This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 19, 2008.
Bite the bullet on gas prices
Back in 1998, I stood at a gas station pumping gas at $1.11 per gallon and noticed that the station next door sold its gas for $1.01. I had a light bulb moment and created The GasMan website to track local gas prices.
Keeping such a thing up to date is a lot harder than it sounds, and five years later I closed the site down. The average price I was posting at the time of the site's demise was $1.65 per gallon. $1.11? $1.65? Those were the days.
Today, you can buy GPS units that provide directions to the closest, cheapest gas. Finding the cheapest gas in the area, though, might save you $70 or $80 per year. Is there anything that can be done to save $500 or $1000 per year?
There are many factors that affect the price of gasoline. The most basic, though, is increasing demand. In places like China and India, car ownership is skyrocketing. In the past few years, oil production has little changed, but demand continues to rise. Basic economics tells us that rinsing demand with no change in supply leads to rising prices.
The reality is that I will probably never see $1.65 gas ever again in my lifetime. When you're on a budget, that's a hard reality to face.
When reality raises its ugly head, politicians smell blood. Every politician wishes they could come up with a way to tax us back to $2 gas, or to force Saudi Arabia to open the floodgates and let the oil pour forth, or to drill holes in the Alaskan tundra or the continental shelf to extract our own oil. Something, anything, to reduce the price.
The problem is that some of these "solutions" will only work in the short or medium term, but help us not one whit in the long term.
There is almost nothing the current president, nor the next president, nor the Congress can do to manipulate gas prices.
One idea is to cut the federal gas tax -- a tax holiday. Cutting the federal tax of 18.4 cents per gallon, though, hardly seems worth it. Remember good old supply and demand? Increased demand for something in short supply means higher prices. That 18 cents will disappear in a week, and the deficit will do nothing but grow.
Some members of Congress want to impose windfall profits taxes on oil companies. This is an idea that I can support, but the new money should have a dedicated purpose having nothing to do with gas prices because such a tax will do nothing to lower the price of gas, and could make it go up.
Midwest farmers see the alternative fuels market as a great way to get paid more for their crops. They get more money when their corn is converted to ethanol than if it is sold as food. But if food costs rise as fuel prices go down, have we gained anything? And who's to say more ethanol means lower prices?
Increased domestic supply is also touted as a solution, extracting oil from shale or drilling at ANWR or off shore. But as environmental consciousness rises, more people don't see solutions in exploiting nature this way, they only see folly.
No, the real solutions are all long-term. We are going to have to bite the bullet.
The best solution is to decrease our need for oil. Higher CAFE standards, so that new cars get better mileage, are a start, but only just. What we really need is alternatively fueled vehicles.
We need bio-fuels, especially from non-food sources like switch grass, and they need to power hybrids that can eke out 100 or 200 miles per gallon. We need to develop hydrogen. We need better electric cars. Something. Anything!
What we need is an Apollo project for fuel. We need to invest time, money, and brain power in the problem. There is a solution out there, and I can guarantee you it has nothing to do with petroleum.
One day, there will be a need for the GasMan web site again, but instead of tracking the price of a gallon of gas, it will track the price of a liter of hydrogen or the cost to top off a quick-charge battery. The day cannot come soon enough.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Mixing personal and political
This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 5, 2008.
Mixing personal and political
It isn't often that the ordinary citizen gets to represent his or her town, but a couple of weekends ago, that's just what I, and other fellow Willistonians, did.
The Democratic primary held on Town Meeting Day was not the end of the delegate selection process. Several weeks after the election, in towns throughout Vermont, Democrats met to select delegates for the state convention. In Williston, less than two dozen people congregated in the library's Community Room. We mingled and sipped coffee until it was time to tend to business.
That business was the selection of some of us to go to Barre in May, to be town delegates at the state convention. Turns out, Williston was allocated more delegates than there were people at the meeting, meaning that if we wanted to go, we could all go.
We separated into two camps, one for Obama and one for Clinton, signed our names to a sheet of paper, and left to go finish whatever weekend chores we had to do.
When I got home, I announced that I was an official Obama delegate from the town of Williston. My family's reaction was underwhelming, but I was excited. I had gone to the meeting to see what it was all about, and walked out a delegate. For a political junkie like myself, this was heady stuff.
I went to mark the date on the calendar and I quickly spotted a nexus between the political and the personal -- that weekend was when my sister was getting married, and family from all over the country would be descending on Vermont for the event. Since I was not in the wedding party, however, I figured the timing would work out.
As the time for the convention grew near, I started getting a new kind of email in my in-box. Other delegates to the state convention were vying for one of ten positions in Vermont's delegation to the national convention in Denver. The trickle of emails soon turned into a flood as delegates from around the state tried to get their name out there.
