The Thundering Herd

I dropped the boy off at school today via private motorized vehicle. I am not going to work today, yet as I was driving the kid I was able to witness the rest of the Elk Grove Thundering Herd go about their daily ritual of grinding out solo commutes to work in other cities.

I'm impressed by the quality of their vehicular units. Very few drive cars like mine, a Honda Civic. No, they were mostly SUVs and light duty trucks and mid-sized sedans, but not too many economy cars. I'd wager the average value of each of these units at about $23,000 a piece.

Take a look at the following graph of oil consumption by nation:

then look around your own neighborhood. It's not hard to understand how we consume a quarter of the world's oil, and we do so for such trivial things...like driving a fourteen year old boy to school.

There is no doubt that China and India will develop (they are developing) their own suburban enclaves that will encircle their old cities, as people there will tire of pollution plagued environments and seek to escape to the fresh air of the suburbs twenty two miles distant. They'll still need to work in those same cities, so these nation's inhabitants will grind out their own commutes. They are developing, and you can see from the graph that even during a global economic slowdown they've increased their consumption. Our consumption dropped significantly due to the popping of our hallucinated economic bubble. We don't manufacture anything anymore, nor are we bulldozing tens of thousands of acres annually to build new sprawl (only 351,000 new housal units were built last year), so a lot less oil is being consumed here. For now.

The investment we've plowed into our roads and bridges and our beautiful private vehicles is all so dependent on easy, cheap access to 18.6 million barrels of oil a day, or 6.8 billion barrels per year. All of ANWR has 10 billion barrels.

So the entirety of Alaska's Arctic Refuge is but for less than two years of continued Elk Grovian commuting to work. Our economy loves to stress the value of purchasing more fuel efficient vehicles or perhaps even batterized ones, claiming a whopping 30% savings in annual fuel costs yet all you'd have to do to get a 50% reduction is to fill that seat next to you with another soul and have no capital outlays whatsoever by doing so. No capital outlays while increasing your social capital. There's an idea that's past due.

But we'd rather trade our $23,000 gasoline cars in for $35,000 batterized cars and continue to drive solo sixty miles a day to our cubicles in other cities. And for that, I should thank you for keeping our economy afloat for a few years longer. I will do my part and drive my boy home from school today.