This morning, in the St. Louis airport, my older son noticed a CNN broadcast stating that gasoline now cost $3.98 a gallon (as a national average).  His response:  “Wow!  Gas is only $3.98!”  We informed him that when he was born, eight years ago, gas in the metro St. Louis area could be found for as low as .71 cents a gallon.

 

We are going to spend the next decades paying the piper for the artificially cheap fuel prices of the past.  Unfortunately, a lot of apple carts are going to get upset along the way.  Where will the pain locate itself most acutely?  Low-level charities will be badly hurt right out of the gate: Local food banks, homeless shelters, etc.  Infrastructure repairs, especially in cities like Evansville and St. Louis with a shrinking population and a collapsing tax base, will be abandoned, put off, or done on the cheap.  New construction projects (the big local one is I-69) will double and treble cost-wise, and perhaps even be quietly put out to pasture.  

 

 

Now add in the increased cost of diesel fuel, which is really an inescapable bottom-line increase in the price of transport for the required building supplies, and the cost will rise further and possibly faster.  What should have been a slam dunk community-wide effort will now be taken to Evansville voters in November, and the voters, understandably, are likely to vote “No,” even though the entire project was slated to be paid for with bonds rather than through direct tax increases.  Upshot: The public schools will continue to stagnate, bottom out, and fail.

 

Wherefore now the arts?  When it costs eighty bucks to fill your SUV, will you also continue to buy season tickets to your local theater?  No.  Wherefore now the low-profile playwright, such as myself?  Play festivals will shortly be unable to continue flying playwrights to festivals of new work.  In fact, the festivals themselves may dissipate; most exist only at the whim of state and federal arts agencies, and those funds will also start to dry up.

 

The doom and gloom scenarios such as these are realistic and possibly unavoidable, but they are not the whole picture.  Solutions abound, and they don’t have to be the obvious ones like “Bring Back Nuclear Power” or “Drill for Natural Gas on the Statehouse Lawn and Underneath Every Third Reindeer.”  SUPPLY and DEMAND are the enemy here, sure, but they can also be a staunch ally.  For example, if we as a nation (as a government) are serious about getting cars off the road and reducing the DEMAND for gasoline, then why doesn’t the federal government subsidize mass transit?  In Evansville, a line running from the University of Southern Indiana on the west to Newburgh on the east, and following the existing transit corridor of the Lloyd Expressway, would ease fuel consumption by thousands of gallons per year, maybe hundreds of thousands.  Another line, running north-south from Henderson (KY) up to Princeton’s Toyota plant, would be the jewel in the crown.

 

 

DEMAND for oil also comes in the form of plastics, a huge number of which, especially in the arena of packaging and in the food industry, are unnecessary and hugely wasteful.  Just how many plastic forks and restaurant cups get tossed in the trash daily?  (None of these places seem to recycle.)  Fast food alone, if it went “green” and began re-using things, could cut its waste by fifty percent or better––a figure I arrive at simply by looking at what I receive on a given fast-food tray and then thinking about which parts don’t need all the wrap-and-pack crap it currently comes in.  Extrapolate backwards: If we stop demanding that everything be sealed up, then the factories producing all this junk, especially the molded plastic “display packaging” that has to be pried open and cut apart with large scissors, can branch out and diversify into producing something of higher, longer-lasting quality.  Result: Less DEMAND for petroleum by-products.  End result: Lower prices at the pump.

 

Initially, China, India, and Brazil, etc., won’t follow our lead.  But they will over time, because what I’m suggesting makes good economic policy for them, too.  In the long run, what’s good for the goose is always good for the gander.  There’s only one planet earth, remember?

 

Why do some of my neighbors DEMAND that their lawns look like golf greens?  I know one person, in particular, who cuts his lawn an average of once every three days from March through November.  Is this a sane use of gasoline?  Was that a rhetorical question?  (If so, then surely the Pope must be Catholic.)  If the middle and upper classes of U.S. homeowners modified their perfectionist attitude toward their lawns even slightly, we could drastically reduce gasoline consumption, especially in the summer months, when DEMAND traditionally spikes.

 

Oh, and let’s not forget the realm of tax incentives.  When will my family (and millions of others) get a tax break for intentionally locating ourselves within walking distance of work?  When will those who bicycle to work see the federal and state governments reward them financially for their choice?  Once this happens, others will follow suit, with the result that our roads will become less crowded and prices at the pump––Gosh, am I repeating myself here?––will, at least in the short term, fall.  Neighborhoods will shift, housing prices in the suburbs will fall dramatically, and some will wring their hands that this will be a “disaster.”  Hardly.  It will, to use stock market terminology, be a “correction”––and a much needed one at that.

 

What’s frightening is how little political imagination exists right now.  I hear NOTHING from congress about doing any of these things.  Instead, I hear political hay-making malarkey about “summer gas holidays.”  That’s not policy, that’s an election-season gimmick, and it ought to be beneath the dignity of anyone, Republican, Democrat, or otherwise, to suggest such a thing.

 

Provide people with incentives, and they’ll alter their behavior in wonderful and surprising ways.  High prices are one kind of incentive, but the promise of conditional tax relief is a better one, because it is targeted and thus more controllable.  

 

We cannot, however, control the SUPPLY of oil in any meaningful way, ditto for natural gas.  (Besides, they’re non-renewable sources in the long-term no matter what we do; the actual SUPPLY is effectively fixed and always has been.)  However, we CAN and SHOULD use the levers and leverage of government to effect DEMAND.

 

Will either presidential candidate dare to take this road, both high altitude and abundantly necessary?  Doubt it.  But on this day, a day on which Hillary Clinton finally cedes her bid to the momentum of Obamaism, it does seem like a fine time to consider the possibilities.

 

As for my son’s jubilation at four-dollar-a-gallon prices, I can only imagine how happy he’ll be when the price hits ten bucks a gallon and I’m using my roof to grow crops.  On the up side, I foresee the revivification of certain stocks––may I suggest we all buy into Ball Canning Corp., and the sooner, the better.