I'm a child of the 1970s. One of my major memories of the end of that decade is waiting on long gas lines with my father on Saturday mornings so he could fill up his big old Ford. He would get me up at dawn's early light (well to me) and, around 7AM, we'd drive to a bagel shop about a block or two from the gas station. He would drop me off with some money and continue to drive to the gas station to await its opening at 8AM. At the bagel shop, I'd buy us a couple of bagels, coffee for him, milk for me, and the newspaper and then walk back to the gas station where he was already parked on line (and sometimes not the first driver). I think he liked it better when we were forced to wait on the street as he was able to have a smoke that way. Anyway, we'd eat our breakfast, fending myself from my dad trying to take part of my bagel (he was a big guy) and then I'd wait for him to finish the paper (if I remembered I brought a few comic books with me) and we sat. And sat. And sat. Sometimes we talked, but age 10 or 11 I wasn't a great conversationalist, aside from comic books, baseball cards or the Mets and Yankees. All for the privilege of paying an outrageous $1 or so per gallon of gas. By time we left, at around 8:10, the gas line was already circling the block, with cars burning up their gas just waiting to get more. This process repeated itself among the several gas stations in our neighborhood (my mother, a teacher, was able to fill up her big Oldsmobile during the middle of the day when the lines were shorter).
So, it is with that memory that I look at today's gas crisis with a "what's the big deal" attitude. Don't get me wrong, I hate paying $50 to fill up my mid sized family sedan that gets 22-25 MPG. Same for my ever rising grocery and electric bills. However, I can still drive right up to the station and fill 'er up. Aside from the high prices, the only similarity I see is the newspaper's sports pages discussing how bad the Mets are (yes, I'm still bitter about the way the Mets fired Willie, but that's another story). However, unlike that gas shortage, we should've seen this one coming years ago. We've seen the Chinese and India economies becoming more industrial over the last decade or so as they improved their standards of living to match ours. They've started consuming goods and food like we do; all that requires energy to produce. We've seen them using more and more oil. Yet, we continued to buy our gas guzzling SUVs and virtually ignored alternate energy research. Now we're paying for our shortsighted outlook at the pump. However, at least we still have something to buy.
I'm not a big fan of off-shore drilling, I sure don't want to go down to the shore and smell refineries. However, I realize it may become necessary one day. Not so much to keep fuel prices down, but because that is all that is left. Oil is used in many things aside from gas, such as plastic bags and vinyl siding. Unless someone invents a replacement for those products, we're going to need oil for the foreseeable future. We also need oil to be converted to gasoline to keep our cars and trucks running as, even if were to shift gears tomorrow, it will be decades until we can rebuild our rail lines or have all our cars be alternate fuel cars (at least those that would use little or no fuel). So, I'm in favor of it to keep our society together and running. However, I'm not in favor of it just to keep our addiction to cheap fuel alive for a few more years, putting off the inevitable to a time when we don't even have the off shore option.
One thing left out of this debate though, even if drilling were to start today, it would probably be 5-10 years until the new oil fields would be active and flowing into our fuel supply and even the, on the world market, the supply would be fairly small. Prices won't go down from that. And even if they did dip, we, or our children, will face a worse problem in a few more decades. So I'm not in favor of off shore drilling unless it is combined with true research into alternate fuels and conservation of non-renewable fuels.
We need to make what we have last. The days of cheap fuel are over. We (we I mean you, me and the economy) better adjust to that soon. With gas over $4 a gallon these days, the day in the mid 70s when my dad's cousin asked for $5 of gas to fill up his car seem quite quaint. Though prices may fall, we'd best get used to paying more -- or walking everywhere.
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