Priorities

Chuck Asay Slate

Today at Slate Magazine the cartoon series of the day is about oil.
Go and flip through them and there are all of these political cartoon about oil --
Like this one. Two people are lying in a hospital bed, bandaged head to toe and the caption reads, "but it was fuel efficient." The Headline in the paper on the table says, "Congress Wants Car Makers... More Fuel Efficient..."

As it happens, I have been thinking about this all week. I drive a big car. I drive a Volvo XC. Big, heavy, and with a big tank.

Right now it costs about $65 to fill up every week -- and I don't drive very much. I feel bad about the gas mileage.

So for my fun this morning I've been fishing around on Kelly's Blue Book and Crash Photo sites.

I honestly think gas prices may double in the time I thought this car would last. The article on Kelly's Blue Book about the Toyota Prius says, "long term costs associated with the car are unknown."

I bought it for safety -- furthermore, it's my second Volvo, I've been in a series of accidents, and I really think that the car has protected my children and I from a fair amount of damage. Once I got hit from behind -- hard -- by a minivan. I was 7 months pregnant with an toddler in the back and we were fine.


link
the way the crumple zone works is that the car folds up around the passengers, protecting them in a metal cage.


Not all cars act like that.

I've been thinking about trading it in...

I think I'll wait.

The Best Tool We Have

"The oil rig rumbles to life, breaking the early morning quiet in this neighborhood of urban townhouses and big box stores with a deafening screech and roar."

So reads the lead in a story by Gillian Flaccus for Newsweek. Because the price of oil is so high, many wells previously deemed empty enough are being revisited with new and better technology to drain every last drop.

There are some concerns, according to the article, that some of the wells have been in disrepair for a long time, that some of the new ways of drilling and extracting could prove unstable, and that unforeseen environmental effects could be big.

I am intrigued by this.
What do we revisit when the stakes are raised -- when time passes...
The crumbs we leave behind during prosperity may be nourishment later.

Then I came across a great website. The website for the Union of Concerned Scientists. They have all sorts of great information there!

And look at this:

"Increasing fuel economy is by far the best tool we have for cutting our oil dependence. It will deliver fast results. It has been proven to work from experience—we roughly doubled the fuel economy of our cars between the 1970s and the late 1980s. We can do this right now. The technology needed to increase the average fuel economy of our cars and trucks to 40 miles per gallon (mpg) has already been developed, but for the most part is collecting dust on automakers' shelves.

If we increased fuel economy to 40 mpg over 10 years, then within 15 years we would have saved more oil than we would ever get out of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge over its entire 40-50 year life. And the savings from better fuel economy would keep on growing indefinitely, while the oil wells would dry up."

I'm not exactly sure what these two things have in common -- but I know I was relieved for the second -- and desperately needed a story that sounded not quite so desperate.