With $4 gas, it ain't easy being green

(Note: This is an issue that won't go away, so you can bet this won't be the only article I'll write on the subject. I can be bold and call it the first of a series, but this implies discipline on my part.)

If you haven't noticed how ugly gas prices have been lately, you must be one of those people who are not affected by it. Maybe soon I'll meet one of those people.

It doesn't matter how you get around in your home town; you will still feel some effect of escalating energy costs. There's just no escaping it. Even if you ride a bicycle everywhere (as I do) and only check out the gas prices to see how badly those poor fools in SUVs are taking it in the shorts, you may have noticed the price of just about everything else going up.

I have no hard numbers to back it up, but even the cost of pork & beans has increased to reflect the cost of transporting it from the piggery or wherever they process it to your grocery store. Everything's sent by truck, rail, ship, or submarine, so there's a cost right there. And since no businessman in his right mind is going to "eat" that extra cost, you'll notice the difference at the checkout counter. I tell you, there's no escape.

What I find particularly interesting is that folks are starting to pay less attention to environmental issues with fuel doing such radical surgery on their wallets. While it's nice to bloviate about carbon footprints and global warming when gas is a buck a gallon (and it wasn't that long ago), all this talk seems to have gone out the window lately.

Like the noted social commentator Kermit The Frog once said, it ain't easy being green.

There's renewed talk of drilling for oil in previously-forbidden areas such as the National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska and in the Atlantic off the Carolinas. Nuclear power is starting to look feasible again. Even to environmentalists.

My own politics are decidedly conservative, though I'm also serious about environmental issues. It's sort of like what Edward Abbey once wrote: "God bless America ... let's save some of it." But now some of these options are starting to look real good right now. And I'm not the only one thinking this way.

But these are all short-term, for-the-moment measures. Face it. It's a mystery to me why we're still so reliant on fossil fuel anyway. Using our other technologies as a yardstick, oil-driven anything should have been thrown on the scrap heap years ago, where DOS-only computers, vinyl records, Underwood typewriters, and slide rules currently reside. We've built more effective ways of killing the enemy in war. We have radar and satellite technology that can track a hurricane from its point of origin. We've built desktop computers that are more powerful than the room-sized units that coordinated moon landings 39 years ago.

Everything is new and improved, except energy. On that score we're still in the Stone Age.

Back in my taxi-driving days, I drove a Texas oilman from his weekend home on Kiawah Island to the airport, and we spent most of the 45-minute trip talking about alternative energy sources. He'd studied that, and he said that in all of these alternatives there is some oil required somewhere.

(Personal footnote: When I started driving a taxi in 1997, I burned about $16 in gas a day. When I left the business near the end of last year, my daily dose was $30 a day, sometimes $40. The car was a Ford Crown Vic, which did best on high-test and got me about 18 miles per gallon. If I was still driving that cab, the fuel cost would be more like $50 to $60 per day. Sounds like a drug habit, doesn't it?)

As I write this, gas is hovering around $4 a gallon in Charleston, South Carolina. And historically, that's one of the cheapest places in the nation for gas. To get an idea of what people are paying elsewhere, check out gasbuddy.com -- in fact, use that site to find the cheapest gas in your home town. You might save a few pennies that way.

Even when fuel costs reach crisis proportions -- and don't tell me we're not there yet -- people in the good ol' U. S. of A. still like convenience above all. We are, I submit, a spoiled bunch. Despite talk of cutting back on driving, I can look at the freeway and see the same number of cars on it as before, when gas was much cheaper. And the cars look the same too. Maybe a few people traded in their SUVs and four-wheel-drive Diesel trucks for something more economical, but I honestly don't see much difference. And though I get around on bicycle, I don't see where many people have joined me there. Are you kidding? I have yet to see air conditioning or an mp3 player on a bicycle, and I still haven't figured where to put my coffee cup when riding it.

And the trickle of oil shapes our foreign policy. While most of our imported oil comes from neighbors Canada and Mexico, we have to go to some real sleazeballs for our daily fix. Some of my friends don't buy gas from Citgo because it's all Venezuelan oil, courtesy of Hugo Chavez. OK. Chavez may want to be the next Fidel Castro, but he's certainly no worse than the people running Iran, or Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, and his human-rights record is no worse than theirs.

But getting to the green aspect for a moment. Environmental study isn't so cut-and-dried like physics is, where everything can be boiled down to a handful of natural laws. To truly think green, one must have a grip on a number of disciplines -- from high-school biology and geology to high finance and politics. It's a multifaceted science, with a web of connections that would put an enterprising spider to shame. And much of truly-green thinking is almost the dead opposite of how we humans are built to perceive things.

Humans tend to take the short-term view as a means of solving their problems, and that's where the going gets dangerous. That's where ideas such as drilling in the National Wildlife Reserve come from. Even if we go drilling there or off the Carolina coast, and build a bunch of new refineries, it'll merely put in a dent in the problem without solving anything.

Even some of the feel-good environmental measures such as hybrid cars are, at best, a short-term stopgap measure. And I understand there are problems with those hybrids, that the battery needs to be replaced every so often at a cost that would scare Bill Gates. And, really, the gas savings are not significant enough to solve anything.

But if you wish to think in the long term, this energy problem presents a golden opportunity for some new technologies -- whatever they are -- to take shape.

I'm not a great fan of focus groups and conferences -- one man alone can do some pretty stupid things but it takes teamwork to really foul things up -- but maybe that's a partial answer. For some reason I visualize a summit of some of the best minds in the sciences, engineering, politics, foreign policy, and throw them together for about a month. Give 'em those large sketch pads, feed 'em yesterday's pizza with cheap wine, bunk 'em together in a dormitory, and see if they come up with something to get us off the oil teat.

Right now, we're at the point where we'll take anything. That's the good news. The bad news is, we're at the point where we'll take anything.