On fumes.

Mercifully, I have a short drive to just about anywhere I'm likely to go. My day job is minutes away, my mom lives across the street, my sisters the next street over... in fact, none of my immediate relatives live more than 15 or 20 miles away, and they all work within spitting distance of where I live. Both of my wife's and my vehicles, while ancient, are four-cylinder sedans, only one of which we drive with any regularity. If we clock 5,000 miles in a year's time, that's a lot for us, so I'm filling the tank of my '93 Accord probably once every two weeks. A year ago, that cost around $30; now it's $40 or so - manageable, thus far. But these precipitous price increases on gasoline are killing most people I know (and most of those I don't know), and there appears no end in sight. It would be bad enough if it just hit you at the gas pump, but it affects everything else as well. The food you buy, the employer you work for, the community you live in - every aspect of our lives, it seems, is built on the assumption of cheap and plentiful fuel. Take that away, and our economy starts to scream.

I often wonder how many of my fellow Americans connect this phenomenon to the fact that our nation is run by rogues and oil men, including an administration that spent its first six years encouraging and facilitating rampant consumption of gasoline. How many see the connection between the single-passenger Hummer in the lane next to them and the skyrocketing prices at the pump? Yes, there's increased demand from developing countries like China and India, but for chrissake... look at the freaking vehicles we drive! People have been driving trucks as passenger cars in mass numbers for over a decade now, and we're feeling the effects. Back in the mid eighties, after nearly ten years of emphasis on making fuel-efficient vehicles, there was a worldwide oil glut even in the thick of the Iran-Iraq war. Oil fell to about $12 a barrel because (wait for it) WE WERE USING LESS OF IT.

Today people use more fuel because we have been relentlessly encouraged to do so over the past twenty years. Not sure if anyone recalls, but there was tremendous resistance to improving fuel efficiency standards back in the late eighties and through the nineties, with horror stories about how U.S. auto manufacturers would lay off thousands of workers, etc. (an important talking point in Dan Quayle's bizarro performance during the 1992 Vice Presidential debate). Of course, the auto manufacturers shed enormous numbers of workers anyway in the years that followed, even with fuel standards that allowed massive V-8 engines and SUV's that look like passenger trains. Most states - including my own state, under Gov. George Pataki - allowed the speed limit to move up to 65, causing greater fuel consumption (55 mph was determined decades ago to be an optimum speed for fuel efficiency). And who can forget the current administration deploying Ari Fleischer and others to defend gas-guzzling as central to the American way of life? This is a failure of leadership, to be sure... but it is also enabled by the goofy choices we make.

Not sure who the next president will be (though the next creepy Veep could be Mitt Romney, for chrissake) or who will control the Congress, but whichever way it goes, it will take some real pressure from below to get this monster under control.

luv u,

jp