Americans Feeling Pain at the Pump, But That’s Only Half the Story
Written on 06/07 at 05:07 PM by Andy Posner
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Filed under: Huffington Post TreeHugger Job
Note: I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be read in its original context here
It’s amazing how unaware Americans are of the extent to which our economy is dependent on oil. Amazing not only because of the consequences--geopolitical, environmental and social--of oil addiction, but also because oil prices affect every aspect of our daily lives. I was reminded of this fact the other day when I went to my local bike shop. There, the talk wasn’t about carbon fiber and chainrings, but rather about how the cost of shipping has skyrocketed over the last few months (fortunately for the bike shop, high gas prices also mean business is booming). Meanwhile, food riots in Haiti, Egypt and Mexico have made headlines, and the airline industry, hit particularly hard by fuel costs, has gone so far as to begin charging $15 per checked bag.
From high-end bike shops in Providence, Rhode Island, to the slums of Port-Au-Prince, and everywhere in between, people are directly feeling the effects of $130 a barrel oil. Yet there is still no sense of urgency in American political discourse. President Bush was recently on his hands and knees begging OPEC to pump more oil (which they declined to do), and both John McCain and Hillary Clinton have been touting a federal gas tax holiday. Some believe that once oil gets expensive enough America will be forced to truly seek out new sources of energy. But that kind of thinking belies a fundamental problem: the switch to an economy based on renewable energy won’t happen overnight, and it will require far more than a mere policy fix. Just try to think of one product you buy that can be manufactured and delivered without fossil fuels and you’ll see that the scale of the problem dwarfs our current proposed solutions.
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