one cup of coffee this morning, and I’m responding to a blog post, not writing a dissertation.
And mythago is right on—people are reluctant to spend when the economy is tanking. I think the sophisticated people refer to it as “low consumer confidence”.
La Lubu, sorry if I sounded glib or arrogant in my last reply. I’m not denying that people are getting screwed, badly, under the current situation, nor that people near the bottom of the ladder or in parts of the country without great options, in terms of work or transportation, are probably seeing the worst of it.
Where I’m frustrated is that I see the current and near-future economic and technological situations offering considerable opportunities to permanently resolve many of these energy problems that have been bedeviling us for 35 years, were we to have, among other things, a political system that had the competence, foresight, and courage to take advantage of them. I said above six things that I would do if I were setting policy. Short-term pain for long-term gain. It’s difficult to sell that under a system that, under the best of circumstances, doesn’t like inconveniencing anyone other than a scapegoat-du-jour without a constituency. (oil executives, Muslim extremists, teenage “superpredators”, “welfare queens”, “deadbeat dads”, pharmaceutical companies, “drug kigpins”, etc.) It becomes nearly impossible in the current divisive environment and in a country where people are getting doubly hammered by current energy costs and a collapsing housing market, and that will be seeing 60+ million people retire over the next 15 years. It makes me wonder if as a country we are just too old, frightened, and sclerotic for bold and imaginative initiatives anymore.
Dropping a nickel in the farebox and sulking out a bus trip,
Forty nickels, actually, where I live. And yes, we poor people certainly are sulky about it.
25 nickels around here. Booyah!
Where I’m frustrated is that I see the current and near-future economic and technological situations offering considerable opportunities to permanently resolve many of these energy problems that have been bedeviling us for 35 years, were we to have, among other things, a political system that had the competence, foresight, and courage to take advantage of them.
Agreed, Tom (don’t want ‘cha to think I went away mad. Just went away busy!). I’m frustrated too. I’m an electrician, and there is a wind farm project in my jurisdiction that is being vigorously fought against by the NIMBY folks. So far, none of those NIMBY people are willing to go without electricity. Since their major objection is “those windmills are so unsightly!” I strongly suspect that the coal industry may be fueling (heh) the front group. (Also, those same folks don’t seem to have objections to cell phone towers, go figure). My Local is in the process of building a new union hall, and we’re going to install solar panels—partly to save money, partly as a sales pitch to the public (”see what you can do? call us for a list of contractors just dying to put panels on your roof!”). The more people who do that, the lower the price will get. For crying out loud, you’d think it would be a real no-brainer for the U.S. to invest in infrastructure and new technologies—more people employed at good-paying, nice-benefit jobs, more young people going into apprenticeships for a career with a future, better options for transportation translating into less out-of-pocket costs for the public, renewable energy translating into lower utility costs—damn, people, let’s get this show on the road!
As for NIMBY objections to infrastructure changes, I like the way Belleville (Illinois) handled the MetraLink (light rail) system going through. Belleville is pretty strict about not wrecking out historic buildings if it is at all possible for them to be saved. The routes were planned to minimize the necessity of bringing in the wrecking ball, and older (mostly brick) buildings were moved to empty lots where feasible. I think there was a certain amount of rerouting of freight lines so old “heavy rail” right-of-ways could be reappropriated. Of course, one of the things that made that possible was the fact Belleville stopped being the upper-crust area long ago. Higher-income areas have more clout to stop projects.
A lot of mid-size cities wouldn’t have to worry about the impact on neighborhoods—urban sprawl and the rise of the car meant those battles were already fought long ago with road-widening projects. The existing roads could be reappropriated for light rail. I live on one of the main arteries of my city—a one-way street. Make one of the one-way streets a light-rail line, make the other a two-way street. Boom—your main north/south run, no buildings to wreck. There are other streets that could easily accommodate the same method; there’s also “heavy rail” that could be relocated to the city’s edge with those right-of-ways reappropriated. It sure isn’t like this area couldn’t use the jobs created by projects like that. It would definitely invigorate the school district, since Illinois relies heavily on property taxes (and this district has experienced middle-class, mostly-white flight to the surrounding suburban communities—sure would be nice to see some urban investment around here on all kinds of levels).
