On the day I got my driver's license, gasoline was selling for 89 cents a gallon. I remember, because my dad has always been super sensitive to gas prices - squirming anxiously/angrily when they rise, expelling a sigh of incredulous relief when they fall, and forever certain there's some small but powerful group of plotters that controls the world's oil supply with the sole intent of keeping us all dependent. Driving to the gas station for the first time as a newly legal driver, I felt a compulsion to carry on his legacy. To the scrawny, acne-ridden sixteen-year-old I was then, 89 cents a gallon was outrageous, simply because it was outrageous to my dad.
Two weeks later, the Exxon Valdez crash-landed on the pristine Alaskan shoreline, dumping 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. As a result of this disaster, gas skyrocketed to over a dollar per gallon, to everyone's shock and dismay.
It never went below a dollar again. Not where I lived.
A year or so later, during the first Gulf War - particularly the tension-filled six months leading up to the imposed January 15 deadline for Saddam Hussein to pull his troops out of Kuwait - gas prices spiked again. I remember this vividly, because it was about the time I purchased my first car, and bitching about gas prices was no longer just a matter of parroting my dad. Now I was directly affected by it, and I began to understand the painfully simple equation he'd been talking about my whole life: the more I was stuck having to pay for gas, the less money left in my pocket to get me through the weekend.
My first car was a 1977 Chrysler Newport. About as long as a football field, its big 400 engine had a powerful thirst, and when Saddam Hussein defied the world order to vamoose, I was frustrated by the resulting jump in gasoline prices. When our military went in and ousted him from Kuwait and he set all those oil wells on fire, the price spiked once more and my dad and I went into a tizzy together.
That spike created a new bedrock: the price of gasoline never again dropped below $1.20 per gallon in my area after Desert Storm.
Throughout the 1990s, I worked a variety of gas station attendant jobs. I was, for many years, 'that guy behind the counter', ringing up your gas, cigarettes and lottery tickets. For most of that time, the price of gas hovered around $1.25, almost conspicuously stable and comfortingly predictable in its habits. No matter what was going on in the world, at home or abroad, it could be relied on that gas prices would spike around Memorial Day, inflate to what we thought was the point of bursting ($1.45/gallon! Yikes!) through the heavy travel summer months, then invariably fall back after Labor Day.
I came to realize during those years that my dad wasn't the only one super sensitive to gas prices, or who believed there was a secret cabal keeping us hooked. Whenever the odd spike came along, I, manning the register, bore the brunt of customers' indignation. The first time gas rose over $1.50 was a downright unpleasant day for my co-workers and me. People seem to think, or choose to believe to satiate their desire to blame someone, that the cashier behind the counter is responsible for gas prices. I was often treated as though a) I alone determined the price of gasoline, b) I was, as a mostly part-time employee whose biggest responsibility was hosing down the carwash and restocking the cooler at closing time, secretly part of that cabal my dad spoke of. Yes, I was in on the jacking up of prices; I was privy to price gouging meetings in smoke-filled rooms; I was happy to stick it to the working man for my twenty-hours a week at minimum wage.
I guess I should have been flattered; they attributed much more influence to me than I will probably ever actually have in the world.
The next spike I remember came September 11, 2001. That night, area convenience stores were besieged by gas hoarders. Vehicles were wrapped clear around the block waiting for their turn at the pumps, back seats and truck beds stuffed with red gas cans intended to be filled before - so the rumor was spreading - gas spiked to $8 per gallon. It was a surreal scene; an unfortunate ending to an already horrific day.
Gas prices did spike a little after 9/11. Not to $8 per gallon of course, but $1.50 was suddenly the new bedrock. I don't think it ever dipped much below that again.
Since 9/11, and since the Iraq war began in 2003, there haven't been spikes so much as a steady, unending climb, coupled with a slow but unstoppable erosion of the aforementioned stability. It hit $2 per gallon in 2004, and that was shocking. $3 per gallon sometime in '06 and '07, and that was worrisome.
