There is at least a partial solution to be found in one Coloradan’s complaint about the rising cost of fuel. See if you can find it:
For drivers such as Robert Wagner, 51, a high school teacher from Thornton, Colo., the higher fuel costs mean cutting back on movies and dinners out for him, his wife and their two children. “We’re very, very frugal right now,” he said as he trickled enough $3.09-per-gallon gasoline into his Chevrolet Suburban to get him to his next pay day.
Now try to figure out who will get the blame for this appalling state of affairs. Will it be (a) auto-motoring Americans who insist on surrounding themselves with more armor plating than a phalanx of Middle Ages knights aboard Percherons, or (2) a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist richly deserving of impeachment?
Mad Blog Media 
You forgot #3…Blame Bush.
I’m felling the burn myself. 52 dollars US American per week in my ride, another 30 in the wife’s means the belt is tightened to the choking point. Not a word from capital hill on the price gouging, the speculators running up the price, or the ginormus profits all concerned are taking. Me, I’m looking for a job closer to home so I can get back to bicycle commuting. WTF am did I just say? Sorry, there aren’t any jobs to be had around here.
Damn, I be happy for 3.09/gal gas. I just started driving a 1997 Ford Thunderbird becuase it gets an ave of 25 mpg as opposed to my 2005 Trailblazer that gets an ave of 18 mpg. Bought the TB so I could pull my pop up and expected better than that, given it has a straight 6 as opposed to the T-Birds V8. When the bell rings at over $4/gal, the 1985 Honda Nighthawk 650 will be pushed into service as long as it’s sunny…55 mpg.
That’s easy… He’s a teacher! It must be them unions! If he wasn’t paying them union dues, he’d be able to gas that mother up!
~shakes head~
Gas is hovering around $3.40 here in Wisco lately. We both have Vibes that get mileage in the mid 30’s and work close to home, so we’re lucky. I have biked the 2 miles to work but the bridge across the Wisconsin River is too dangerous – full of neck-craning FIBS in SUV’s. No thanks. I want to live.
You’d think a history teacher would know better. Since I’m on the roads more these days, I won’t mind one bit to see it go higher. Everybody wants to talk about fiscal responsibility when it comes to money and then act like college freshmen turned loose with P&M’s credit cards when it comes to energy. I reckon God made that oil and coal for us Merican’s to burn up at our leisure. And the cost better not affect buying newer items that will allow us to consume more of said energy.
Fuck…I’m getting cynical again.
Alright Patrick; you’re a journalist, so answer this question for me-
Would/did the journalist who wrote the original article deliberately and surreptitiously include the detail about the Suburban to show the irony?
Do journalists regularly do this? I’m not offended at all, but it’s an interesting way to either get the reader to think (if they’re paying attention) or to inject a little commentary without deviating from an article that’s supposed to report “Just the facts, ma’am.”
And of course; do you think Mr. Wagner believes he’s part of the problem?
Peter, there could be some bias on the editor’s part (this is a story some AP desk jockey assembled using work from a number of reporters). The only vehicles ID’d are big’uns (the F-250 diesel pickup and the aforementioned Suburban). The florist’s delivery van is not identified.
Back in the day, when journalism was still profitable, there was more editorial oversight, and something moderately gratuitous like this might not have survived the gantlet.
Is it necessary to know what type of vehicle a person drives to make the point that higher gas prices pinch a bit? Maybe, if you also mention the driver’s job. A roofer driving a Dodge pickup might feel the burn more than a banker driving next year’s BMW. Location is important too, fuel prices and joblessness both being higher in California, for example. Perspective is everything.
A real nut-crushing editor might say, “ID all the vehicles or none of them.” Or, “Go back out there and talk to a Prius, a Volt, a bus rider, a train passenger and a bicyclist.”
Frankly, there’s not a lot of thought put into these reactive boilerplate pieces. “Oooh, gas prices are up, go bother some shmucks at the pump and gimme 500 words.” This sort of wankery is for interns or someone the city editor is pissed at. And for bloggers like me to crack wise at, of course.
…his Chevrolet Suburban????
M y 4-Runner gets 16 mpg fully loaded, but I have to have it for work, so I’m just kinda, how do you say, screwed.
Got Such A Deal today, a fill-up of piss-water at $3.29.9! 😦
Oh, and to answer your question, the blame will rightly be placed on Greater Ragheadia. Them people hate us you know…
Littlebang, we’re not that high here … for some reason Bibleburg seems to be an oasis of fairly reasonable gas prices. The cost of living here, like the wages, remains fairly low, though unemployment is high compared to the rest of Colorado.
