Our Addiction to Gasoline: What IS the Alternative?

Staff Reports

Once again it’s common to see gas prices higher every day. And emotions are as high as they were during the last gas crisis. “Somebody needs to DO something about these prices,” screamed one lady as she fueled her vehicle.

What cost $45 to $65 for a fill-up last month is inching closer to the triple digits. “Yeah, it’s pretty frustrating,” said Bob Grant, “I’ll have to drive less as the prices go up.”

Some people want to start email chain letters to the big oil conglomerates (which never really worked before), and boycott their gas stations. It sounds (and feels) good, but no one’s going to bypass the gas station when the gauge points to empty. We’re addicted to driving, and that means we’re addicted to gasoline.

Besides, a boycott rarely impacts the oil companies’ bottom line; it just hurts local business owners. They’re dependent on middlemen all along the supply chain: oil-producing nations, drilling companies, exporters, importers, refineries, and national, regional, and local distributors.

The largest entity impacting the world’s oil supplies is the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a consortium
of 13 countries: Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq,
Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates
and Venezuela. Gas is very cheap in some of them: in Venezuela it costs
only 12 cents a gallon.

But the COST of those supplies is controlled by commodity traders, who
panic at the thought of a tight supply even when producers increase
their output to avoid a crisis. Today’s traders worry that Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, and Iran will face upheavals like those in Tunisia and Egypt, so
the price goes up based on fear of the future—and we pay in the
present.

How can we get “un-addicted” to the oil we crave? In the early ’70s gas
shortage “gasohol” was introduced as an alternative fuel and sold here
in the mountains of Western North Carolina. It’s relatively
non-polluting, and totally renewable (unlike petroleum resources), and
fairly economical to manufacture. Perhaps revisiting this alternative
may be a plausible option.

But “ethanol” sold at pumps (“this gasoline contains 15% ethanol”) is
both polluting and expensive. Fertilizer used to produce corn flows down
the Mississippi, where it’s created a “dead zone” of thousands of
square miles. And using all that corn for fuel raises the price of corn
for our dinner tables and for cattle, pork, and chicken fodder. The high
price of food contributed to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt,
which inspired the uprising in Libya, which is causing the panic upswing
in oil price futures. (Libya produces two percent of the world’s oil,
but fear of disruption there has already inflated prices by 30 percent.)

Maybe alternative fuel sources—recycled cooking oil, “gasohol,” electric
or hydrogen power—for cars will save the day. Then we can put the OPEC
nations on notice that we can resort to our own country’s resources that
are MADE IN AMERICA.

But in the meanwhile, we’re stuck with gas, which means that all we can do—for now—is look for the cheapest prices around.