Gas won't be coming down I think

My stepson has a love of muscle cars. And since I have one of the last WS6 birds produced by Pontiac, I guess you could that I do as well. However, when he recently expressed a desire to get rid of his very economical (and vintage) VW Beetle in favor of a 4th generation Camaro, I looked at him and simply said something to the effect of "Are you crazy. Gas is not coming down. Ever. It may fluctuate up and down periodically and swing as much as 10 to 20 cents either way, depending on economic forecasts and driving seasons. But from here on out, it's consistently marching ever forward and upward."

It's a depressing thought, really. Not just because it hits so many millions of American households right in the pocket book, but because the difficulties faced by this nation in any attempt to switch over from gas to "something else" will be enormous for many reasons. One of those reasons is the way we live. We tend to live "spread out". Many of us commute considerable distances to our jobs and live far from our relatives. Another reason is how we transport things. We don't use trains quite so much as we do fleets of 18 wheelers that drink rivers of gas like great herds that once roamed the plains. Simply put, America is a car culture. We don't simply love our cars, we've built our entire way of being around them.

Let me just state that I am personally in favor of electric plug-in technology. It contains emissions at one source (power plants) and if you power up your vehicle during off peak times, the cost is fairly low. And with a little R&D for battery technology (say 20 billion--but that's nothing compared to what's been spent in Iraq so far), fleets of plug-ins could be on the road in a few years. By contrast, ethanol is essentially a joke and it goes nowhere. You couldn't run America's cars off the entire planet's corn harvests, let alone any other source of ethanol. And hydrogen fuel cell technology, while attractive, is decades off as far as implementation is concerned. I mean how can you get HFC vehicles on the road without refueling stations. The current gasoline refueling infrastructure (thousands and thousands of gas stations) that we currently have took decades to build up. And we really don't have decades more to resolve this issue.

The answer, IMO, is electric plug-ins and perhaps plug-ins that are also hybrids.




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