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Ken Del Rossi |
I have some experience
with the politics of oil.
I was a service station attendant for two years during
high school, which in those days required one to leave
the warmth of the cabin where the cigarettes and sodas
were housed and walk out onto the pavement where customers
waited in their heated cars for you to fill their tanks.
Gas was about 65 cents a gallon back then (in the
mid-1970s) and people complained about it constantly.
One of my favorite laments came from an elderly man
whose cranky disposition didn’t require inflation
to get him going, but who never failed to share his
opinion on the world oil market. “I remember when
gas was 15 cents!” he would exclaim, as if I had
never heard this before. “I could fill my tank
for 3 dollars!” That assertion seemed dubious
even to a naive high school kid given that his gas tank
was roughly the size of an armchair. His car didn’t
resemble a car so much as a boat, and was such a gas
hog that by the time Mr. Unhappy drove off the lot he
was already down a gallon.
But his attitude about cheap gas was common. It was
an entitlement for Americans, a birthright almost. Ever
since World War II ended, we had guzzled the stuff voraciously,
like Vikings taking to mead, and transformed U.S. society
from one of mass transport and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods
to a suburbanized car country.
The first wake-up call had come with the 1973 oil
embargo when OPEC nations shut off the spigot to the
United States and European allies who had supported
Israel in the Yom Kippur war. The price of a gallon
shot up about 20 cents and stayed there even after the
embargo ended the next year.
The unreliability of foreign oil produced legislation
designed to promote conservation. Congress passed a
bill mandating speed limits of 55 miles per hour on
the nation’s highways, and I can remember my dad,
who taught a class titled Man and His Environment, telling
us what a good thing this was. But I was 15 and had
just received my learner’s permit. The 55 mph
barrier was spoiling my fun. I had bought into the notion
that we deserved our big rumbling cars, and plenty of
open roads to run them fast. Just my luck, I thought,
the gas runs out the minute I get my license.
Now I know better.
Sitting at the table with a panel of Stanford faculty
recently, I realized again the hard lessons we should
have learned a long time ago. Their analysis (see article) is both a primer on the geopolitical effects
of oil and a dose of cold water on the idea that the
United States can or should aspire to “energy
independence.”
This is tough medicine to swallow. I love driving,
and those beautiful Western highways still beckon seductively.
But until I can afford a car that runs on electricity,
or hydrogen, or leftover Pop Tarts, my appetites will
adjust.
My bicycle never looked so good.
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