Gas Prices to Soar to $10 a Gallon by the Year 2010!!!

As part of my every day ritual I immediately turn flip through the major cable news networks (minus Fox, of course) and catch up what is going in the world around me. I truly believe that we should always be knowledgeable of current events around the world, in national news and within our local communities. Just opening our minds and horizons makes us more interesting individuals and better citizens as result.

During my daily digest of current news information I couldn’t help but overhear a segment on the rising price of gas. It appears that a chief economics, or economic agency (can’t remember what is was) projected that with the skyrocketing prices of crude oil we could gas prices in the U.S. elevate to a whopping $10 a gallon!

YIKES! How are we supposed to live when, what segment described as being nearly thirty percent of the average working class American’s household income will go toward paying for gas? The experts say that with gas selling at these levels people will be forced to pay more for gasoline than they would for groceries! This also doesn’t include the impact caused by the inflation of other goods as companies are forced to raise their prices due to an increase in production costs. Obviously, we know who will be hit the hardest—the middle and poor working class.

Consider a friend of mine that I new from my days of attending high school in rural South Carolina. She is twenty-three years old and has three small children to care for. Being that she lives over sixty miles from the city (Charleston, SC) she must rely on using her car to travel to school, to work and back home again. When you count the total distance she has to travel each day this comes up to about two-hundred miles a day and about one-thousand miles a week. I could only imagine how much of her weekly earning, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $325 a week after taxes, is sucked up at the gas pump. Imagine how it would affect her when the price for a gallon of gas encroaches the five dollar mark, let alone ten.

The question I pose is this: With all of this superior technology in the world today, why did we not try to find an alternative fuel source to oil? It seems kind of outdated to use a fuel source that is expensive to obtain, refine and transport when we have the technical knowledge to use natural resources as primary fuel sources (i.e. the sun, water, wind, etc.). Even nuclear energy could be more thoroughly researched so we can use it as a safe and efficient source of fuel that has greater lifespan than fuel and doesn’t harm the environment. For that matter, even electricity seems like a viable option. It is simply wasteful to not only be dependent on oil, a fuel source that is destroying the planet, but to also be dependent on a foreign entity that practices collusion to obtain it.

It seems to me that the greed and voracity of corporate America and has gotten us into a bit of a quagmire. I believe the only reason why we are still dependent on oil as a nation is because the large multi-national oil companies (BP, Shell, Sunoco) are making big bucks off of oil and are too lazy or cheap to change their business models and develop a more efficient fuel source.

In the meantime, while we try to figure out what to do about these absorbent gas prices I think I’ll be holding off on purchasing that car I planning to get for myself as a Christmas gift this year and stick to taking mass transit on my commute. And with the rising cost of flights these days I think my summer travel will be quite limited.