Energy -- who dunnit?

We seem to be facing an energy crisis. So I’m told. Today gasoline popped back up to $3.95 a gallon. I drove down a familiar high way yesterday, one I’ve driven hundreds of times at all hours over the past 30 years. It seemed almost empty. Vistas where there are always three or four cars in view, day or night, showed nothing but bare pavement.
For years the rivers near us have been clogged with pleasure boats running out to Lake Michigan on weekend afternoons. This year the channels seemed almost empty some Saturdays and Sundays.
I accept it. We are facing an energy crisis. The fascinating thing to me is that it seems to have come as an almost total surprise to the people around me.
Okay, we’ve selectively forgotten 1974 when the gas station on my corner was open one hour a day – and it only sold to regular customers and only eight gallons apiece. Then came the big love-in at Camp David and the Arabs all remembered that the US, after all, was their biggest and richest customer. So the good times rolled – with gasoline up to 50 cents from 30 or 35.
Then came 1979 when the Iranians dumped the Shah and (perhaps rightfully) blamed us for all his sins and shortcomings. Gas jumped to a dollar, to a dollar and thirty five cents around here. Once again the Saudi’s and Kuwaiti’s – who then were as addicted to dollars as we are to oil – ramped up production and off we sped.
(To put that $1.35 in perspective, you could buy a Buick that year for around $8,000 bucks. So triple or quadruple that amount in today’s dollars.)
The recessions that followed those petroleum speed bumps were nasty. The one that came in 1981 was rated the worst since the Great Depression.
It was only after these warning shots that we became a society in which everyone had to have an SUV, a pickup or a minivan. T. Boone Pickins tells us that in those days we imported only about 39% of our oil; today it’s around 75%.
The driveways on either side of me are chock-a-block with pick-ups, motor boats, SUVs and even a huge mobile camper. We’ve got a minivan. We joke that we should be a car lot. (Let’s not forget the snow mobiles.)
The last bus that picked up passengers anywhere around us stopped running by 1982. You want groceries? You take a car or pull a large wagon for miles. A man without a motor vehicle around here is as helpless as a man without a horse in the desert.
Sidewalks? Walk? Walking in America is as subversive has carrying explosive toothpaste on an air liner. It flies against our deepest belief: God meant people to drive cars for any distance over two hundred feet. Obesity, anyone?
I recall having a hilarious conversation with a Soviet diplomat once. He was briefly stationed in Phoenix. He loved to take walks in the cool of the evening, just through normal suburban neighborhoods. Once a police car accosted him. What was he doing on foot? At nine o’clock in the evening? Did he have identification? When he displayed his Soviet papers deep in Goldwater country, the cops went bananas.
Forget communism; he was a walker.
Come on. If I figured out there was an energy crunch coming by 1950, a lot of other people should have also. All my dad had to tell me was, “We are six percent of the world’s population. We use 50% of its energy.”
I’m not even especially good at math. But I figured out very quickly that that situation was not going to last. Someday they’d rebuild the bombed homes, roads and factories in Europe and Japan. Someday our choke hold on planetary oil supplies would falter. Someday some totally new customers would show up at the pump. (India, China.)
Where were our statesmen? Even our military leaders? And who were the idiots who zoned everything out of walking distance and then cut the bus service? Who allowed the cities of 1950 to spread miles and miles and miles into the countryside?
We’ve done a number on ourselves. (I’d rather concentrate on solving global warming than on how to get us out of this mess, myself. Much easier to talk about.) How much do we have to reverse? Just to survive.