When I returned home for spring break and began driving again I finally noticed those vaunted high gas prices--and to be honest they didn't bother or surprise me in the least.
I mean, think about the immense amounts of work that have to be performed so we can keep our Ford Expeditions humming along at 15 miles a gallon. First you have to dispatch teams of geologists to the far reaches of the globe and give them millions of dollars just to poke a few likely holes to try to find crude oil. Assuming you do find it, you then have to build the rigs, pipelines, refineries and tankers, and you have to pump the stuff, refine it and ship it to, say, your neighborhood Foodstop. That all this is accomplished for well under two dollars a gallon is quite incredible.
I mean, compare the amount of work it takes to get a gallon of gas across the globe and into your car to the amount of work it takes to produce a gallon of milk. Pretty much you feed the cow and start milking. Yet milk still costs a dollar a gallon more than gas. Last fall I lived in Boston, which politically borders on socialism--yet the city is content to let single mothers pay three dollars a gallon for milk for their kids. Unleaded climbs to $1.65, though, and we Americans collectively start screaming.
The reaction from our national leadership has been expectable--after all, the leadership is ultimately responsible to us--and we are the same people who use our minivans and full-sized pickups to drive our fat asses anywhere farther than our houses' lot-lines.
On our behalf, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has been touring OPEC nations in recent weeks to push higher production. Last Thursday Congress passed a bill allowing the administration to cut aid and military sales to OPEC nations that push up crude oil prices by organizing production cuts.
Although President Clinton has promised to veto that one, internationally our point has already been taken. Responding to allegations by members of Congress that Kuwait was ungrateful for American intervention in the Gulf War, Kuwaiti oil minister Sheik Saud Nasser al-Sabah said in an interview with the Times, "We would like to know what price do the Americans consider acceptable? We feel as if we are between a rock and a hard place."
We certainly considered a dollar a gallon quite acceptable, thank you--and while we enjoyed obscenely low gas prices last year, the global petroleum overproduction that ultimately dropped crude oil prices to $11 a barrel caused the Kuwaiti government to run two billion dollars debts on four billion dollar budgets in each of the past two years. Now that oil prices have corrected, as Sheik Saud argues, we cry foul--whereas we were quite happy to let economics take its course when low prices busted the Kuwaiti budget.
While we are quick to scatter blame around the globe for rising gas prices, it distresses me that none of our leadership raises the larger issue--we refuse to address our own oil dependence. We complain how much it costs to fill our SUV's tank--but instead of buying a smaller car or carpooling to work, we pay the extra gas money and continue on our merry way. Every year we become more dependent on an energy source that will run out--ultimately no amount of political intimidation will be able to wring more of it out of Arabia.
I shudder to think how we will deal with this. Sometime in the middle of this century--maybe even during most of our lifetimes--the oil will run out. Maybe just about that time the powers that be will conveniently trot out nuclear fusion reactors--my pet conspiracy theory is that someone's already figured out reactor-scale controlled nuclear fusion, but the oil companies bought the designs and are sitting on them until all the oil's been sold. Assuming I am not right about this (a very distinct possibility, I admit), we face the chance of having no viable energy source to replace petroleum.
In the meantime, though, I would hate for us to have to ponder such depressing matters. Let's just return to our previously scheduled gas price griping. We shouldn't have to pay $1.65 a gallon--after all, we're Americans.