We’re very fortunate to be able to work from home. Herself has to drive to Denver at least twice a week, but otherwise she handles her gig from the basement office via smartphone and Al Gore’s Innertubes. Me, I’m a part-timer who’s full time on the Innertubes, writing, cartooning and editing.
I could sell the Subaru Forester for beer money and get by with bicycles and the 1983 Toyota 4WD longbed, which does about 20 mpg on the highway with a tailwind going downhill. But I’ve kinda gotten to appreciate the Subie’s heated seats on cold winter mornings. And to think I used to race cyclo-cross. …
Regular was 3.59.9 this afternoon. Not only are Suburbans gas guzzlers (and we don’t know how much mileage is put on it weekly) but unless it’s paid off there’s probably a big lease or loan payment involved,too. Suburbans always seem like overkill and a household with a Suburban always has another vehicle – and probably a pickup, SUV or cross-over,
even if it is a one-person household.
Damn, Libby, that’s a toothy nip at the wallet pocket. For the U-nited States, anyway. If I recall correctly, coming back from California earlier this year I paid nearly four smacks per gallon around Needles. Nothing dumber than a driver locked into burning up the highway: “Miles to go before I sleep, I can make it to the cheap gas, I can make it to the cheap gas … awwww, shit.”)
As for giant GMCs, I have a personal grudge against those rascals. I hit one, hard, on a bicycle once. That hurts.
Since we spend so much time in Italy, I just LAUGH at Americans whining about fuel prices! We’ve paid $8-10 per gallon over there for years. Italians rarely waste fuel, taxi drivers PUSH their cabs up into the next spot in the cab line at the airport (try that with a Chevrolet Subdivision) and there are ZERO drive-thru lanes (except at McDonald’s but you don’t see many cars there) Cars are small and fuel-efficient and a lot of ’em are diesels or GPL (for us that’s LPG?) with roof racks for the now and then when you have to haul something big. Huge pickup trux are rare, the working man’s flat bed truck is made on a van chassis but most folks with loads to haul get by with one of the Piaggio 3-wheelers. It’s amazing what can be piled into the bed of one of those things! The cheap energy days are over, if they ever existed at all when you consider all the military expenditures we’ve covered for various wars and interventions to keep the “cheap” oil flowing. Now America’s morality about democracy is being tested — the Faux News folks would rather have the cheap gas than have folks in the oil-producing dictatorships taste freedom. But there’s hope, a CBS poll recently showed a LOT of people would rather pay higher taxes instead of screwing over the public employee unions! Could some sanity in the “no taxes, I got mine – so screw you!” USA be upon us?
We can surmise a few things about this: first is that since he lives in Colorado a Suburban is not an ‘unreasonable’ choice for a vehicle (being as there is snow, ice and the occasional monsoon). Second we can surmise that at $3 and change it is a whole helluva lot cheaper there then in California. Third, we can surmise that the writer of this particular piece was making a statement about how some drivers will forego “movies and nights out with the wife and kids” for dinosaur juice. And finally we can surmise that the hullabaloo about Bush and his Texas oil buddies back in 06 and 07 was just a bunch of farmyard excrement as the price of said juice is inching back up and Bush is nowhere in sight.
Anaheim CA yesterday was $3.81 per gallon;Palm Springs Costco was 3.58; Costco in Avondale AZ was 3.23. It was a pricey trip to visit family.
Oh, fuck. Filling up the Impreza is painful enough. But really. Do you have the right to piss and moan while driving a Suburban?
I grew up in Buffalo, N.Y. and with all due respect for my old man, a lifelong Chevy blue collar worker and machinist (East Delavan Gear and Axle Plant), I never needed a fucking Suburban. A VW Rabbit with decent tires had me plowing snow over the top of the vehicle and I never was stranded, even when stinking drunk and driving the car into trees in the dead of winter (it was light enough to push off of the tree with girlfriend steering) or driving it through farm fields while deer hunting (while sober).
Larry nails it. I was in Bremen, Germany this January and gas was roughly 8 bucks a gallon. No idiot drove an SUV unless he absolutely needed it for work and could write it off the taxes. The only large vehicles I saw were really commercial stuff. Everyone else drove something small and fuel-efficient.
Americans will be weaned off their love affairs with gas guzzlers by logic or pain. Probably the latter. Bitch all we want about gouging and conspiracy theories. Gas will go nowhere but up. Get used to it. We are well into Peak Oil and that is not a leftist myth.
http://landing.newsinc.com/shared/video.html?freewheel=69016&sitesection=ndnsubss&VID=23339870
It’s been in around $3.25 or so here on Iowa’s right coast. I’m thinking that I’ll soon be seeing more people on bikes on my bike commute. I suspect it will be much like it was after Katrina. All of the sudden, there were a bunch of bikes, but in about three weeks, it was just me out there. It’s been a brutal winter for the bike, but the bus system here has racks on the front of them so I can ride to the bus, rack it up, get over the river and then ride to the office. I can’t drive there as cheap as the bus… $1 round trip.
