Oil Addiction

Back in the 1970’s we had an oil crisis. Gasoline went up to over $1 per gallon (horrors!) and there were lines at the gas stations because people were afraid to run out of gas.

At the time I was in college and some friends of mine and I decided to take a little road trip. To avoid the gas shortage, we put gallon milk jugs of gas in the back of a Pinto (the car that blew up on impact even without extra gas in the trunk) and went on our merry way. Fortunately, we did not get into a rear end collision.

Eventually, gas came down in price and the crisis was over. But we didn’t learn anything. For awhile, you could get cars that had really good gas mileage. My 1985 5-speed, 4 cylinder, Toyota Tercel got 46 miles to the gallon, which is just about as good as an expensive hybrid these days and far better than any gas-only car on the road now.

There was some talk of alternative forms of energy-electric cars, solar power, and so forth. But we remained addicted to oil and thus subject to the whims of oil producers.

Now we have the same problem and I hear so many people wanting to drill for more oil in various places and assuring us we have oil for a few more generations.

At some point, some generation is going to have to bite the bullet and get off the oil. We can do this cold turkey when oil totally runs out and it can be a big crisis, or we can use two energy crises in thirty years as the impetus to wean ourselves from this addiction.

There are reasonable alternatives that don’t take a lot of infrastructure changes: adding more buses to already-existing public transportation, altering diesel engines for the use of biodiesel (which can be made from used French fry oil, available abundantly from our addiction to fast food), using solar power to juice up electric cars for short trips around town, creating bicycle lanes on existing roads, rethinking new housing developments so that essential services are within walking distance (grocery, pharmacy, etc.), adding sidewalks to existing neighborhoods, and I bet most health clubs could be self-powered by adding generators to the stationery bicycles! Imagine what would happen to our obesity problem if the only way you could watch tv was to generate the electricity through a stationery bike!

To wean ourselves off of oil dependency will take what any form of weaning requires: self-discipline. We have to plan ahead so that any trip we take accomplishes more than one goal. We have to think creatively about trying out new possibilities-maybe we can take the bus to work. Maybe we can walk to the grocery with a cart. Maybe we can investigate solar energy. Maybe the next car can be more fuel efficient. Maybe (gasp!) we can make do with a single gas-powered vehicle in a household. Maybe we can look at the health advantages of walking or biking and see this transition as something good.

This is do-able in baby steps-with each person taking responsibility to lower his or her energy requirements. And we owe it to our grandchildren to make relatively easy sacrifices now, rather than putting them in the position of having to make difficult, drastic sacrifices.