High gasoline prices have not derailed the economic recovery, but that’s small comfort to Loraine Greene. A customer relations manager in the Hudson Valley of New York, Ms. Greene spent the weekend packing up to move to a rental house much closer to work.
At $4 a gallon, gas is too expensive to justify the 50-mile round-trip commute.
“The option was either to sell my truck and get something smaller, or to try to get closer to work,” said Ms. Greene. She chose to move. The new house is just eight miles from the office.
The sad part is that once gas prices decrease again, Americans won’t keep up their frugal behavior, even though the price threshhold has been raised again. If gas prices decrease by 25 cents in the next few months, many will abandon their frugality measures, even though they’ll still be paying about 75 cents more for a gallon than they did last year.
The oil companies are quite good at manipulating consumers because they know that many Americans won’t maintain frugal or even sensible practices.
We have been living increasingly crazy and unrealistic lives for many decades now. Living far, far away from one’s workplace may be necessary at times, but having so many people do this so routinely contributes to stress, ill-health, environmental degradation, and spiritual deadening of our society. We simply must move from our atomized lives towards meaningful family and community-oriented lives, with adequate time for rest, enjoyment of simple things and, and reflection. If we don’t, we will reach a point where there are no physicians–only patients.
Oh please, get a life. If you want to live the life of monastics, go for it! For the rest of us: drill baby drill! Fire up the nuke generation plants!
One little bit of silver lining here……even if it is only ephemeral: The price of a gallon of regular gas dipped 14 cents in one hour two days ago here in Los Banos. It’s down now to only $4.17, but will no doubt zoom back up again like a skyrocket bound for the moon. It bounces up and down like a yoyo.
Oh, well, some small but temporary relief for the consumer now and then is better than none at all, isn’t it? Personally, I’m all for hydrogen/electric motor vehicles, and the sooner they go into production the better! Then oil producers can drink their oil!