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For once, it was easy to participate in a protest. For a fortnight before last week, amid all the e-mail offers to refinance my house or improve my sex life with V!@gr@, there were messages urging me not to buy gasoline on May 19.
If every American avoided the pumps on that day, the
missives explained, then the oil companies would choke
on their stockpiles,
and the price would drop from its
current record level of more than $2 per gallon.
We don't drive much here. I work at home, as does Martha, except when she works part-time at the local library, a three-block stroll. Most necessities of life, like groceries and hardware, are within walking distance, and Salida has pleasant tree-lined streets with wide sidewalks.
Even so, we have two cars. The Blazer was last filled on March 11, the Geo Prizm on April 2, and the only gasoline purchase since then was three gallons for the lawn-mower can.
That can had at least two gallons in it when I retrieved it from winter storage to prepare for another summer of mowing. Gasoline goes stale, and that lawn-mower is picky about its fuel. Just in case the gas had gone bad, I didn't want to pour it into a vehicle's tank.
My solution probably violated half a dozen laws. Between my woodpile and the neighbor's shed is a foot-wide gap where an elm tree insists on growing. We take turns trying to eliminate it. I've cut it back to a stump and smashed the stump with a spud bar. It came back. He got to the base one year with a drill and packed rock salt in the holes. It came back. This spring I doused it with the leftover gasoline; the leaves are brown and dead, but I suspect that it is easier to find Osama bin Laden than it is to kill an elm. When they find life on Mars, it will be an elm.
At any rate, May 19 was pretty much like any other day here in the gasoline department; I didn't buy any. And even if millions of other Americans followed the same sensible course, it didn't matter. Overall consumption remained steady, and the price continued to rise.
But is the price really that high? Adjusted for
inflation, it's lower than in 1980, when it was $2.91 a
gallon in current dollars. That was during the
administration of President Jimmy Carter, who promoted
energy plans (the moral equivalent of war
) with
allocation systems and subsidized synfuels development.
His successor, Ronald Reagan, was smart enough not to have a national energy plan. The market worked, and through the administrations of George Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton (no national energy plans there, either), prices were relatively low and supply was abundant.
Just why millions of American voters believed Bush the Younger when he said we needed a national energy plan, when relatively free markets had been operating properly, is one of those abiding mysteries. The plan involves immense subsidies and tax breaks (some estimates run as high as $20 billion a year) for the petroleum industry, but lower prices do not result. Thus we get to pay twice; once at tax time and again at the pump.
Even so, the oil market still works mostly by supply and demand, and since World War II, America has been constructed to increase the demand for gasoline. We've built sprawling suburbs that are miles from places where people work and shop, so it's impossible to walk or bicycle to the job or the market. We started shopping at big-box stores that require auto trips, and driving the kids to school and soccer practice.
In 1960, the average American burned 294 gallons of gasoline; in 2002, it was 428. It is possible to have a high standard of living without burning so much gasoline; on average the Germans live at least as well as we do, and burn only 116 gallons apiece each year.
We do need to consider the benefits of our consumption level, though. The more oil we burn, the more we import, and thus more money goes to some countries that support or sponsor terrorism, which means we need to spend more on national defense, and hey, those defense contracts are good for our economy.
Plus, all that driving makes us fat and flabby, which gives gyms and fitness centers a big market that wouldn't exist if people walked more. Throw in the driving-related employment of ambulance drivers and tow-truck operators, as well as the insurance we're forced to buy, along with the related medical expenses, and you've got a major economic force that makes increased gasoline consumption an integral part of the modern American way.
A one-day boycott made no difference, and never will. The oil industry doesn't care whether you fill up on May 18 or May 20, just as long as you keep filling your tank frequently. And in the past 60 years, America has been built to insure that you'll visit those gas pumps often.
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