It’s that time of the week again: after driving back and forth through various parts of the valley and Los Angeles, the gas meter on my Volkswagen is edging toward that little “E.”
Last year, I remember that “E” (short for evil, rising gas prices?or, empty) being reached after miles of happy driving, to be refilled by a semi-unreasonable price of a few cents under $3. I complained like everyone else, but I remembered that it could be worse.
Well, it just got worse. Today, even the lowest octane-level gas is up to $3.50 (or even more by the time I wrote this) a gallon in some locations. Yesterday morning, gas prices hit a record, rising to almost $104 per barrel, reported The New York Times website. This is the highest record since the energy situation in the 1980s.
Sure, environmentalists may see this as a good thing because people will use less gas if the price is increasingly higher, but this is an unrealistic approach. Until Los Angeles gets transportation like the east coast has (or San Francisco for that matter), or someone invents a hovercraft, Californians will continue to commute by personal vehicles.
Most people have a commute of at least 20 minutes to get to their destination each morning. CSUN is mainly a commuter campus, as seen by the parking crisis (in few other parking lots across the valley do you see drivers begging pedestrians to give them a ride to their car).
America is a country where people spend money that they don’t have, thinking that five credit cards will pay for everything. So, rising gas prices won’t hinder most drivers.
Is our current president to blame for the gas prices we have to endure with now?
“?So one of the initiatives that I will push, again, is to get an energy bill out. I will tell you with $55 oil we don’t need incentives to oil and gas companies to explore,” President Bush said in 2005.
If that was true with $55 barrel oil, then how has that doubled in a little more than two years?
Bush said that he was “unaware” in a press conference Feb. 28 that everyone was predicting the $4 a gallon gas rise by summer, or even sooner. Was he simply uninformed, or playing the dumb card?
The house passed the energy tax bill last week, proving a threatened veto from Bush doesn’t scare anyone. Though it has a high chance of flopping, the discontent starting to break out by many Americans will hopefully pressure Bush to fix the mess he has started since his first year of presidency.
Americans will not give up their addiction to fueling up their precious cars that some treat better than they would treat their own children (which is why some people shouldn’t procreate).
Our president knows this fact, so he is not in a rush to do anything drastic to help lower the over $3 prices that most will end up charging on their credit cards.
Until we get a new leader in the White House, we will have to spend extra minutes watching the numbers rise and rise, cutting into our weekend spending money.
