The average American measures successes and failures, “good” and “bad,” on the bottom line. I wrote a week ago about conservation as a needed addition to Going Green in an effort to save our resources. Why? for the reasons stated Wednesday in the Gaylord Herald Times by Thomas Mall, director of the Michigan Oil and Gas Producers Education Foundation.

“Detroit manufactures have built and supplied highly efficient cars to the American market since the 1970s. The problem is that Americans (who consume nearly 25 percent of the world’s daily oil supply) squandered that fuel efficiency savings by traveling more, and demanding and buying the less efficient vehicles soon after oil prices fell from $30 to $10 per barrel in the late 1980s,” he wrote in this guest editorial.

I would suggest that this is because the energy savings of the time had more to do with the cost of filling the tank, not the disputed effect that burning that gas had on the environment. Conservation is an afterthought of Capitalism. And that seems to me to be supported by the current excitement over hybrid vehicles and the effect of $2.99 per gallon gasoline. We talk about how the cost of gas is going to affect our traveling, not the cost on the environment.

“There have been no new refineries built in the United States in over 35 years. We are now importing ever increasing amounts of gasoline annually,” wrote Mall, alluding to why gasoline costs are so high right now, outside of speculators running the oil markets. There are no plans that any refineries should be built as oil companies see the U.S. push to alternative energy sources and costs to build refineries overseas go down
as reported in May — when Gaylord-area prices rose to $3.79 per gallon — by Kevin G. Hall of the News&Observer, a McClatchy newspaper.

So it seems we’re in for higher prices no matter what and our best hope is to go farther on a more expensive tank of gas … at least until more of us are willing to change our lifestyles.