In ancient Greece, messengers who brought bad news were promptly executed. In modern times, politicians who bring bad news are not elected. This is why you didn't get much advance warning that gas prices would be going through the roof. But have they, really?
As things stand, for 20 cents, you can put five people in your vehicle, load up the trunk with all your stuff, and cover a full 1.5 miles! Do you think anybody would do that on a bike for 20 cents? Terrill Patterson may be the only person in town capable of such a feat. Hmmm I'll let you be the one to ask him.
I have never been good at numbers, but how on earth did we come up with the price tags in the first place? Even I realize they are out of whack and make no sense. A barrel of crude oil costs around $100 today. Fill up the same barrel with your favourite beverage at your favourite coffee-store, and you'll end up coughing up close to 10 times that.
Having trouble with the figures? Just bear with me here. It costs $1 to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground in Iraq; in exchange, this one barrel gives you an average of 25,000 hours of human labour. Hey, this is free energy! This means that through his hard-working life, eight long, repetitive hours a day making tires for Firestone Co., my father accomplished the meagre equivalent of four barrels of oil.
This free energy gives us the freedom to choose when and why we sweat. The smell of intense perspiration and hot rubber always preceded my father's arrival - it became our daily cue for dinner! Now, just look around you. How many people do you know that still sweat for work? Most of us go running or get on our bikes after work to go get a good sweat. Pure genius of a lifestyle, eh? If something is too hard to do or make, we simply use our free energy to buy it cheaply elsewhere, from others who are still sweating for work, then we use our free energy to also transport it cheaply to our doorsteps.
Our aversion to bad news and what we class as "doom and gloom" means it is much easier for a politician to react to a crisis when it's already happening than to prepare for it beforehand. Still, I wouldn't call increasingly "high" gas prices a crisis, but a reality check. Come on - it is about time the free energy fallacy came to an end. Now, we either swallow the pill or we choke on it.
We'd better get ready for some real sweating because, on our new planet, we will find no easy fix to keep the wheels turning and well greased - roll up your sleeves! I mean, even if we wave a magic wand and fill up the roads with Toyota Priuses, in five or six years we would be looking at the same gasoline consumption. And it's just that our incessant thirst for growth requires more and more oil. Apparently, one golden barrel gets you 1,000 miles of driving. Can we squeeze a few extra miles out of that? We need to learn to accept speed limits on economic growth as we do with cars on the road. Look at it this way: A recession is a siesta from relentless market and financial expansion, and where I come from, they know darn well the health properties a good siesta contains.
Really, we are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel here, so wake up and get used to the idea; I personally have no qualms in telling you that we'll have to grow a lot less and sweat a lot more. Since I am neither a messenger in ancient Greece nor a politician in modern times, breaking the bad news to you like this doesn't worry me in the least.
This column was inspired by the movie "A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash." You can borrow it from Squamish CAN's library, housed at In the Raw Organics/Gelato Carina on Cleveland Avenue. Special thanks to Mary Mitchell for donating the movie.
Ana Santos is the co-ordinator of Squamish CAN. Ana's column does not necessarily reflect Squamish CAN's views or principles. You can contact her at [email protected] and read previous Moving Planets columns at www.movingplanets.net
