Demand Reduction

There are now as many cars on Franklin Blvd. as ever, now that gasoline is on the cheap. Tonight we had our first substantial rainfall of the year and as I rode my bike over Hwy 99 it was stopped stopped! as is the usual pattern during inclement weather. When 99 is dead, Franklin Blvd. becomes a parking lot, and my little bicycle is about three times faster than any motor vehicle. I can routinely beat cars from the Campbell Soup factory on 47th all the way home when it's raining. Six full miles.

I'm not the only one to report increased driving, and it flies in the face of Mrs. Palin's Drill! Drill! Drill! mantra of two months ago while now she's silent on the issue. Drilling more doesn't do shit if all we're doing is driving more. The same goes for Sean Hannity, who two months ago claimed that our eight hundred dodecaheptaseptaquadrillion barrels of oil in the Bakken shale deposits in the Rockies would relieve us of our foreign oil dependence. As far as shale oil goes, we've extracted precisely dick in eighty years, and for good reason -- it would cost three hundred dollars a barrel to extract, and with oil now at $60 and falling further, who's gonna do it? You?

We're driving more because the 'crisis' was so short lived that we've failed to permanently address our asinine behavioral decisions. Instead of true demand destruction, it was only demand reduction while we parked our Denalis in the garage for a brief summer hibernation. We will soon return to luxury SUVs for everyone with a pulse (as should be expected in our exceptional nation) and we'll fuggeta about the 'crisis' of ought-eight. Then, perhaps in 2010, or 2015, we'll have another 'crisis' and we'll hear the Drill! Drill! Drill! mantra again.