"Well, yeah, but I'm not complaining. Gas should be $5 a gallon."
He thinks I'm kidding. He thinks I'm insane. When he just asks why, I tell him. "Dude, we pay less for gas than any industrialized country. That's what it costs in Europe, or Japan. We use a quarter of the world's oil, and are what, 5 percent of the population?"
"Yeah," he says, "but what's the point? Those oil companies make enough as it is, bastards." True.
"Well," I say, "it would force automakers to raise gas mileages, which they could have done years ago, if they weren't so fucking greedy." That's a pet peeve he himself bitches about. "But mainly, that money is needed to rebuild the public transit infrastructure that GM originally destroyed." I'm now back to insane. "Public transit was once easy and convenient—people liked it. So GM bought up streetcar lines everywhere, dismantled them, literally burning them, to make people need cars." I'm upgraded from insane to conspiracy nut. "They say one man can't change the world. But Alfred P. Sloan sure did, even more than his buddy Hitler, when you really think about it. This car culture affects every part of the world, on almost every level, from asthma to accidents. And he created it."
Sky high gas prices won't encourage these people to drive less, support alt-fuel sources, or use public transport. It's the working folks outside the grid, those without access to buses or a max, those who could least afford another price hike that would suffer. It seems the "car culture" brand can only apply to regions where driving is actually an option, not where it
BUT DIG A LITTLE DEEPER, and the law of unintended consequences kicks in. There is simply no way to impose a cost on a specific group of people without the load getting shifted somewhere else. And it typically rolls downhill, until it lands on someone who can't shift it elsewhere.
Make truckers pay more for moving produce, your grocery bill goes up. Make John Q. CEO pay more to fill up his Lexus, and he votes himself a bigger paycheck - and the people that by his company's products get to pay. When John Q. Public can't afford to fill up his Ford Focus, he goes to his boss and asks for a raise, which is paid for by...?
See the flow?
http://www.upa.pdx.edu/CUS/publications/docs/DP98-11.pdf
I have a video documentary about this that public TV did about 15 years ago. The image of acres upon acres of streetcars all parked side by side, all on fire is the one that's always stuck with me, even though it's grainy black and white, it just doesn't seem possible that such a thing was done...