Fuel & Fickle Outrage

Ten or fifteen years ago, there was a sudden nationwide spike in the price of gasoline. Where I live, in California, a gallon was approaching $2.00 — which, at the time, was considered frighteningly high. The local news did a segment at gas stations, in which folks vented their frustrations. “At least at this station, the price is reasonable,” said one customer, prompting the reporter to quip, “$1.50 is reasonable?”

It was funny, because just a month or two earlier, $1.50 would have been seen as expensive. Today in some places of the U.S., four-dollar gas is normal now, and if it spiked up to $5.00 this summer, you can be sure that even $4.50 would soon be the new reasonable.

I think oil companies and OPEC should manipulate the public’s ongoing discontent with fuel prices, as a way to become way more profitable. It would just take a little conspiracy: Every six or nine months, have the price of gas shoot up by about a dollar, and keep it there for a couple of weeks. Then drop it back down — but not quite to where it started. Each cycle, the price creeps higher and higher. As long as the low price is much less than the outrageous number it came down from, relieved consumers will be delighted that they’re getting gas for a relatively reasonable price. If you keep shifting the standard of what’s reasonable, consumers will practically thank you and ask for seconds. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this??

Of course I’m kidding. The above scenario kind of already happens, and it says something about the way people think. A few years ago there was a lot of crowing when gas prices were pushing $4.50 ($5.00 in my area). Some SUV owners actually traded in their Suburbans and Hummers for more efficient cars. It was positively delicious. But now that the prices have been fairly stable for a couple of years, I see more SUVs on the road than ever. Consumers just don’t seem to care; I guess the price of gas is reasonable again. (Compared to Europe and other places, it’s been reasonable for a very long time.)

People tend to react against perceived change because they just don’t like change. If it costs them more money, then they really don’t like it. But in the long term, when standards and expectations are forced to evolve over time, the threshold for consumer outrage just drifts along with the tide. Like heat waves among climate change, the sudden fluctuations are clear to see, but the gradual global trend is less likely to get our everyday attention.

Then again, a lot of us just aren’t paying attention.

Something You May Not Know About Carbon (6/5/2009)

This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.

Pop quiz: Let's say you have a pile of dry leaves that you raked and want to dispose of. You could burn them in a big fire, or you could compost them and put the compost on your organic vegetable garden. Which method would release more carbon into the atmosphere?

Or, you have a pile of firewood. You could burn the wood in your fireplace, or you could let it decay naturally with the help of fungus and termites. Which choice is more carbon-friendly?

The answer is that in each case, both methods put exactly the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere: all of it. The cellulose and other carbon-containing molecules are broken down and oxidized, whether by fire or by living organisms, and the eventual waste product is carbon dioxide. Burning merely accomplishes this very quickly. Burning leaves and wood also releases other pollutants, which makes burning environmentally less desirable -- but in terms of carbon alone, the carbon in the plant matter will reach the air either way. It's just a question of whether it will take minutes, or months/years.

When people talk about "carbon footprint," they're really referring to how much new carbon a person is responsible for bringing into the environment. Coal, gasoline, and natural gas represent sequestered carbon (in the form of hydrocarbons), having been taken from the atmosphere by plants and animals millions of years ago and stored underground. Burning this material releases carbon that hasn't been in the environment since the age of the dinosaurs, or earlier.

Conversely, with your pile of leaves or firewood, the only way to prevent that carbon from going back into the air would be to bury it far underground, or otherwise sequester it in some way (something that green industries are trying to accomplish with carbon dioxide). If you don't do that, at least in terms of carbon, it doesn't matter how you get rid of it. The carbon is already in the environment, and there it'll stay.