High Oil Prices in the us are Vitally Important – Yes
High oil prices are necessary to prevent them from quickly becoming even higher in the future, which could cause a depression making the one that started in 1929 seem not so great.
Two years ago, the price of gasoline in the U.S. hit a new record high, $3.00.
Today the record is $4.10, 36% higher, yet people continue to drive alone to work when they could car pool, trucks are still bought by city folk to promote image, and SUVs that nobody needs continue to sell.
Americans who travel to foreign countries often remark that there aren't fast food restaurants on every city corner. Supermarkets are few and far between. Foods eaten daily here are available only in season and they cost far more than at home. The locals walk, ride bicycles, use bus or light rail. Large cars, trucks and SUVs are not often seen.
This isn't because people elsewhere don't want the convenience and plenty that Americans enjoy. Few can afford to drive a car often or at all to work, shop or socialize. They pay about twice as much per gallon for heating oil and gasoline, over $9.00 a gallon in European countries. Natural gas and electricity cost three to four times as much.
If there isn't soon an effective transition in our country from our dependence on driving to get where we need or want to go to public transportation, we won't any longer enjoy a standard of living anywhere near to the one to which we have become accustomed.
If an effective transition isn't made soon, more and more of the businesses whose customers who live distances they won't walk from the businesses will close, and even more jobs will be permanently lost. Not a coincidence is that Starbucks is planning to close six times the number of stores they planned on closing a year ago. Don't be surprised when McDonald's, Burger King and other convenience food restaurants announced similar decisions. Soon, delivering a pizza is going to cost more than making one. When corporations can't afford to buy TV advertising and spectators can't afford to drive to sporting and entertainment events, the opportunities we now have to enjoy our free time will be history.
Gasoline will cost more than $20 a gallon some day. The law of supply and demand makes this certain. There is just so much oil in the earth. Even if the same amount pumped out today could be pumped out forever, the increase in the world population and increasing number of motorized vehicles on the roads in China, India, Russia and South America mean the demand for oil will be increasingly higher.
This all sounds far fetched, like Chicken Little warning that the sky is falling, doesn't it?
Fifty years ago a gallon of gasoline cost 24 cents. Who then would have believed a gallon would cost $4.10 in 2008, 17 times more. Even I can't comprehend $70 a gallon gasoline in 2058.
If market forces and oil speculators are left to dictate the price of oil, there will be greater suffering than has been caused by the recent price increases and our country could be impoverished.
Chicken Little again, you think?
How many people foresaw how the world impoverished as it was from 1929 until World War II?
We don't have to be at the mercy of the market or speculators.
A $1.00 to $2.00 surcharge could be added to the price of a gallon of gasoline. There could be a 50-cent per pound surcharge on any new vehicle that weighs more than 700 pounds per passenger seat less than the average medium-size, five-passenger car weight. There could be a surcharge on heating oil and electricity generated using fossil fuel.
The surcharge revenue could fund an orderly transition from car dependence to car independence. Public transportation could be free-of-charge. Rail lines unused because their use is not now cost-effective could be opened to make more viable and popular personal train travel and freight transportation. Destinations reached in reasonable time by car could be reached in the same or less time using new bus and light rail services. The redevelopment of neighborhood stores to which people could walk and shop could be promoted as alternatives to big box stores and shopping malls by subsidies.
The amount of oil used in North America can be less than the amount pumped from beneath it. When this is achieved, jobs can be as secure and happiness can be pursued in America like in the 1950s, before cars became the dominant means of transportation because oil prices weren't high.
