The price of gasoline: Do we try and explain this to Americans or let them find out the hard way?

Americans don't want to hear the real reasons behind our gasoline price problem. Do we tell them this or do we simply let them go off the cliff and come over to say "I told you so" afterwards? I just don't know.

The fact is, though, cost of gasoline is going up no matter what we do. I'm going to intentionally ignore the Iran issue and other temporary things and discuss the long-term chronic issues.

Economic Reasons
Speculators are driving the price ahead of the demand curve, but the fact is we've gone past the point of peak oil... or at least, peak light sweet crude. What's left out there is extremely expensive to get at, which means prices are going to go up. Plus (primarily thanks to America giving away its jobs to them), gasoline demand is skyrocketing in China and India; lower gasoline usage in America means nothing because it's being greatly offset by faster-rising demand in Asia. Plus Mexico and other countries are becoming rich, too, and their demand for gasoline is all going up. Global demand for gasoline is going up; and production is not. When demand outstrips production you have price increases - and, looming in the future, you have shortages and outages.

What's that side bit I said about outsourcing American jobs? Well, that's contributing directly to the devaluation of the US dollar, too. The downward pressure on the dollar is causing the price of gasoline to go up. The Government's need to take care of the millions of Americans put out of work by globalism, is also driving up our debt and driving down the value of the dollar. This drives up the prices of imports - including oil.

Oh and did I forget to mention that when we do put people out of work they have to get out and drive to apply for jobs all day? That burns a hell of a lot of gasoline when you multiply it by the number of unemployed we have in America now.

Domestic refineries are closing because they can't charge over-inflated prices to Americans. This cuts down on the supply of gasoline because oil has to be refined into gasoline. This is also driving up the price.

Cultural Reasons
America is afflicted with the problem of urban sprawl. This means, basically, that many people are sub-urban residents - meaning they live 5 or 10 miles or more from their jobs or the places where they shop. This means long daily commutes that burn gasoline. Add to this the fact that most Americans drive cars to get where they want to go, and you can see the multiplicative effect this has on the demand for and use of gasoline.

Most Americans don't want to hear about the idea of being forced to move closer to shorten their commutes; and for good reason, actually. Doing so typically means paying a very steep price not only just to move one's belongings, but also to pay much higher rents or mortgages because residential zones closer to job hubs and shopping areas cost a hell of a lot more to rent or buy. This will typically more than eat up any gasoline money savings that one might realize by avoiding the urban sprawl lifestyle. Ironically, forcing everyone to de-sprawl will drive up the demand for urban real estate and thus the already astronomical prices in those areas. It will also lead to overcrowding; anyone who has lived in New York ([url=http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html]population: 17 million[/url) or Tokyo (population: 33 million) can attest to the horrors of overcrowding and the price of real estate in such a situation. And those are the modernized overcrowded cities; in some parts of America it could look more like the uber polluted city of Shenzhen, China (population: 8 million), crime-ridden Mexico City (population: 17 million), or slum-filled Mumbai (population: 14 million). America needs to slake its hunger for gasoline to avoid being crammed into cities like that.

The stress of a long suburban or rural commute would simply be replaced by the stress of walking amidst a crushing mass of people. Living in such places is indeed enough to inspire one to entertain a few... Malthusian thoughts. This, again, is why so many people choose the lifestyle of urban sprawl. This is another way that we keep up our enormous demand for gasoline.

Yes, America could pack people into cities similar to New York, with a relatively okay mass transit system and high speed rail between major population hubs. But we completely lack the will to do this. See the constant opposition to high speed rail, and the dismantling of the public bus transit systems (for example: the Red Car). So, again, this is another way that our gasoline-hungry culture is reinforced.

Worse yet, there is more than just a political or cultural problem with cramming people into smaller areas: natural disasters. As we saw in 2011, a single Tohoku earthquake and the resulting tsunami in overcrowded Japan killed 15 thousand people in a single catastrophic incident. We have major fault lines in California, the New Madrid thrust fault in the midwest, and probably some unseen ones on the East Coast. Major earthquakes waiting to happen, with devastating consequences for large cities with even the best-built high-rise buildings. Again, another point in favor of urban sprawl - never keep your populace all in one place. But again, this drives up the demand for gasoline. And its prices, too.

This turned out to be a long section but these facts can't be ignored; our culture is a MAJOR part of what drives America's thirst for gasoline, and why the cost of gasoline will only go up. I've only scratched the SURFACE of this issue; I haven't even gotten into the non gasoline-related damage done by urban sprawl to our ecosystem.

Environmental Reasons
The cost of gasoline is more than what you pay at the pump. It also involves the cost we pay in the form of pollution and global warming.

As we speak, we are seeing freakish weather patterns all over the world. This is being caused by a rise in temperatures not seen before the dawn of the industrial age; and it is directly in line with the effects that scientists predicted would happen with the discharge of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Gases which are caused by burning coal and gasoline and other hydrocarbons.

These freakish weather patterns have resulted in droughts and mass fires in Russia which recently damaged their wheat harvest; a hard freeze in California and Florida's 2011-2012 winter season that has damaged their orange harvest (among other crops), which will mean a shortage in oranges and orange juice; and a devastating drought in Texas in 2011 that led to massive statewide fires and also the culling of many herds of cattle, which will result in higher meat prices soon (if not already). Hydrocarbon-induced global warming is the prime suspect behind these problems.

How is this relevant to the rest of the article? Simple. You are paying hidden costs for gasoline in the form of higher food prices, caused by global warming-induced weather damage to crop yields. If gasoline remained cheap, we would burn even more of it, poisoning our atmosphere even faster, and over the same period of time we would be even worse off, with even more dramatic crop damage, and sooner than later, famines and food shortages. All because of our thirst for gasoline.

So What Can We do?
Well, we liberals know what we can do!

We can encourage more bicycling, carpooling and van-pooling.
We can bump up funding for public transportation.
We can switch to electric cars or fund further research into hydrogen fuel cell technology. We can build high-speed rail systems.
We can de-suburbanize the populace, moving them from a million small cities into, let's say, a tenth as many mid-sized cities (bigger than Podunk but considerably smaller than New York).
We can localize food production to shorten the transportation times and fuel cost for food.
We can fight to bring jobs back to America and then encourage telecommuting-style work for tech workers and other types of jobs, by the strategic application of tax breaks or subsidies.

But that would take getting past the GOP, and worse yet, America's addiction to its own gasoline-addicted lifestyle.

We're going to have to try to explain this to America, or hope that enough of the civilized world is left when all this is sorted out, to say "we told you so".