No Gas Day Won’t Work. This Will.
I don’t remember how I first received the No Gas Day e-mail in 2004. According to Snopes.com, this call to action has been circulating in some form since 1999. This year, it’s more popular than ever. The problem with No Gas Day is that, good as it sounds, it won’t actually hurt the oil companies or drive down prices.
I understand the frustration people feel about high gas prices, and why an idea like No Gas Day is popular. Even when you adjust for inflation, gas prices are nearing an all-time high. Unfortunately, the concept behind No Gas Day is inherently flawed. Staging a one-day “gas out” just means that people will buy more gas the day before or after the protest. Since the supply and demand of the product (gasoline) isn’t actually affected, the price won’t change. No Gas Day might send a message, but it won’t make the dent in oil company profits that people believe it will. The only way to truly fix the problem is to make gasoline obsolete.
The sad fact is that our country’s economy is completely dependent on oil derivatives like gasoline and diesel. Without the oil industry’s products transportation in America would grind to a halt, crippling our economy. In a way, they have the ultimate product — we can’t not buy it. The oil companies know this, and price accordingly. They also know that the supply of their product is finite. I don’t doubt that the current high prices are part of a strategy to weather the shortages that are inevitably coming.
A single day of abstention won’t solve our problems with high gas prices, foreign oil dependency, or global warming. No single solution will. Electric cars, hydrogen fuel cells, and ethanol will not save us. Oil has given us a long and happy spell of relatively cheap, plentiful energy. That’s going away, and it won’t be easy to replace. There is no magic bullet.
What we need is magic buckshot: a variety of simultaneously-deployed solutions that work together to meet our country’s ravenous energy appetite. We need a dedicated, multi-faceted research and development effort to make this happen. We need investment from both the public and private sector. And we need it now.
