In reading the news I noticed a few items over the weekend about rashes of gas theft. This one, about a man using storage tanks to steal between 3,000 and 10,000 gallons of gasoline in Florida and this one, about a gentleman in Balitimore who hijacked a tanker truck with 7,100 gallons of diesel fuel inside. It seems as though these sorts of theft will become more and more commonplace the higher the prices of gasoline rise in combination with it's dwindling reserves.
It seems as though the post-apocalyptic nightmare of The Road Warrior is fast becoming true.
Unless we almost completely shift our energy dependence from fossil fuels, it's very easy to see us in twenty years living in small, tight knit communities, zealously guarding our gasoline with our lives from any would-be thieves. We'd barricade the streets with discarded vehicles and old busses, we'd sandbag the holes with old tires and we'd protect the precious gasoline. Because without gasoline, why would life be worth living?
It seems as though the oil companies and politicians who won't insist on shifting our focus from gasoline to renewable and clean burning fuels are those poor souls in that community already, guarding their livelihood with their lives. (Does that make Republicans the feral child with the boomerang?) And I suppose that in this terrible metaphor, that would make those who care about common sense and the Earth Lord Humungus. Which isn't so bad if we need to attack the problem with the same amount of zeal that Lord Humungus and his posse did and take the oil away from them.
But the problem isn't going to be easy, and it's going to be to the death. Like Thunderdome: Two men enter, one man leaves....
(I bet you can guess which President and Vice-President team would be Master-Blaster in that metaphor. I'll let you decide who gets to be Master and who gets to be Blaster)
On a more serious note though, aren't these reports of gas theft proof positive that the problem with dependence on oil for energy is out of control and it's having disastrous effects on the economy? What happens when gas supplies dwindle and the price of gas skyrockets and John Q. Middleclass can't afford to get to work? An oil economy is just not a viable system.
The sun. Now there's an energy source I can get behind, we've got plenty of that. But if we don't fix the problem soon, we'll be living in George Miller's films a lot sooner than we think.
Bryan Young blogs daily at This Divided State
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on their fuel tanks, so it was pretty easy to
siphon fuel out of someone else's tank, and
into your own. There was a lot of that, and that
was just when fuel was on its' way to a buck.
Where are we headed now? Into the future, and
there's several different answers to this
question/problem: The first, and easiest,
the one that this administration hasn't really
put much effort into pushing for, is conservation. If ya don't use it to begin with,
you don't 'need' it. Ah, but these guys are the
fuel pump MASTERS. You buy less, they refine
less, price stays high, they make money. When
60MPG cars come along, the price will go to
60 bucks a gallon. Enter ethanol, a fuel you
can legally make yourself. Ruh Roh. Remember
reading about all the 'shiners(not Shriners, 'shiners, as in 'moonshine'). The
revenuers (federal tax agents) did a brilliant
job of wiping them out, and there went an
entire self-sustaining, albeit self-poisoning
in some cases, independent cottage industry.
Government's motto? Bigger is Better. Or, is
it? How many tankerfuls is YOUR community from
folding up like a cheap kite? Long walk to the
grocery store, bare shelves when you get there,
likely power outages because the utility company
doesn't drive their cars on good intentions
either, all kinds of things start to head
south, suddenly, There's A Problem, multiple
problems, cascading problems. Fire truck? Oh.
Yeah. Need diesel fuel. Schoolbus? Same.
We are indeed oil-dependent, and a lot of
people intent on profiting massively off of us
are well aware of that current dependency.
The answer? Start developing green-tech like
it matters, green up your car, park it, convert
to biodiesel and ethanol, plan your trips better, conservation can help a lot...if you
don't need to turn that key, don't.
Sensible societies would work with what they've got and thereby avoid the notice of said parasites.
Perhaps what it really means is a return to a quieter, slower and more peaceful society with lessons learned from the stupidity of their predecessors. I guy can hope can't he.
Regardless, human ingenuity will replace the loss of oil but it is quite likely that it will not go totally smoothly - and remember, Max doesn't follow the rules of Thunderdome.
As for Bush and republicans - I say that this man has broken the law. Right or wrong, we had a deal. And the law says: bust a deal and face the wheel!
BUST A DEAL AND FACE THE WHEEL!
Oops, nope, can't do that, liberals and leftist democrat made darn sure of that in the '70s. I guess we are stuck with our "you-know-what" hanging in the wind. One thing solar power can do besides charge small batteries and power your wristwatch is give you one heck of a sun-burn but not much more than that.
"liberals and leftist democrat made darn sure of that in the '70s."
You must be reading the Fox News version of the 70's. Big oil has owned this governments energy "policy" for over 4 decades. You could have build everyone a home with those "useless" solar panels with all the money big oil invested in congress and the White House.