With what I do for a living and the geographic area I live in, I don’t see myself ever getting by without a personal vehicle prior to retirement. That’s true for a lot of folks in “flyover country”. But there isn’t any reason those vehicles can’t be manufactured for more mileage per gallon, less gasoline usage, less pollution, etc. If we build those vehicles in the U.S. rather than import them, it can put more people to work at the same good-paying, nice-benefit jobs available in infrastructure improvement.
1. Perhaps a good way to put it is that, while high gas prices aren’t good things in themselves, the silver lining is that people are acting a bit more responsibly and keeping an eye on how much gas they’re using and wasting. If more people use mass transit, great.
2. Rather than blaming the oil companies, who keep as profit a low percentage of what they produce, I’m looking at demand — particularly at the gas being wasted (and pollution spewed out) while everyone is IDLING in traffic jams on the highway. Has anyone besides me come to the belief that having everyone go to work and everyone leave work at roughly the same time is a rather daffy idea? The worst part is that traffic is moving JUST ENOUGH that you can’t turn off your car (to wait the more-than-one-minute that makes turning off your engine and turning it on again later a good idea), because the vehicle in front of you pulls up just when you do. Then, of course, there’s the sprawl-style planning Hugo mentioned, wherein people live in large developments nowhere near a commercial area or mass transit, so that every quart of orange juice and trip to the bookstore requires firing up the car. We’re shooting ourselves in the butt here. It’s safe to say that prices wouldn’t be this high right not if people took some of the measures they do now way back when there was no “crisis” (for want of a better word). But that’s like every drought when the local news team tells us to brush our teeth with the faucet off and other things we should be doing all the time.
4. There are plenty of geologists, meteorologists, and other scientists who question humankind’s impact upon climate change. But here’s the thing: whether or not climate change is caused by human activity, MOST of the things suggested to combat it are good ideas, anyway. We should be carpooling and walking and biking more. We should be more devoted to recycling (I have driven a county away to drop off my Number 5 and 6 plastic, while donating a fee to do so).
We should unplug appliances that aren’t being used for a while because they use up electicity otherwise, even when they’re off. It just bothers me how the talk about global warming has muscled everything else in environmentalism out. If you dump motor oil into the lake, it won’t have much of an effect on our planet’s temperature…but we should still tell people not to do it.
4. I enjoy taking the train, the bus, or the subway to get around — but I do admit that I am CHOOSING to do so; those who must use it every day probably find the novelty wearing off. My analogy for that is that day back in school when someone would show up on crutches, and everyone else would want to “try them out,” having fun trying to use them to walk, but the kid with the broken leg would find them a bit less entertaining.
5. In the inner cities, one major cause of poor health is that the foods that are most available, relatively inexpensive, and high in calories (since people are trying to feed themselves and their families economically) are the ones that aren’t so good for you: processed foods, fast food, starchy junk foods. Those corner pantries often don’t have much in the way of fresh vegetables, which are more expensive to produce and more perishable to shelve than, say, potato chips.
3.
And don’t ask ME how the three wound up down at the bottom and got replaced with a four in the middle. Nope.
The sprawl situation is a tricky one. The dream of affordable middle-class homeownership is one that Americans have aspired to, and remains a noble and laudable personal and social goal. Of course, the classic problem of real-estate economics, namely the fact that nobody’s making any more of it, means that more land has to be brought under development to make it affordable, as the price of city-core real estate skyrockets, due either to natural or artificial shortages (e.g.: Portland, which has become very expensive as a result of “smart-growth” development restrictions). In LA County, it’s estimated that there are 300,000 people living in illegal garage conversions. Conversely, we’re seeing a boom in construction of 20,000+ square foot houses for the ultra-rich in the Santa Monica mountains, our own version of third-world-style finca-barrio urban development.
But then, with sprawl, you get the fuel and environmental problems you describe…
Another issue with poor diets, especially among the poor, again comes back to another side-consequence of our agriculture policy. That glop that goes into junk food is mostly produced using corn and soya as feedstocks, the same corn and soya that are artificially made cheaper thanks to our Congress’ solicitude to Archer-Daniels-Midland and “farmers” like Scottie Pippen and David Letterman.
I admit that this one always baffles me. You can drive up pretty close to the wind turbines in NorCal, and I think they are beautiful. If they’re talking about noise or other disturbances, that’s a different story.
Yes, Tom, that little “if available” is a big freaking “if”.