From where I stand, it's easy for rising gas prices to look like a great thing. My family lives in a beautiful, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood that enables us to walk to church and shop for the groceries not provided by our CSA program at a market down the block. Right now we do have a car - a borrowed '93 Volvo station wagon which we're looking after for my adviser while he's in Europe - but we drive it very little, and lately we've been making a point to rely on it even less. Yesterday, for example, my wife decided I needed some new clothes as an early Father's Day gift (I am now the proud owner of a fedora and some seersucker pants which unfortunately do not match my seersucker jacket), and with the tank nearly empty and the possibility of a $50 fill-up staring us in the face, we opted to take the bus downtown and then walk home. (The first part was great - my son has developed a bus obsession since he learned the hand sign for it - but our return, with the westerly sun beating down on our faces, turned out to be a bit tough. All in all, though, a great afternoon, and very much more enjoyable than driving.) And so when I think about $5-a-tank gas, and imagine for example how it might bring our extended family members to cut down on their own driving in similar ways, it makes me feel all happy, both inside and out.
But then I read things like this, and those feelings go away pretty quickly. (An exercise for the reader: compare this map, which illustrates the average portion of income being spent on gasoline, this one, which maps median household incomes by county, and this one, which shows per-capita carbon emissions.) Sitting here in Berkeley and legislating from the seat of a state-of-the-art, zero-emissions bus, with the Volvo gathering dust and bird droppings back at home, the realization that somewhere else in America there are people spending as much as twenty percent of their income on gasoline hits me like a blow to the gut, and the post-petroleum future suddenly looks a lot less bright. And so, as much as I would like to agree with Megan McArdle and Ezra Klein about the rationale behind artificially raising the cost of high-carbon lifestyles, my inclination instead is to abandon all hope and start drilling in ANWR.
Let's be honest with ourselves: these are not people who are likely to be helped by improved public transportation. Nor are they the wealthy, short-sighted bobos who've bought exurban homes on Paradise Drive, and for whom sympathy feels more than a bit misplaced. And it really seems a gross understatement to speak of them as people for whom gasoline fuels a "way of life": given their circumstances, it is rather the stuff that pretty much waters the roots of life itself, and the notion that we ought to take steps to make it even more expensive seems to me to border on obscenity.
I am, however, aware that carbon emissions are a serious problem, and so I can't pretend to have a good solution to any of this. I know that people who think harder than I do about the details have tried to think up ways to offset the initial regressiveness of carbon taxes and other such measures, and to help to transition rural America into a more sustainable future. It's crucial, though, that those of us privileged enough to have a plethora of earth-friendly options right down (or on) the street not lose sight of the immensity of the challenges facing those who don't.
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