What a dilemma for freedom-loving Americans.
We get caught up in the powerful emotions on display in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Libya, as one authoritarian regime after another is confronted by its own people. Our own commitment to democratic principles puts our hearts on the side of those risking their lives for freedom.
At the gas pump, though, our emotions turn to righteous indignation over escalating prices. Now it’s our freedom that’s top of mind — the freedom to drive around on the cheap.
The connection between people rising up in the Middle East and gas prices rising here at home is as real as that big number on your gas-pump receipt. And it’s a useful reminder that our dependence on oil is not just an environmental problem, but an economic and national-security threat we can’t afford to minimize.
Oil prices on Tuesday reached their highest levels in more than two years, $95 a barrel. Locally, gasoline is about 60 cents more per gallon than a year ago. Stocks fell sharply Tuesday over worries that unrest in the Middle East could hamper oil production, sending prices higher and threatening an economic recovery that’s finally starting to build momentum.
Remember when gasoline broke the $4 barrier in 2008? That’s also when the recession started. Gas prices weren’t the sole cause, but they made things worse. With worldwide demand on the rise, some analysts already were predicting $4 gas will return this year.
How will we feel if the people of Libya, a major oil exporter, win their freedom but the flow of oil is interrupted in the process? Will their liberation lessen our grumbling over higher gas prices? What if a similar uprising starts in Saudi Arabia, the region’s top oil producer? Do we root for democracy or cheap gas?
Beyond such moral questions, the reality is that the days of cheap gas are over. The need to decrease our dependence on it, particularly the imported variety, has never been more urgent.
Policies that increase vehicle fuel-efficiency, that encourage the proliferation of electric cars, and that create incentives for the development of viable alternatives to oil aren’t passing fads. The more we can do, nationally and locally, to further such goals, the more we’ll enhance our own economic independence.
And the farther removed we’ll be from those ruthless regimes trying so hard to hold their own people down.
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