Gasoline and Our Community
Submitted by R. Abner Perney
Driving home Monday evening, January 17, I noticed that regular gas had jumped up to $3.159 a gallon, at many Salina stations. That’s 5.33 percent in just the first 2 weeks of this year! You can’t blame it on Obama. It’s just the reflection of the world market now that the US elections are over, and there is pretty good agreement that we are either past peak oil production world wide, or within a couple years of it at the most (our Pentagon is going with 2012.)
Look at the possibility that this would become a trend for the rest of the year. At a nice round 5 per cent every two weeks. That’s $4.03 by April, $ 5.40 by July. $6.57 by September. I can’t bear to go on. But you should get the picture, and you should remember that gas did go up this fast to top $4.00 in July, 2008. And now, with the demand increasing world-wide, and supply decreasing there is no reason to believe it will ever go back down substantially.
It means several important things for us in Salina, KS, USA. First we need to concentrate on developing a sustainable, resilient, economy that can help us adapt to a much more difficult world. A world where growth fueled by cheap energy comes to a halt. A world where the US economy is no longer the largest. A world where it is no longer financially feasible to ship food thousands miles to our supermarkets.
Our highest priority to remain alive as a balanced full service community of about 50,000 population should be to develop a reliable Local Food Supply. History shows that it is possible. Salina used to be fed by farms within a 50 mile radius. We used to have dairies, hogs, chickens, cattle and the necessary slaughter houses that close, to feed our community. We used to have commercial bakeries, orchards and vegetable growers, close by. Having the basic security that local food provides is invaluable and we need that kind of security to survive here, where we are, on the edge of a vast area of the country where population has been declining steadily since 1880.
The next priorities should be to produce as many of the other products we have come to expect in our daily lives closer to home – at least in our own country. We can’t afford to continue to import nearly everything from China, and India.
Simultaneously, we need to become much more energy efficient in our transportation. We need to lobby for and demand universal railroad service, like we had from the early 1900’s through World War II, for both passengers and freight of all kinds. The specialization of railroads into limited commodity shipping in long unit trains has gone too far. Rail is the most efficient mechanical form of long distance transportation, powered either with fossil fuels or electricity.
For local transportation we need to walk more and switch to bicycles for the many short trips we take every day. Americans did that from the beginning of the country until the nineteen-fifties. We’d all be healthier if we left our cars parked more and went to work and shopping using our own self propulsion. Salina is small enough and dense enough that most of us could do this.
Start today. Seek out and support local food and local business, even if it costs a little more. Drive less. Get your old bikes out and use them for going places and doing things, and walk more too!
~ R. Abner Perney, Serious student of cars, the automotive industry and automobile culture for at least 56 of my 64 years.