Where’s the Oil Conservation Leadership?

04/15/2008

Paul Munnis


As oil reaches $114 a barrel and the dollar heads for a drop of 60 plus percent it’s time that we ask why none of our national leaders are calling for a fuel conservation program in America in order to cut oil consumption and limit our oil import?

Some sort of a conservation program is long over-due.

For example, a resumption of the max 55 mph speed limits. Perhaps rationing of gasoline and oil products is in order if we can’t cut consumption any other way. Maybe restrictions on the sale of general aviation fuel, perhaps a decrease in the number of domestic airline flights, even restrictions on the sale of recreational boat fuel. Those and many more sorts of conservation measures should be undergoing hearings right now in Congress and in our State legislature. Soon Congress will be on summer recess without having even mentioned the problem.

Instead of leadership there is just the sound of dying family budgets, the gasp of people losing their homes and investment equity, the quiet slaughter of what’s left of the middle-class.

Nobody is doing a damn thing about it.

We should be trying to optimize fuel availability for certain critical applications like trucking and rail use even as we put a fee surtax on SUV and large pickup truck fill-ups and licensing.

Businesses should get a larger fuel allocation than individuals. We should even be entertaining the curtailing of sporting events. Instead we are just trying to pretend this is a temporary aberration. It’s not, we are up against it and our whole economy is in dire jeopardy.

We should be running a national advertising campaign to encourage people to use public transportation where it is available and to concentrate their trips into an optimized route for shopping, child related transportation, and work trips. There should be a huge federal advertising campaign to encourage car pooling and ride sharing.

Bush should be leading the parade instead of bringing up the rear with a shovel and broom. Congress should be treating this as the national emergency that it really is. Every effort should be made to cut the amount of gas and oil that we are consuming and we should even be talking about cutting back on the thermostat this coming winter even as we cut back on our air conditioning use this summer.

It’s a crisis that will send us into a depression and it’s time we stop fooling ourselves. The dollar is in the cellar, income is not keeping up, fuel costs are rising, everyone’s budget is feeling the pinch and it’s time to change the nature of the pain to something more tolerable. Some of what I have suggested above is not tolerable, yet if it has had the needed shock effect to wake people up then it was worth the mention.

It’s time for an action plan and time to get our heads out of the sand.