WPCNR MR. & MRS. & MS. WHITE PLAINS VOICE. August 19, 2005: In response to the "gold that burns" that comes from White Plains gasoline pumps these days, longtime WPCNR reader comments on a rational approach to the rising gasoline price gouge.

John,

I read your brief on rising gasoline prices with interest.
Most of your readers likely drive once to work, and once back from
work, and fit in some errands and leisure around that.
I drive all day to many places, putting miles on my car at about
3x the average rate.  It's how I make my living; all I can do is
optimize my routes - I can't drive any less, even if I wanted to.
The rapidly rising price of gasoline has definitely put a crimp in my
wallet, and raised my ire.

(more)

Who am I angry at?  Who do I blame for these high prices? It's easy to say, "It's George Bush's Fault, why won't he do something?"  but let me takethe high road, and attack some different, more amorphous targets for us.

We can definitely blame OPEC, for they didn't invest in new exploration and infrastructure during the late 90's.  They're pumping and refining at capacity now, but could be producing more if they had invested for the future when oil was closer to $10 a barrel. We can also partly blame the UN, the Clinton and the first Bush  administration for disallowing Iraq's oil to sell on the open market until the famously  corrupt "oil for food" in the late 1990s. 

Meanwhile, Saddam still got rich and next to no money went to improve Iraq's oil infrastructure, which is so dilapidated, even the best Halliburton and Bechtel guys are afraid to modernize for fear of causing an explosion.

We can blame ourselves, as voters and consumers. As voters, we didn't elect representatives who demanded higher fuel standards from the car companies.  We also elected reps at the state level who jacked up the gasoline taxes.
Cross the border into New Jersey, and the pump prices speak for themselves.

As voters, we disallowed the construction of new refining capacity here in the US - no new refineries here in the US
in about 20 years due to "NIMBY."  Yes, crude oil and refined gasoline move up or down in price together. But refining bottlenecks make the supply chains more tenuous than need be, and prices go up even more.

As voters, we didn't push for legislation to force high minimum r-values on homebuilders.  I see attics in  brand-new or nearly brand-new homes in our area all the time and I'm disgusted by the lack of energy-saving insulation in those empty spaces. As voters, we keep voting down the exploration of areas that might be "environmentally sensitive" despite the fact that drilling is safer and more productive than ever.  We have environmental laws to keep drilling
sites clean and can easily enact tougher ones if need be.

As consumers, we didn't make hay while the sun shone. We didn't build our new homes with adequate insulation (no one says you can't "exceed code" for energy efficiency), or replace leaky windows and doors with ones that are thermally tight.

We also bought outrageously wasteful sport-utility (and other) vehicles, even though features such as cargo room and all wheel drive were available in less profligate autos.

As humans, we can also blame ourselves for... making more humans.  There's only so much crude to be taken and refined, but we keep making more consumers each year.  Basic supply and demand tells us that this is a natural formula for higher prices.

Our entire infrastructure, lifestyle and economy were shaped by this temporary (in epochal terms) bounty of crude.
Nearly all of us, to a one, participated in the sick and massive collective delusion that this stuff would always be there for us, awaiting relatively easy siphoning out of the ground. And we're still only just starting to wake up.

So, the next time you write a letter to your Congressman, Senator or President asking for them to "do something about high gas prices" please make sure to ask them to:

1. Force OPEC to build more wells and refineries
2. Force everyone to trade their SUV and guzzling sedan in for a hybrid
3. Force every homeowner to insulate their home
4. Tell the world to stop making babies for a couple of years
5. Convert the industrial and transportation base of America to one that uses only renewable resources
6. Heavily subsidize renewable resources, to the tune of raising taxes to the point at which they choke the lifeblood
     out of our economy.

Winter's coming, so write that letter to our leaders now, so they can get a crackerjack start on the list...

Aaron Woodin