As the price of gasoline creeps towards $4 per gallon many “experts” have arrived to tell us many different reasons for why this is happening. The explanations range from the classic unrest in the Middle East, to conspiracies involving oil company fat cats, to my personal favorite; we have a lot of oil but it’s all in the middle of the country and we can’t figure out how to get it anywhere else!
All of these seem like good reasons but they are all far to complicated and down right wrong. The reason gasoline costs so much is because, brace yourself: we’ll pay it! What ever it costs, we’ll pay it.
Now I should also tell you now that $3.50 a gallon isn’t really that much compared to other parts of the civilized world. You could spend $4 or $5 per gallon in Europe without even trying.
And that’s where the solution to our problem lies. The rest of the world has long dealt with this issue by simply making small, fuel efficient cars available to whoever wants to buy them. There are herds of affordable cars that get between 30 and 60 MPG! And don’t think that you’ll be riding around in a cardboard box that uses a leaf blower for propulsion. Oh no, these fuel efficient cars are available with leather seats, sun roofs, and sat nab. Heck! They even have rear seats that slide back to make more leg room, and tumble forward to make more cargo room. We can’t even make a Dodge Challenger with a driver’s seat that slides forward to let people in the back.
I know that some people will say that these cars are diesel or that they’re to small to be safe on American roads, and they’d be half right. In fact the Honda civic HF of the 80s got 45 MPG on gasoline. But what’s wrong with diesel? And don’t tell me the cars are unsafe because they have trucks and SUVs in Europe and somehow they make it work.
So here we are driving our not really efficient hybrids, our inefficient average cars, and our utterly monstrous trucks that apparently have colanders for fuel tanks. I don’t mind gas guzzlers because my Jeep gets 17 MPG on a good day but if you have one, please don’t complain. No one made you buy that car or truck. We’re not communists, we’re capitalists, and that means we can buy what we want without having to worry about the future implications. Unfortunately it also means that we feel we can complain about what ever we want too, without coming up with a solution.