Americans to be rescued from high gas prices?
Saudi Arabia appears to be frightened of Americans’ desires to cut back on oil use and to start putting money into alternative forms of energy - so they plan to raise their output considerably next month.
It must be hard to balance one’s profits against one’s desire to keep customers hooked … I wonder if drug dealers feel that way?
It would be ironic if Ford retooled all those factories to build their more-efficient Eurocars only to find that gas was cheap again and Americans were back to big SUVs.
It would also be sad if Americans proved to think so short-term… I can almost understand forgetting the 1970s, but forgetting the Spring of 2008 by the Fall of 2008 would be pushing it.
When one thinks about it, the best thing OPEC can do is vary supply now and then, just often enough to get people to invest in fuel efficiency, then make it an unworthy investment. That would give fuel efficiency a bad name for businessmen, so that if the price did slowly, slowly climb up (like cooking a frog), few would be willing to put their capital into fuel efficiency.
I’m probably assigning more intent into this than is merited. However, as Americans, we are definitely hooked on cheap energy. No children’s party is complete with plastic bags filled with plastic rubbish designed to be thrown away after a day or two. Americans, unlike Europeans, still heavily favor the top-loading washers that use three times the water and quite a bit more energy; and precious few people dry off their towels on clotheslines. Again, not to be redundant, but lots of people and business don’t even use the sleep features of their computers (or the “shut down” feature). People leave their SUVs running while they drop off their kids at school, for ten or fifteen minutes… on nice days as well as days when one can pretend that they need to keep the car warm.
Nobody listens when I say that energy is still cheap — though a lot of people are seeing their net income run into deficits with the change in gas prices. Still, power is so cheap that many people leave their lights on 24/7, along with their computers and air conditioners. It’s so cheap companies leave the lights on in their buildings and air condition massive atriums to 65 degrees. It’s so cheap people are still buying track lighting with halogen bulbs. It’s so cheap people don’t think about power costs when they buy a TV, ignore the energy usage labels on their refrigerators and air conditioners, and leave the a/c on overnight instead of opening windows, even in rooms they’re not using.
Power is expensive enough to complain about (and to really hurt people whose incomes are finely balanced with their expenses), but not so expensive that the large majority of people will use less, even when it won’t cost them anything but a few seconds to shut a light or put on their energy saver or shut their computer or spend $20 on a slightly better a/c unit or $100 more on a refrigerator … though many will gladly spend more than that to get their precious stainless steel refrigerator skin.
In a real energy crisis, we would all find ways to economize, just as Californians during a drought slash their water usage (admittedly a small percentage cheat.) Industry would find ways to save energy, just as automakers are now increasing their wind tunnel time and making stylists live with minor changes for the sake of aerodynamics (or, at Toyota, major changes for the sake of aerodynamics). There’s lots of things we can all do and when the price is really high, we’ll do all those things.
Or, of course, we’ll find people to blame, get all angry, and make ExxonMobil and the leaders of a small number of oil-rich countries very happy and very amused. But I’m hoping the future holds the America of FDR, George Washington, and Thomas Paine, and not the America of Senator McCarthy, Henry Ford, and A. Mitchell Palmer.