Shut Up And Drive

I just got done writing yet ANOTHER essay about gas prices—this one to our little local newspaper, The Brunswick News. They have published five of my writings over the past year.

I won’t bore you with the entire text of my “Letter to the Editor”… let’s just say that it was written in response to the newspaper’s call for president Bush to emulate his father, George H.W. Bush, in releasing some of the oil stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help reduce gas prices.

Are you one of the people that actually believe that such government intervention would help gas prices?

OK, sit down and let me go through this again.

TODAYS GAS PRICES ARE NOT RECORD HIGHS!!!!!

You got that? No?

Well let’s look at a little history contained on the Department of Energy Web Site.

As this graph shows, the price of unleaded regular gas hit $2.85, adjusted for inflation, in 1980 during the Carter administration. Last time I checked, we’re forty or fifty cents below that right now.

Another thing the graph shows is this trend:

Year...Price then...Price 2004 dollars...Year...Price Then...Price 2004 dollars
1920....$0.298.........$2.812.................1970.....$0.357..........$1.737
1930....$0.200.........$2.256.................1980.....$1.245..........$2.853
1940....$0.184.........$2.479.................1985.....$1.165............$2.044
1950....$0.268.........$2.099.................1990.....$1.127..........$1.629
1960....$0.311...........$1.986.................1995.....$1.109..........$1.373
...........................................................2000.....$1.486..........$1.629

I know that the government’s inflation figures make most peoples eyeballs roll back in their head, but look at that chart with me for just a minute.

In 1920, when Henry Ford’s Model T was bringing autos to the average Joe's driveway, gas cost 29 cents a gallon. What was that number, adjusted for inflation? $2.81?

In 1960, right after my dad traded his 56 Chevy two door in for a Chevy Nomad station wagon, gas cost 31 cents a gallon. What was that number, adjusted for inflation? $1.98 ?

Except for a period in the 1990’s, it looks to me like the price of gas has always tended to hover within 25 cents higher or lower of the equivalent of $2.00.

So yes, things are a little high now, but it hardly could be defined as a national emergency. In my opinion, gas prices are not president Bush’s fault and there is little he can do on a short term basis that will have much effect on them.

Dumping all the oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would buy us about 31 days of driving, based on our current consumption of 9 million barrels of oil per day in automobiles. We better start drilling in ANWAR, looking at other domestic sources of oil, and build a few new refineries, or things are just going to get worse.

So like I said earlier...SHUT UP AND DRIVE.