High Gas prices – who really cares?
seriously – do you? is it truly affecting you? you may be angry to see the price over $3. you may rail against the gas companies for posting record profits based on oil speculation, but do you truly care? has it changed any habits? i haven’t been a driver/regular commuter for over 2 yrs now, so i’m not the one paying at the pump, my better half is. yes, it’s expensive, but we have a diesel, so our trips are few and far between. we just did a 2200 mile roadtrip on 3 1/2 tanks of diesel.
my point is – what is it going to take to get us to really care about this issue? the talking heads made this a huge story last year and the year before when prices spiked. did we as americans actually stop buying gas? no. did we stop buying fuel inefficient vehicles? no.
what will it take to make you think about your gas consumption in your car? if not high prices – $5/gal; $7.50?; long lines?; rationing? i’m not judging here, just wondering what other people think.
I do both-I ride the bus to and from work, but I have a car for the rest of the time-I can go to the store or do something on weekends, so I don’t hit the pump as hard as some do-like my husband who has to drive to Vancouver every day (we’ve tried looking at mass transit options and it just doesn’t work).
I started riding the bus because a) paying for parking downtown is stupidly expensive, b) I live on a good bus line, and c) my company pays for my pass. So commute for free, or pay stupid amounts of money for gas AND parking. No thanks.
i don’t worry too much about high gas prices– in fact, I wish they were higher if the money was going to the right place, like, say, a $1 tax on gas, rather than just lining corporate pockets. the US has the cheapest prices for gas in the world (see the UK, where gas is about to hit roughly $6 bucks a gallon).
while i know that some people HAVE to drive, and high gas prices affects commuters, the higher gas prices are, the more likely people are to actually think about whether they need to get in their car or if there’s another way to get where they need to go. if only it weren’t political death, someone should propose a gas tax right now.
I don’t worry about it ’cause I use FlexCar; gas is included in the price (and the fleet is made up of gas-efficient cars like the Honda Civic Hybrid, for example.)
But if my hourly FlexCar rate goes up, I’ll probably cut back.
If you think about it at all, it’s easy to understand why higher prices don’t mean that people buy less gas. Gas demand is inelastic, because it is easier to absorb additional cost there than anywhere else that would affect demand.
How can you use less gas? You can move your home and your work closer together–but that can be pretty expensive, and takes a lot of time, so it’s not a technique you can quickly switch to when gas suddenly rises. You can switch to mass transit, but if we all do that there will still be plenty gas demand, it’s just going to be used by the bus instead of your car. You could negotate a work-from-home or compressed work-week (say, three 12-hour days plus a slight pay cut) so you commuted less often, but again, that’s not a quick solution and it has its drawbacks (pay cut!)
You could have your groceries delivered (costs a bit more, and that’s just using gas in a delivery truck instead of your car). You’d certainly cut back on recreational use: no long drives up the Gorge or to the beach on the weekends. (Which impacts tourism in those areas, and might cause job losses.)
The fact is, most people have arranged their lives, made their choices about where to work and live, and how to spend their time, with car use in mind, and it’s not easy to make substitutions for those decisions.
snippy, you make some good points. so, with that in mind, do people make some choices? i think 1 person or 2 not taking a trip to the gorge won’t make the dire impact on the econompy you profess, but would make an impact on that person’s cashflow. that was my question – what will it take for individuals or families to change their lifestyle with regards to fuel consumption.
there’s another aspect of this- we use fuel everywhere as you point out, so cost of everything will begin to rise as a result of higher prices. will it affect spending? once again, in the immediate, i don’t think so. airlines are charging more, but people are still flying and not just the rich. ups is charging a fuel surcharge, but people are still shipping. what does it take for one to rethink everyday choices?
for me, i can’t think of a barrier with gas/diesel where i would be seriously affected, but i also think of how expensive it was to heat my house this winter and make the connection. i don’t drive, but high fuel pricess affects me in other ways and it affects my pocketbook even more.
Soon higher gas prices (which are, of course, higher transportation prices) will affect groceries and durable goods. They’re already affecting air travel, as you suggest, and Tri-Met is thinking about another fare increase (because their cost of gas is going up, too).
We’re lucky here, because we could buy mostly or possibly all locally-produced groceries and that might mean lower prices (since less gas is used to truck them a shorter distance).
I think gas would have to be at least double where it is now to have any noticable effect on the life choices of people in the US. I already live in an urban neighborhood in SE where I could walk to most stores and professionals if I had to, and take public transit (have done for most of my adult life, although I don’t right now) to a job that is less than 4 miles away.
But what other choices can we make? All the environmentally-friendly ones: reduce, reuse recycle. In the short term, buying new adds to the fuel problem, so wear your clothes a couple more years instead of buying this season’s popular items; same with appliances and all other consumer goods. Use your old, slow computer–you’re not going to be buying the newest games that require the fastest processors anyway. And so on. All of these choices reduce our reliance on fuel (of any kind).
In the long term, yes, give up living on a big property in the country and commuting 45 miles or more round trip every day. Either find a way to work at home or move closer to where work is–poor people have to do this anyway.
Having cars has given us a lot of choices we didn’t have before–I can get my hair done across town instead of at the neighborhood beauty shop, etc. It’s really hard to give that up.
I think we are all pretty much at the mercy of OPEC and the middle east where most of the worlds crude comes from, and they ramble about the cost of production and so on… then get in there frikken Merc and go home to their Gold plated mansions, so in actual fact we are paying the high prices (even here in Australia) because we are at the mercy of countries that don’t like us and charge what they want when they want, and increase anb decrease production as they choose
And do we know that Cars now run on water, air, methane, and a number of other things that are completely renewable but hey why don’t we have mass production (ASK any Oil company to make less oil cause we don’t need it, we have something else) and thats my point, OIL controls the economies of the biggest and best nations of the world including yours and mine.
Something to think about….
We land on the moon but we can’t live without oil
We can cure the some of the most hardy diseases but can’t live without oil
We can design the most amazing machines and computers to do some of the most amazing things, but we can’t live without oil.
I Think we don’t want to live without it, otherwise we would find a way and do it.
look im a 12 year old
and i care because if my parents pay for gas how is moi gunna get anything
Gas prices are stupidly high. There is no excuse for it. However I have found a way to save and even make money with the high gas prices. Give it a look see it really works. http://www.4ecorp.ws/kmac1234/