This whole energy crisis has got me thinking. Oil prices are through the roof, McCain flip-flops daily on energy policy (first he said offshore drilling was a temporary and non-sustainable solution, and now he's urging states to support drilling off their coasts), and both Bush and Obama wish they could use a magic wand to bring down gas prices.
This is a multi-dimensional problem with no near term viable solutions. The energy problems are somewhat related to how friggin hot it is predicted to be this summer, by the end of which the north pole will have melted. This is to be taken with a grain of salt, according to a journalist at the Times:
Given the unpredictable short-term dynamics up there, which make the ice subject to vagaries of Siberian winds and a mix of currents, a lot of polar ice experts tell me it’s pretty much impossible to make such a prediction with high confidence.On the other hand, Fox felt that it was okay to simply cite other news sources without doing any fact checking for themselves.
For the first time in recorded history, the North Pole may be free of ice this summer, according to a published report Friday.While I hate to spoil our good name by giving them any traffic, I just wanted to point out that the Times journalist did more research for a blog post than Fox did for a regular news piece, based solely on the number of links (17 vs 4). In all honesty, they might do better by just redirecting foxnews.com to something else.
Anyway, call me unconscientious, but I'm not really going to focus on the environmental part, because (i) I'm not a hippie, and (ii) we probably won't be around to deal with this problem. (I'm not saying I'm going to start driving an SUV anytime soon. With all the off-road terrain I need to deal with in the eastern US, I'm not sure if this is a good pledge to make, but I'll deal.)
The second part is the obvious issue of how this is hurting the American economy while it is in recession. In reality, Americans have been paying waaayy less for gas in comparison to other countries. So how have people abroad been coping with this problem, and now that domestic prices are approching the international mean, why are the effects on the American economy so much more drastic? There are several reasons I can think of, none of which seem to have come up in any of the campaigns of people who can actually do anything about this, mostly because of distractions like stupid people who correlate wearing a flag pin with being patriotic.
Do Americans drive too much? Have we consumed large amounts of fossil fuels in recent decades just because we could? A recent poll by Gallup shows that 31% of respondents are either limiting travel, driving less or going out less. This suggests that a sizeable portion of a family's transportation costs may be recreational. However, although I don't have the data to support this, I'm not sure we go on vacation any more or less than people in other developed countries. I think we're now forced to be in a position to conserve, which is in itself good, but we don't have the same processes in place as other countries because of our (till now) abundant supply of inexpensive gas.
Consider solutions adopted by the rest of the wor. In 2003, London started a congestion charge for vehicular traffic in the center of the city. According to the BBC, this decision, although initially unpopular, has paid off:
[T]he volume of traffic entering the congestion charge zone has fallen by over a fifth - with bus use increasing by 15%. Meanwhile the £125m extra cash generated by the charge (after its upkeep costs) goes straight back into public transport.Taxing roads has the same effect on transit behavior as taxing gas. If U.S. cities had imposed restrictions on where you could or couldn't drive and how expensive it was as a means of transport, the effect of today's gas prices would be less significant (NY has accomplished this by its restricted supply of incredibly expensive parking spots). Although the same article says that Miami, Minneapolis, Seattle and San Franciso are looking to follow London's example, which is great, this is still not the root problem.
The problem is that the U.S. has simply not put enough effort into building mass transit systems as the rest of the world. That's why in that same poll I cited earlier, only 1% of respondents say they are using public transport more. To get a rough idea of how disparate the situation is in the U.S. compared to other countries, check out this data on the modal share of rail transport.
Yeah, that's right. We're last. A measly 0.3% of U.S. transport is by rail. Japan leads the pack with 27%. I'm not saying everybody should travel by train, but in the U.S. people don't even have the option to. The situation with buses, etc. is probably similar, but I don't have the data.
Who's fault is this? FDR did such a good job making our vast network of interstate highways that it squashed development of other modes of transport. We're in recession again, let's get some government money into improving transport collectively rather than sending people $600 to cover half their rent for a month. Also, since North Korea has officially been removed from the axis of evil, maybe we can scale back the global search for WMDs.
Back to China. Ted Koppel on TDS said that China is putting 25,000 new cars on its roads a day, or 9 million a year. Soon they're going to overtake the US, and then we're really going to have it out for the oil in the middle east. We are in trouble unless we start doing something soon.
Please weigh in.
P.S: I fucking hate blogger. I have a 24" screen in front of me and it decides to make the text box big enough to send a fucking IM. And there's no way to easily add images/data where you want, so I had to link to a spreadsheet. Super gay. Blogger, i.e. Google, learn something from Wordpress.
