Pat and Linda have started carpooling to their offices. Pat works in a large retail outlet as a ‘Store Manager’ and Linda works in a healthcare insurance company as an ‘Analyst’. Their work times don’t quite match but Pat reaches his store thirty minutes ahead of time in order to carpool with Linda. On the way back from the office on a Friday, when they stop at a light on a county road, Pat says,
“Honey, try and switch off the engine on this light. It takes more than three minutes for that thing to turn green and we can go 1.5 miles more with that much gas.”
“Okay” says Linda and turns off the engine. “You know, we should turn the van in to the Toyota dealer and buy the new hybrid model - Prius. It is supposed to go 50 miles on a gallon. We can try and squeeze in with the kids in a Prius; I think we can manage.I wonder what will happen this winter. We haven’t yet seen the cost of heating.”
The light turns green, and they pickup their daughter, Erica, from the baby sitter’s. As soon as Erica settles in her car seat, she pleads, “Mommy, can we go to Chuckies today ? It’s been a month since we have been there! Please, let’s go.” Linda tries to console her, “Sorry dear, we can’t. We can try to go there on Thursday next week, en route to Shoprite.”
Linda and Pat drive forty miles to their offices each way. Since their work times did not match, both drove their cars to office everyday. Gas expenditures for them were $350 a month then. But now, with the current gas prices, if they continue driving their individual cars, they would pay in excess of $800 a month. With the home mortgage monthly payments, car loans monthly installments and Erica’s school and day care expenses, they decided to car pool. Linda carefully plans out her trips and now mixes her groceries trips with library, drugstores and does that on Sunday morning after her visit to the church. Instead of weekly groceries, it’s biweekly now. She makes intelligent use of Microsoft Excel to prepare her checklist, making sure she misses nothing. Unless anything is high priority and gets missed, it gets added to the checklist for the next round after 2 weeks. Gas prices have not stopped climbing, in fact they are estimated to touch in excess of $5.5 by year end. That will also be the time when the heaters will be running. Linda and Pat haven’t yet figured out the plan of action for the coming winter.
According to a graph displayed on congressman George Miller’s website, national gas price in USA was $1.5 on first day of 2004, $2.2 on first day of 2006, $3.1 on the first day of 2008 and more than $4 today. It has more than doubled in a period of 4 years. There may be a rare set of people whose incomes went up in the same proportion, but most of us still don’t believe the way gas prices have shot up. Linda and Pat, too, belong to the latter category.
In 1980, there was a similar hue and cry over gas prices, which had soared to $103 per barrel (in today’s dollars) then, as per an article in BusinessWeek dated July 23 (titled ‘Should oil be cheap’), about rising gas prices. The country responded by buying smaller cars, installing more efficient heating systems, and boosting oil exploration and drilling. America learned to use half as much energy per dollar of GDP as it did before the crisis. The efforts greatly helped but US being the largest consumer of oil in the world, there was excess supply of oil worldwide. Less demand more supply and the prices obviously plunged. But they plunged so much that a barrel of oil was worth just $11 eventually. Excess supply, rock bottom price. The result was that for the next two decades there was excess of oil in the world. In 1985, Saudi’s slashed the drilling from 9.9 million barrels to 3.4 million barrels per day, as per the same BusinessWeek article mentioned earlier.
The last two decades have experienced the biggest boom in the auto industry. Every car manufacturer introduced a luxury performance version of their sedans exploding with engineering prowess. Each had double the engine capacity, double the power, double the thrill to drive and less than half the mileage. Also became popular the gas guzzling SUVs. These had even better power, stability and some of them came with a four wheel drive option. From four cylinders, we moved to six cylinder and then eight. The auto commercials depicted the cars climbing snow peaked mountains, tearing through sand dunes or a river and taking the proud owners in the wild. What was never advertised was the mileage of these environment monsters, the brown haze of air pollution hanging over many of our parks, images of weather disasters linked to global warming or the oil derricks and tankers needed to feed gas-guzzling SUVs. They spew out 43 percent more global-warming pollution and 47 percent more air pollution than an average car. According to studies conducted by Sierra club for global warming, switching from driving an average car to a 13mpg SUV for one year would waste more energy than if you left your refrigerator door open for 6 years, left your bathroom light burning for 30 years or left your color television turned on for 28 years. Now, hybrid car sales have more than doubled in the last 9 months while the sales of SUVs and vans have plunged by 36%.
Pat and Linda, too, feel the burden of rising gas prices, and so are thinking of trading in their van for a hybrid sedan. This can keep their gas expenses in check till gas becomes $10 a gallon and they hope that day never comes. They are also contemplating searching for a job in the city and moving to a suburb, where they can use public transportation to go to their offices. There are no more 500 mile long weekend road trips. Instead of taking their daughter to the grandparents who are 400 miles away, they take her to a local state park. And, a visit to Chuckies is always when Linda does her groceries. Pat and Linda have adapted to the changing lifestyle and perhaps so will millions of fellow Americans.
