No quick fix for oil prices

Paul Giannamore
It’s easy to blast George Dubya Bush, Congress, Dick Cheney, Halliburton and Big Oil for the price of gasoline as it shoots up seemingly every few days.

They certainly are all at least partially to blame, spending billions a week on war while the dollar slides, jobs are exported and nobody is coming up with a way to keep America powerful as India and China ascend into the middle-class consumerist masses.

But, if you’re of a certain age, you either sat in the gas lines of the 1970s or the classrooms where environmentalism rose into the national conscience in the 1970s.

Think back. Somewhere in the grainy film of your memory is either thoughts of sitting in some huge luxoboat waiting to buy 65-cent-a-gallon gas that might not be available tomorrow, or of watching some film about industrial pollution, replete with brown skies and rivers filled with oil slicks and detergent-like foam on the surface.

That was more than 30 years ago.

Somewhere back there in the sands of time, we were treated to a whole lot of science about environmentalism, a whole lot of national political talk about energy independence, discussions about turning shale in Colorado into oil, a 55-mph national maximum speed limit and tweaks and twists in daylight saving time, all in the name of energy conservation.

Cars shrunk. MPG rose. But the cars were lousy because they were scrambled into production.

The EPA rose to power, pollution controls became mandatory. The skies cleared for the most part, but many people claim their factories closed because of the costs involved that couldn’t be passed on to consumers.

Decades passed. The world moved on. The U.S. made it for nearly two decades without the words “energy crisis” passing its national lips. The stock market boomed.

And all that talk about the need for alternative energy, for a national energy independence, all waned into the background.

After all, only the “fringe lunatics,” the VW Microbus hippies of the 1960s, still talked about real energy research, after all.

People had their stocks paying for their McMansions and, the world be damned, we were enjoying a sort of modernized, higher-tech version of the 1950s, with better TV, a wider variety of music and more powerful cars.

Now that the energy albatross has come home to roost, we’re blaming government and looking for a solution from presidential candidates to a basic economic problem.

The dollar has been sliding against the currencies of countries that now are buying cars and nice clothes and better houses and the oil is going where demand and high value are recognized. The all-powerful United States, strapped by an expensive war, faces paying more for its all-too-vital, and all-too-imported oil, when it could have spent much more time, effort and national debate since the 1970s on research, development, funding and product rollouts for energy efficient homes, factories, cars, light bulbs. Jobs would have been created.

Is it Bush’s and Cheney’s and the current Congressional members’ faults? Yes, but it’s more than all of them. It’s their predecessors. It’s those who funded research inadequately for 30 years. It’s the way that the money went to the systems that were making money: Oil, namely, and the way that petrowealth was able to shift its weight around while the fat, happy populace moved from Buick Wildcats to Chevettes and back up to Hummers, while the Chinese and Indians started developing societies that would be just as dependent on consumer goods, led by cars and trucks.

Politics can’t fix this. Shell out your bucks for that next tank of gas.

Sometimes, we get what our own history didn’t bother to try to pay for.



(Giannamore, a resident of Toronto, is business editor of the Herald-Star. His e-mail address is pgiannamore@heraldstaronline.com. Be sure to check out his blog, “Backfire,” at www.heraldstaronline.com.)