People have acclimated to high gas prices before. Actually, I suspect that in inflation-adjusted dollars, gas is not that much higher than when OPEC had us by the balls in the seventies. What I cannot figure out is why someone would even buy a huge vehicle in the last few years unless they needed it (and if you are in small business, can pass the transportation costs on to your clients). Wishful thinking?
What else has changed is that the average paycheck in the U.S. has not kept up with long term inflation. Loss of well-compensated blue collar jobs to overseas production, etc., etc. So nowdays when gas goes up, there is no buffer. I was on a grad student stipend in 1979 and remember that’s when I bought a Motobecane Mirage and started pedaling my ass to Stony Brook University every day. Side benefit was that I no longer looked like that Fat Guy on the jersey after a few months, since my activity level finally kept pace with my beer intake.
We will need to readjust our expectations to Third World level or grow the middle class again. That’s gonna take some short and medium term pain (less fun, more work), some political acumen, i.e., stop voting for people who only care about feathering their own comfortable nests, and some picking the pockets of the wealthy–not because I hate the wealthy, but because that’s where the money is. There has been a vacuum cleaner stuck in our middle class wallet, headed into the hands of the rich, since Ronnie was president.
Who the hell do you think was responsible for the 40 hour week and living wage? Not the unions, of course…I don’t think we can turn back the clock, but the purpose of unions is to make sure there is a check and balance on how we adjust to the economic future.
As Larry’s wife says, though…..
Here is the inflation adjusted price of gasoline in the U.S.
http://www.fintrend.com/inflation/images/charts/oil/gasoline_inflation_chart.htm
In ’79 I was in Bibleburg, just a few blocks from where we live now, serving my last year at our fabulous local fish-wrapper before taking a higher-paying and incredibly hideous gig at The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.
I was making the transition from reporter to copy editor and no longer had to even pretend to look professional, so I was riding a Schwinn Varsity (or Continental, can’t remember) to work now and then because the pay was for shit and I needed the exercise for the same reason you mentioned, K.
Speaking of Schwinn, the legendary bike marketing maven/space alien representative Gregg Bagni once opined that Americans would get serious about cycling once gas hit $6 per gallon. When we got over $4 I noticed a slight uptick in cyclo-commuting, and with all this turmoil in those sandy places with all the grumpy types squatting on our oil I anticipate a chance to test-drive his theory this summer, if not sooner. The price at the pump has risen 20 cents per gallon (to $3.19) since I last filled my tank.
Somthin’ on the radio to the effect that one type of oil just hit 115 per barrel and the bulk price is closing in on 100. With Libya in full scale civil war and most of the other Sheik Yerbouti types listening to footsteps, it could be worse before better.
But in the long run, whoever runs the middle east will want to sell their oil. The question is, for how much. With India and China building cars, we will soon be seeing three billion more people lining up to buy dino juice. And, they have all our IOUs. So like you, O’G, I expect the price to continue to rise. But then again we said that before. The difference now is that not only do we have geopolitics to consider, but Peak Oil, i.e., we are using it faster than we can pump it, thus headed into permanent supply lagging behind demand. Unless, of course we use something besides oil.
But if we go to electric cars, someone has to figure out how to put a penny behind every circuit breaker when we all plug in our car at once. Do the math on replacing barrels of oil with kilowatts. Even if we build more stationary sources (coal? nuke?) and put up solar, we will need to expand the distribution system.
In 2007 we imported about 3.65 billion barrels of oil. If a barrel of oil is equivalent to 1700 kilowatt hours of energy, we import about 3.7 billion barrels per year, and burn about 2/3 of that for transportation, then that is about 4 billion megawatt-hours. The present U.S. electrical capacity is about 4 billion megawatt-hours, if I did my math correctly. So we are talking bout roughly doubling our electrical consumption by replacing gas with electric cars. That is obviously an end-member calculation, but it kinds points out the problem.
(if I put links in where I got numbers to plug into this “universal orface” calculation, I think Pat’s server blocks the send but can provide them if you want).
A buddy of mine who walks dogs with me in the morning, a retired U.S. Marine who drives a pickup truck, quipped recently that we should have an ordinance mandating that all roofing shingles be made with embedded solar cells. Not exactly your typical snotty nosed liberal saying that any more. Now that is progress.