What kind of a problem is it?
Thomas Friedman in the NYTimes has a very insightful commentary regarding the current gas crisis. While he makes some pretty pointed criticisms of politicians in the US --which I prefer not to get into personally -- he makes a great point about what the real source of the problem is:
"We don’t have a “gasoline price problem.” We have an addiction problem. We are addicted to dirty fossil fuels, and this addiction is driving a whole set of toxic trends that are harming our nation and world in many different ways. It is intensifying global warming, creating runaway global demand for oil and gas, weakening our currency by shifting huge amounts of dollars abroad to pay for oil imports, widening “energy poverty” across Africa, destroying plants and animals at record rates and fostering ever-stronger petro-dictatorships in Iran, Russia and Venezuela.
"When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.
"Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives."
posted by Brian at 3:52 PM
2 Comments:
I couldn't agree more. For a long time now I have been telling people that I hope that the price of gas goes up.
But perhaps part of that is because I want to see SUV owners suffer a little. It annoys me when someone buys a huge SUV saying that "they have kids". I have kids too, and nothing larger than 4-door sedan in the driveway. And this is a step up from when I was a kid, where we only had two door.
I won't shed a tear for any of those Hummer owners, that is for sure.
In any case, I can only hope that the price goes high enough to force real change in the US.
I am definitively not one of those people that think that I live in the best country in the world. Frankly I don't think that there is a "best", and we could sure learn a lot from other countries like England where you don't see large cars, or Brazil where they rely on ethanol for their liquid energy.
Brian, sorry for the rant, but this is one of those things that annoys me. I better get back to coding to calm myself down :)
That is a rad and completely thought provoking article - thanks for sharing....
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