Now we're on the precipice of $4 per gallon (by the end of this Memorial Day weekend, it might very well have cleared that tower), and $8 per gallon no longer seems to be merely the fiction of some panicked rumor monger. Rather, analysts are talking in serious, level-headed tones about 12 - 15 dollars a gallon in the next five years.
That's the worst part of all this - the resignation in the voices of oil industry experts who are supposed to be making us feel better. They're not even trying to calm frazzled nerves anymore, not alluding to the possibility (at least!) that things might level off after Labor Day, or after the Chinese Olympics (China being a country whose demand is in part to blame for the high prices), or not even indulging in the vague hope that things will get worse before they get better...but they will get better...
No, they're just throwing their hands in the air and saying, sorry folks, get used to it...
None of the presidential candidates, nor the current president, are saying anything different. We're not even getting hopeful (albeit bullshit) rhetoric from our politicians in an election year! They're talking about lifestyle changes, about buying new vehicles (a hybrid, perhaps?), about driving less, riding bikes, walking, car pooling...proponents of light rail have a new fire in their belly...it's all about adapting now, rather than waiting around for things to get better.
Maybe that frankness, that honesty, is what we need, but it's not what we (I) want to hear.
I am certainly ripe for a lifestyle change in terms of what I drive. Sadly, my current vehicle, a '01 Dodge Ram pick-up, gets no better gas mileage than my '77 Newport years ago. It takes over $100 to fill it now, so I simply don't. And I don't drive it much either.
I don't claim to know or understand the reasons for the spike in gas prices/crude oil. It seems to be complex, almost depressingly unintelligible, like an experiment gone horribly awry, control of the situation long since wrested from our grasp. Strong world demand (as opposed to short supply) and the weak U.S. dollar are routinely listed as major factors for the mess by talking heads, and yet, still, no solutions or ideas are advanced. And even with short-term fixes like suspending the gas tax or starting to drill in places we never have before, it would take months or years before any relief would be felt.
At the risk of oversimplification, I do not understand how it is we can build robots that sport human emotions, that can intuit and beat us at chess; we can manufacture cell phones the size of thumb nails; we can send billion dollar probes millions of miles into space and land them by remote control on distant worlds to start searching for life, and send us back pictures. We've eradicated diseases, marshaled the sky, controlled weather, been to the moon. All this fantastic ingenuity as a species, yet we cannot find or develop some kind of substance to combust internally in an engine to replace - or at least relieve - our dependency on crude oil. One would think with all our technological breakthroughs over the last century, we'd be at a place in our history where we can run an engine on used kitty litter if we want to, or garbage...throw a banana peel in the tank like in Back to the Future.
Something! Why are we still desperately digging into the ground for energy like they were 2000 years ago, when in every other facet of our lives, truly space-aged technology blooms all around like flowers in a summer field?
We've made synthetic motor oil, why not gasoline? Synthetic fuel as a concept certainly exists, and there are pockets of production going on here and there around the world, and things like biofuel continue to show promise. And of course, electric cars are all the rage now. But nothing is seriously being done to advance this, to make it mainstream and affordable, or, in the case of hybrid cars, attractive. I'd love to sit down for coffee with someone who designs those vehicles and pitch some ideas. Seriously, make one of those things - just one model - that has lines like an old Corvette, and it just might sell to the American consumer. Nobody wants to drive something that looks like an egg.
What kind of crap is going on, exactly, that we don't know about?
Was my dad and his cronies right all this time? Is there a cabal?
I don't mean in geo-political terms - 'us against them', America against OPEC. I ask, are ALL the oil producing nations and concerns really in cahoots, and deciding where and when we get oil, and what technologies science is allowed to pursue in lieu of oil? Are they waiting, as my dad has indignantly asserted many times over the last 30 years, until every drop of crude is sucked out of the ground BEFORE they even THINK of looking at alternatives, at which time they will be able to seize control of that burgeoning industry too?
This Memorial Day, among other things, I remember the men and women who have died to preserve my freedom to think these things, to wonder, to doubt, to question and challenge everything. And when it comes to the oil industry, and its ongoing stranglehold on our lives, our heroin-caliber dependency on the black gold, that right should be exercised frequently and loudly by all of us.
Enough really is enough.
