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The main thing people seem to be complaining about these days is the high price of gasoline. A year ago, it was less than a dollar a gallon, and now it's pushing $2 or more in some places.
The wise and learned among us point out that, when you adjust for inflation, gasoline is almost as cheap as it was in 1870, when it was poured down the creek because it was a useless by-product of distilling crude oil for valuable kerosene.
This doesn't seem like much consolation, and so our politicians have been offering other solutions. Or so it sounds, though I'm not sure what our Sen. Ben Campbell is really trying to solve when he implies that gasoline would be a lot cheaper if we just rounded up all the environmentalists and deported them.
That isn't quite how he puts it, of course.
Campbell has said that gasoline prices would be lower if there were more domestic production, and one reason we can't increase domestic production is that we can't drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on account of political opposition from those pesky environmentalists.
Further, he argues that environmentalists have put so many restrictions on drilling elsewhere in the United States that it just plain costs too much to develop domestic petroleum production.
So, the Campbell solution appears to be to get rid of environmentalists, and then we'll be able to produce a lot more oil in the United States, and prices will go down, and everybody will be happy.
Much as I hate to deprive a politician of a convenient whipping boy, this just doesn't add up.
For one thing, even if there were no environmental restrictions on oil exploration and recovery in this country, other countries could still produce oil more cheaply.
Go back to the 1950s, when there were no real environmental restrictions on oil drilling in this country. Foreign nations could still produce oil more cheaply -- theirs was so cheap that the Eisenhower administration imposed import quotas to protect domestic producers.
That is, foreign oil is generally cheaper than domestic oil, even if we got rid of the environmental restrictions on domestic production. The cheap and easy stuff in the U.S. has already been found, while the sands of Araby sit atop vast proven reserves that are relatively easy to tap.
For another, the price of oil has a lot more to do with demand than it has to do with the cost of production.
Gas was cheap a year ago because demand was down -- Asian economies were hurting, so people there didn't drive as much. Now those economies are recovering, so demand is up, and so are prices.
Or do you really think that the cost of production has doubled in the past year? That ranks right up there with believing that horse hairs, if left in water overnight, will turn into snakes.
Demand continues to grow in the United States because people buy bigger vehicles, like the Spewt I have, that get worse gas mileage than small cars. It also grows because most Americans live in suburbs that have been fabricated to encourage gasoline consumption.
Where the nearest store is several miles distant, as are schools and churches and soccer-practice fields, and the workplace is a half-hour drive on a good day, then there isn't much choice but to burn gasoline on an extravagant scale.
This is a form of social engineering, designed to create a society dependent on petroleum, rather than shoe leather, bicycles or streetcars.
Now if environmentalists were truly trying to increase gasoline prices, they'd be trying to increase demand, and they'd support even more suburban sprawl.
But instead, most environmentalists lobby to reduce
demand by advocating a reduction in sprawl. The new
urbanism
is all about building neighborhoods where the
usual tasks and errands of life can be accomplished without
driving.
Reducing demand for gasoline, by developing real-estate in a sensible way, would reduce the price more reliably than the full-bore exploration and drilling in the U.S. that Campbell apparently supports.
So does Campbell really want gasoline to be cheaper? Or was he just getting in a cheap shot?
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