Gas Prices

Quit your damn whining.

No, seriously. I love how all the politicians in this country just suddenly realized the high gas prices. Where have they been for the past couple of years. I actually remember paying $0.87/gallon in 1998. That said, gas prices are still fricken low in this country compared to the rest of the world.

It costs me $12/day in gas just to get to and from work. That's up from $8/day when gas was $2/gallon. This works out to $240/month in gas vs. $160/month or for those of you who have trouble with math, $80/month. I'd argue that most working professionals can afford an extra $80/month without really sweating it. For this it means I eat out less or I don't buy some gadget that I don't really need anyway. People bitch and complain a lot, but I don't see them actually changing, not for $80/month. Heck, I could take the train to work. It would be less convenient, but I could do it. I could also carpool if I wanted to.

Obviously the people this really hurts are people who are right on the edge of making ends meet. People who have to drive to work because they live in a city (like, oh, Cincinnati) that has a useless public transit system. They can complain, they actually have a right to.

There are several groups of people who have no right what-so-ever to complain. The first group is anyone who voted for George W. Bush. The straight up fact of the matter is that if we hadn't invaded Iraq there would be more oil on the market and crude oil would be cheaper. If our relations with Iran were better crude oil would be cheaper. If we had the forces available to create peace in Sudan crude oil would be cheaper. If we had started pushing hard to develop alternative energy resources instead of arguing over ANWAR for the past six years demand on oil would be less and crude oil would be cheaper. This is just scratching the surface.

Another group that can't complain is almost everyone who drives an SUV or a large inefficient car in general. I'm excluding the few people out there that actually need an SUV because they either live somewhere where four wheel drive is a necessity or they actually have to haul around a lot of crap for some reason or another. I don't even have to explain this one other than to say I'd wager a guess that this group has a decent intersection with the first group.

The last group that I'm going to bring up is everyone who lives far away from where they work and can't use mass transit. I mean come on this is a no brainier I can't tell you how many SUV driving republicans I know are living in the suburbs in Cincinnati. Sorry, they just flat out deserve what they get. If you walk to work you don't have to worry about the cost of gas. If your kids walk to school you don't have to worry about the price of gas. See in the bay area you can live in Dublin or Livermore and ride BART to work, but when you live in Cincinnati you can't live in Deerfield and well ... get anywhere without a car. And before someone goes and says, "I can't live in downtown Cincinnati, there's crime and pollution and blah blah blah," you don't have to live in Cincinnati at all. Actually your life would be better off if you moved somewhere else, pretty much anywhere else.

Sorry, didn't mean to get into such an anti-Cincinnati rant. Cincinnati is just too easy to pick on and well, I hate the place.

Finally, let me give you a some, "where do we go from here," thoughts. First, there's pretty much nothing that can be done in the short term. Suspending the $0.18 federal gas tax is about as asinine an idea as anyone could come up with. So is suspending the purchasing of fuel for the strategic reserve. A "windfall" tax is also stupid. We shouldn't tax people who make money just because we don't like them. It goes against the idea of a free market economy. If we find that the big evil oil companies are colluding with one another to keep prices high then we already have laws to deal with that. In the long term we need to fund research in alternative fuel sources. I still think hybrid cars are of dubious value, particularly when we consider how much energy is spent making the batteries, etc. Diesel cars might be better, but then again anything that burns some sort of oil isn't solving the problem.

On a slightly related topic, whenever anyone talks about hydrogen as a fuel source, think nuclear. There are no natural sources of hydrogen on planet earth. To make hydrogen we either need to break down natural gas (in which case we'd be better off just burning the natural gas) or we need to get the hydrogen from electrolyzing water which requires more electricity than we get from burning hydrogen (otherwise we could build a really nice perpetual motion machine). The only way we're going to get the electricity to make the hydrogen that won't just increase the fossil fuel problem is nuclear power. Actually, one of the cooler byproducts of some of the new nuclear power plant designs is a built in hydrogen plant. Now I don't mean to say that the hydrogen/nuclear thing is bad. I'm on record as supporting nuclear power. I'm just saying don't let anyone fool you.