Price of Gas V. the Cost

An email petition recently caught my attention. "Let's get together and organize a boycott of the big oil companies until they bring the price of gas down to $1.50. a gallon." I responded but I didn’t sign or forward it. In spite of the obvious futility of the effort, the idea behind it struck me as a prime example of a huge mental/cultural blind spot. An inability to “connect the dots,” a failure to imagine the “big picture,” a denial of personal responsibility at the levels of both thought and action.

The fact that environment-friendly, otherwise intelligent folks can complain about the price of gas without contemplating the cost of a gasoline-addicted culture indicates a massive case - maybe even an epidemic - of denial.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, gasoline is cheaper now (mid 2007) than it was during the 1970s oil "crisis." If the price of gasoline reflected its real cost, we would be paying $10. to $15. dollars a gallon right now; and if we understood the forces behind the cost, we wouldn’t be stupid enough to complain. If we really participated in a “free market” the government would not be subsidizing the oil industry, the price would BEGIN to reflect the real cost, and real market forces would already have curtailed some fraction of global warming. But our shared image of a free market is a sham; it pretends to be a model for “freedom” while it corrupts real liberty; it has intentionally been confused with “democracy” so we can (try to) force global corporatization down the throats of the rest of the world.

If the price at the pump reflected the “collateral” damage (what economists call “external costs,” i.e. costs they don’t have to worry about … yet) – cost to the environment, cost to public health, cost of military interventions in oil-rich countries, cost to future generations, cost to a culture now addicted to oil – the price of a gallon of gas would be $50. or more.

For years it has been widely know but seldom repeated or discussed: the military cost of defending the middle east oil fields is now and has always been greater than the value of the oil. But that cost is not included in the price. If that cost had been invested – say in the 1970s - in sustainable energy we would by now be liberated: from the high monetary costs of energy, from the moral and monetary costs of a criminal war, and at least in part from the oncoming ravages of global warming.

Even at $20. a gallon, there would be far fewer hideous Hummers on the road. Perhaps there would be fewer ads pushing pleasure driving and ego-based car culture. But that implies a new way of thinking about it.

Connecting the Dots
In one hand we hold the dollars or the credit card that we use to buy the gas. In the other hand we hold the newspaper or remote that bring us images of the environmental reality. Is it so difficult for us to see that these two things, pulling us by each hand into very different possible futures, are directly related to each other?

John Ikerd and others have commented on the "high cost of cheap meat." Same idea. In this case the “external costs” include (again, always) environmental damage, also heart disease, obesity and a whole set of economic distortions in the global food market. Are meat and fuel, the violence they require and the unintended costs they incur, connected at other levels of our thinking? Should they be?

The number of “crises” we face seems to multiply every week. Every reasonable expert and screaming alarmist asserts we must “think differently” about this one, the current or next crisis. But no one questions the kind of thinking that brought on the crisis. No one proposes what the “different thinking” would look or feel like.