The real cost of gas

Why high gas prices may be good news for the environment and a remarkable collection of on-line resources on the topic

By: Penney Kome

  Protests, protests seem to be everywhere, as people complain about the high price of gasoline. But demanding lower gas prices or lower gas taxes would be the wrong way to go, say a wide range of environmentalists.
  High gas prices may cause inconvenience. They may force some of us to make tough choices, such as trading the SUV in for a smaller car, or carpooling instead of driving into town solo. Businesses might have to re-think shipping all their goods by road, one truck at a time, instead of by rail. Prices on imported products might increase.
  Look on the sunny side ­ literally. Rising gas prices should help us pick up where we left off after the last great gas price shock in the early 1980s, exploring renewable energy sources such as solar and wind-generated electricity.
 

The real price of oil is ultimately the loss of our planet

  "The good news is," said Sierra Club executive director Elizabeth May, "we already have the technology," to start weaning ourselves from gasoline. Tom Mar-Laing of the Pembina Institute said that the smarter oil companies have already started transforming themselves, "from fossil fuel companies to energy companies."
  Parallel to the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary last June, there was a teach-in at the University of Calgary also called WPC -- Widening People's Choices. Downtown, the OPEC spokesperson was telling a reporter that the high price of gas was due to taxes. Uptown, Eric Picah of Friends of the Earth called the oil industry, "the most subsidized industry in the world."
  Picah ticked off the ways that the US government "lessens the cost of production or consumption of a good" ­ in this case, gasoline. There are subsidies for research and development, he said, for exploration, shipping and refining oil. In addition, cars need roads, and taxpayers pay for building and maintaining all those roads, with only about 30 percent of the costs paid by gas taxes.
  In the US, Picah said, 77 percent of oil companies paid no income tax at all, due to their deductions ­ such as Exon's deductions for cleaning up the eco-disaster caused by the Exon Valdez, which is still disrupting flora and fauna on the Alaska coastline. With the popularity of SUVs, which as "light trucks" are exempt from fuel consumption regulations, vehicular fuel efficiency has been dropping sharply.
  Canada's tax laws are not quite so generous to oil companies in particular, but do provide incentives for exploration and development. To Friends of the Earth, giving oil companies tax breaks for exploration would be like giving farmers tax breaks to clear forests and plant tobacco.
  The price we pay at the pumps, teach-in speakers emphasized, is only a fraction of the true cost of gasoline. Health and environmental effects cost money too. Sierra Club reports that "asthma rates in children have risen 75 percent since 1980."
  Cars and light trucks spew out nitrogen oxide (smog) and carbon dioxide (greenhouse gases). The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has linked those greenhouse gases to disasters such as the ice storm that left scars on Ontario and Quebec communities, and the ten-day hurricanes that flattened tropical areas such as Guatemala and Orissa, India.
  Finally, oil and gas exploration has been linked with serious human rights violations. Albertans need look no further than their own province. "We have looked up the definition of genocide in the dictionary," said Bernard Ominyak, Chief of the Lubicon Lake Indian band, "and at this point, we would say that's what we are going through."
  From a civil society perspective, it's big news that the Sierra Club and Amnesty International joined forces in 1999, to produce a series of reports on "Human Rights and the Environment" which focuses on the effects of oil exploration and exploitation in Guatemala, Chad, Louisiana, Chiapas, and of course, Nigeria and Sudan. "The coalition was sparked by the death of (writer and Ogoni land defender) Ken Saro-Wiwa," said project co-ordinator Falubi Olagbaju, Nigerian himself.
  "For the last one hundred years," said Danny Kennedy of Project Underground, "this has been the industry that determined our geopolitics." He said that "the real price of oil is...ultimately, the loss of our planet."
  Gas price hikes can be painful. Nobody wants to pay more for what we have come to view as essential to our lives. Yet the free market theory suggests that when the price of one commodity rises, that encourages consumers to turn to other commodities. While public anger is understandable, a campaign to find alternative energy sources would make more sense than a campaign to keep gas prices low.

Get More/Do More
Natural Capitalism : Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, a book about making money by creating or using environmentally friendly products and services, written by Paul Hawken, L. Hunter Lovins, Amory Lovins, to be published in paperback in Oct 2000, or maybe in your public library already, in hardcover

Buy "cleaner" gas if you can. Canadian gas is naturally high in sulfur. The federal government has ordered all oil companies to sell low-sulfur gasoline by 2005. See www.ec.gc.ca/press/sulphur_b_e.htm

Friends of the Earth rated six gas companies according to the sulfur content in their gasoline, and asked supporters to boycott Esso, saying that Esso's gas has the highest sulfur levels. Conversely, some gas companies (such as Mohawk) advertise "clean gas", containing up to 10% ethyl alcohol, which burns more completely. Don't buy the gas with MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), which was introduced in the US to comply with the Clean Air Act but which has been suspected of poisoning groundwater. See www.cnie.org/nle/air-26.html#_1_1

There's a comprehensive but fairly technical 4-part FAQ on gasoline online starting at www.landfield.com/faqs/autos/gasoline-faq/part1/

Remember the lessons of the 1980s energy crisis: 1) urban dwellers can cycle, use public transit or car pool; 2) urban and rural alike can consolidate all their errands and make fewer trips; 3) drive a smaller vehicle (4 cylinders if you can) and keep it well-tuned; 4) consider a motorcycle or scooter for quick one-person trips; 5) check your home for drafts and plug them _before_ the cold weather starts; 6) weather strip and put storm windows or plastic on your windows; 7) lobby for changes to electrical pricing that would allow "co-generation" so that consumers could erect their own windmills and use the grid as a gigantic storage unit, for heating and cooking energy.

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