Blaming oil companies for high gas prices is like blaming farmers for high wheat prices -- totally misplaced. Oil companies coax it out of the ground and funnel it into your gas tank. They have nothing to do with setting the price. If they did, oil would have been expensive ten years ago, but it wasn't; it was cheap, too cheap. The presumed "efficiency" of the markets is gonna look like the retarded proposition that it was in about three months. But that's not the point.
Looking for someone to blame for high gas prices? Look in the mirror, and I direct that admonishment toward myself as much as toward you, reader.
Thirty years ago we had a warning: We experienced the pain of an energy crisis that any schoolkid at the time could have told you would eventually become permanent since there are limited supplies of oil in the ground.
Twenty-six years ago, we had a chance: We could have re-elected President Carter who would have instituted a sane energy policy based on efficiency (some call it "conservation" but I don't like that word because of its similarty to "conservative" and because of the negative images of tree-hugging, pie-in-the-sky, hippy-ninny libruls it evokes) and on the development of renewable energy resources. Every day, more energy reaches the surface of the earth in the form of sunlight than will be consumed in the entire short history of hydrocarbons. Gee, you'd think we would have wanted to tap into that, right? Well, it's too late now -- we burned up our seed corn in the tanks of our SUVs; any conversion to renewables now will be tiny in scale compared to what it could have been when we had reasonably priced energy inputs in the form of then-still-abundant oil.
Had Carter been re-elected in 1980, the current energy crisis would have been averted, our air would have been cleaner, our economy and bodies stronger. Instead, we chose to ignore the warning of the 1970s and gleefully let a Pollyanna actor lead us down the primrose path with promises of morning in America when it should have rightly been mourning in America since that point in time marks the genesis of our demise.
We (not we Kossacks, but we Americans) elected oil-and-weapons-man Bush Senior through his proxy, Reagan -- twice. Then we elected him again. After a few years of Clinton (essentially a smarter version of Reagan who did nothing substantial, as will soon become painfully clear) we elected his son. Instead of making our economy more efficient and moving forward technologically, we moved back. We built up our military so that nobody could refuse our mighty dollar and so that we could force oil out at the barrel of a Tomahawk missile, and we cheered mightily when those Tomahawks went into action in 1991, raining death and destruction on the people of Iraq so that we could continue to drive our big-ass cars and heat our big-ass houses and fill our big-ass stores with cheap crap brought from the Orient on big-ass ships.
Well, the chickens are coming home to roost in a big way, and -- you know what? -- we deserve it for being such a docile bunch of civic louts.
Me, personally, I commuted by bicycle until I got married. My wife and I share one four-cylinder car. I used to re-use everything, buy in bulk and generally try to keep my energy consumption to a minimum. Three years ago, when I bought my first car at the age of 33, I just sort of gave up and figured I might as well enjoy it while it lasted, 'cause I knew at that point that it wouldn't last long and why should everybody else have all the fun?
But I didn't do enough. I wasn't active enough. I let my family think me eccentric rather than trying to get them to see the light of the coming energy crash and to repent for the folly of their ways. I didn't get involved politically. All I did was ride my little bike and try to do my little part in averting the catastrophe. I blame myself for what's coming. I should have done more... but the truly sad part is that I did a HELL of a lot more than most of my friends and family who call themselves enlightened liberals.
We're in this mess because we were stupid -- period. We should have seen it coming. We should have done more.
Let me pull out my crystal ball here and show you what we can look forward to thanks to our stupidity:
By the end of this summer, gas will be well over four dollars a gallon, and there will be shortages.
This will completely screw up "the economy," pushing many people over the edge financially, not just because of the high price of gas but because of the high price of everything. Needless to say, it will represent the final nail in the coffin of the automobile industry, which fully deserves to die, though you have to pity the workers.
Social/economic stress will lead to frustration and anger which will culminate in intense crime and violence. This will build for several years, though it will be acute in some areas by the end of this year.
There will be a crackdown on this unrest.
You see where this is heading...
On the upside, at least we'll be able to empathize with all those millions of people we've bombed over the past 40 years. You see, most of the people killed by those bombs weren't killed by the bombs themselves, but indirectly by the social and infrastructural havoc in their wake. God forbid it degenerates into a full-scale state of war, but at the very least we're going to find out what it's like not to have job prospects, stores full of food, or clean water coming out of the tap. The energy crisis of the 1970s was the warning shot. This time, it's the real deal and we ain't gonna drill and strongarm our way out of it.
America in 2008 will be a VERY different place than it was in 1988. But it will be because of the decisions we collectively made back then, during "morning in America."
Ye shall reap as ye have sown, and we have sown very unwisely.