I'd already met one of these candidates in the library back in March -- Taylor Bates had been festooned in Obama regalia and made it a point to meet and greet each person who came into the room. He was already campaigning to be a delegate at the national convention. Though just barely old enough to vote and not even yet out of high school, he has been active in Democratic politics since he was 14.
The way the statewide voting went, Vermont was to send six Obama-pledged delegates and four Clinton-pledged delegates. Half of the delegation would be male, the other female. Bates, then, would be competing for one of three seats, against over 60 other men. There were so many candidates at the Obama sub-convention that candidate speeches were limited to 30 seconds each.
Based on the emails I'd already received and read, I'd made up my mind on the three men and three women I'd be voting for. When the results were read, three of my six choices had been elected. One of them was Taylor Bates. In fact, Bates was the second highest vote-getter, so he had more than just the Williston delegation pulling for him.
We heard speeches that day from former governor Madeleine Kunin, Senator Patrick Leahy, Representative Peter Welch, and Speaker of the House, and gubernatorial candidate, Gaye Symington. From my seat in the tenth row, it was inspiring to hear them speak, to call for action in the party, and to rally the troops to fight for Democratic candidates in the fall.
After a long day in Barre, I headed home, happy that I'd been able to do more for the Democratic Party than I ever had in any other election cycle. I enjoyed the quiet of my car trip back to Williston, knowing that when I arrived home, I'd be swept up in the excitement of seeing cousins, aunts, and uncles, and in the happiness of a nuptial weekend.
Though I was very proud of my town that weekend, and of Taylor Bates in particular, it all shadowed in comparison to the pride I felt for my family that next day. I got to escort my mother down the aisle. My brother officiated the ceremony wonderfully. And my only sister married a wonderful man. Congratulations, Kristin and Nick.
Mixing personal and political
It isn't often that the ordinary citizen gets to represent his or her town, but a couple of weekends ago, that's just what I, and other fellow Willistonians, did.
The Democratic primary held on Town Meeting Day was not the end of the delegate selection process. Several weeks after the election, in towns throughout Vermont, Democrats met to select delegates for the state convention. In Williston, less than two dozen people congregated in the library's Community Room. We mingled and sipped coffee until it was time to tend to business.
That business was the selection of some of us to go to Barre in May, to be town delegates at the state convention. Turns out, Williston was allocated more delegates than there were people at the meeting, meaning that if we wanted to go, we could all go.
We separated into two camps, one for Obama and one for Clinton, signed our names to a sheet of paper, and left to go finish whatever weekend chores we had to do.
When I got home, I announced that I was an official Obama delegate from the town of Williston. My family's reaction was underwhelming, but I was excited. I had gone to the meeting to see what it was all about, and walked out a delegate. For a political junkie like myself, this was heady stuff.
I went to mark the date on the calendar and I quickly spotted a nexus between the political and the personal -- that weekend was when my sister was getting married, and family from all over the country would be descending on Vermont for the event. Since I was not in the wedding party, however, I figured the timing would work out.
As the time for the convention grew near, I started getting a new kind of email in my in-box. Other delegates to the state convention were vying for one of ten positions in Vermont's delegation to the national convention in Denver. The trickle of emails soon turned into a flood as delegates from around the state tried to get their name out there.
I'd already met one of these candidates in the library back in March -- Taylor Bates had been festooned in Obama regalia and made it a point to meet and greet each person who came into the room. He was already campaigning to be a delegate at the national convention. Though just barely old enough to vote and not even yet out of high school, he has been active in Democratic politics since he was 14.
The way the statewide voting went, Vermont was to send six Obama-pledged delegates and four Clinton-pledged delegates. Half of the delegation would be male, the other female. Bates, then, would be competing for one of three seats, against over 60 other men. There were so many candidates at the Obama sub-convention that candidate speeches were limited to 30 seconds each.
Based on the emails I'd already received and read, I'd made up my mind on the three men and three women I'd be voting for. When the results were read, three of my six choices had been elected. One of them was Taylor Bates. In fact, Bates was the second highest vote-getter, so he had more than just the Williston delegation pulling for him.
We heard speeches that day from former governor Madeleine Kunin, Senator Patrick Leahy, Representative Peter Welch, and Speaker of the House, and gubernatorial candidate, Gaye Symington. From my seat in the tenth row, it was inspiring to hear them speak, to call for action in the party, and to rally the troops to fight for Democratic candidates in the fall.
After a long day in Barre, I headed home, happy that I'd been able to do more for the Democratic Party than I ever had in any other election cycle. I enjoyed the quiet of my car trip back to Williston, knowing that when I arrived home, I'd be swept up in the excitement of seeing cousins, aunts, and uncles, and in the happiness of a nuptial weekend.
Though I was very proud of my town that weekend, and of Taylor Bates in particular, it all shadowed in comparison to the pride I felt for my family that next day. I got to escort my mother down the aisle. My brother officiated the ceremony wonderfully. And my only sister married a wonderful man. Congratulations, Kristin and Nick.
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