This article was published as "Give Me Fuel, Give Me Fire" in the June 27, 2008 edition of The Parkville Luminary. 

Generally speaking, I find the pronouncements of economists about as convincing as those of any other mystical soothsayer, although that may be a bit disparaging to mystical soothsayers. An economist who is able to make a sensible declaration (one with which I agree, of course), however, is to be regarded with reverence, for his or her ability to dispense with the nonsense of the profession is a rarity.

But if economists are operating in a vacuum, many members of the public are even worse-off. I’ve heard and read reports of motorists, many of them drivers of large, inefficient vehicles, many people with very long commutes, expressing being fed up with high costs (who isn’t?). But they vocalize both utter cluelessness and a willful disregard of reality in their assessments of why it has gotten expensive to drive, blaming everything but their own living arrangements.

Economist and tax policy expert Leonard Burman has correctly pointed out that one proposed "solution", a summer gas tax holiday, would not only be very difficult to institute and maintain, it would have a consequence contrary to what's needed - it would provide an incentive for motorists to drive more during the busy summer driving season, thus consuming more fuel, and, therefore, driving up the price. Other economists accurately noted that oil as a world commodity has gone up due to a number of factors, including the global ratio of supply to demand, a weak U.S. economy, investors looking for a hot prospect, and a feeble dollar.

It would be nice if someone with a major platform - like the U.S. president, or the candidates for that office - would use that platform to tell the public the truth: that world demand for oil is growing, but supply is not; that opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling will have no effect whatsoever on the cost of oil for 5 to 10 years, and thereafter only negligible effect, because it will not offset the declines in global supply which will occur during that time; and that the days of what author James Howard Kunstler terms the "easy motoring utopia" are numbered. We need our leaders to present rational (though perhaps uncomfortable) choices - choices developed by people who aren't simply looking to perpetuate their own power and fortune, and that of their friends.

Considering the words of those motorists confirmed for me that Americans still do not wish to face those uncomfortable choices. These are people who apparently have chosen to believe what the culture force-feeds us through popular media: that the "American Dream" in part involves each of us driving inefficient automobiles to work and back to our distant suburban tract homes instead of investing in a user-friendly mass transit and passenger rail system. What we need is for those leaders to lead, and to stop pandering, and we need citizens who are more interested in seriously thinking about solving real problems than they are in celebrity-worshiping tabloid trivialities.