Why we should pay more for gas

Check out the video at the end of this page from Yahoo's Green Blog. In it, several things strike me. 

First, is the bit on hair soaking up oil. I'd heard about the use of hair-in-nylons to clean up oil spills, but the video here includes a very impressive classroom demo. If only for that demo at the end, please watch the video. But that's not why I'm writing about it. The data cited astonish me.

To start with, much of the waste from our cars and other machines find its way to our ground and ground water to the tune of about 1 million gallons of motor oil every day. The contamination of our drinking water will be a growing problem as freshwater resources dwindle as our populations grow. But that's not all: 726 million gallons of oil are spilled in over 1,200 spills annually! That's about 2 million gallons/day. The Exxon Valdez "disaster" released "only" 11 million gallons, but even more than that spills every week?!? It is outrageous that these numbers exist in our normal world.

The timeliness of this post is, of course, due to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. I have always been wary of the honesty and truthfulness of the corporate world and its environmental consciousness. While BP has met and exceeded all safety regulations, clearly this disaster is testament that further regulation is needed. But regulation cannot be the final solution. 

Demand for energy will continue to drive oil companies to the fartherst, coldest and deepest corners of the earth. We, the billions of consumers in this world are responsible for this. We live in the suburbs. We pay for airlines to take us on vacation. We love our stuff made of plastic. We know the repercussions of our lifestyles, yet we don't change.

What you will never see me do is complain that gasoline and airline tickets are too expensive. The only way that we will fly, drive, and air-condition less is if it costs us more. A lot more. I've supported a comprehensive energy tax ever since the idea was brought to my attention by Al Gore in 1992. If everyone, businesses and government included, had to pay for all of the energy we consume--in any form--then we would all consume so much less, and numbers like those above would start decreasing. The truth of it is that our dollars drive companies to build monsters like Deepwater Horizon, coltan mines in central Africa and more and more roads. As long as we buy more and more stuff, there will be more and more Deepwater Horizons. That's the inconvenient truth we must face.

Update 2014. The first link above is gone to cyber-eternity, but go here for similar videos.