OH, THOSE GAS PRICES! (OR MAYBE THEY'LL SAVE THE SIERRA)

Posted by Bill Pieper

August 26, 2008

Am I the only one nostalgic for $4.50 a gallon gas? Kind of feels like it, but by instinct I’m a contrarian about enough in life that it’s a familiar place to be. Not that I enjoyed having to visit the ATM both before and after every fill-up of my trusty VW New Beetle earlier this summer. I mean the thing gets 32 mpg, which used to sound good, but let’s be honest. That’s only about half what current automotive technology will support, which itself won’t cure our addiction to imported oil, and I still spew more carbon into the atmosphere than anyone is entitled to be happy about.

Yet with gas at $4.50, and at the time $4.50 looked like a waystation on the road to $5.00 and beyond, you could start to smell change in the air along with all the smog. Used car lots got clogged with Hummers and other SUVs, public transit ridership soared, a new ripple of zeal swept through the alternative energy industries, miles driven per person slumped and our government sounded as though it might get serious about ceasing to subsidize rampant consumption of fossil fuels.

Much there to like, of course, but it’s nowhere near the whole story. Because embedded in "cheap" gas are a host of current land-use issues and abuses. Want the fastest way to damp down urban sprawl? Expensive gas. Want to see more farmland preserved from development? Expensive gas. Want to see inner cities truly renewed and thriving? Expensive gas. Want to see less impact on precious natural environments like our beloved Sierra Nevada from motorized recreation, second-home subdivisions and air pollution? Same answer. And the same for the pleasure of fresher fruits and vegetables grown close to home and for restoring local enterprises and manufacturing by upping the cost of globalization. Not to mention the reduced carbon emissions that go with all this.

So yeah, I was pinched at the pump when we were at $4.50, and I had to cut back and rethink my lifestyle to balance the family budget. And the idea of $5.00 or beyond was scary. But there’s an awful lot on the list of things $5.00 gas would buy that have real value and would be worth paying for.

It galls me that the oil companies, perversely, make record profits whenever the cost of their primary raw material jumps, because they don’t create those side benefits I’ve described and don’t deserve to get paid for them. But when you live in a country whose leadership is too in thrall to big oil to enact any sort of carbon tax or flex-tax to stabilize the price of gas at a rational level—a level that would bring about those benefits as well as finance R&D for energy from cleaner sources a-la France or Denmark—then you’ve got to take the bad with the good.

For my part, I’d like to have some of that good. And if gas were to stabilize at a seemingly "high" price and hold there for decade, I and many others could adjust, and adjust better than we do to the rapid-fire ups and downs of world tensions in the producing countries and a speculator-driven market. So now, as gas prices trend toward $3.80 or thereabouts, I’m nostalgic. There’s too much wastefulness and too many unintended consequences when gas is artificially cheap relative to the true costs of burning it.

Bill Pieper is the author of Belonging – A Novel of Downieville and California's Modern Gold Country (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006) Please see his profile on this site or visit his webpage at http://stores.ebay.com/bpbooks