$3.39

No, not a follow-up to yesterday's post. Not yet.

Wait. Yes it is.

I paid $3.39 (and nine-tenths of a cent) per gallon for gasoline today. To fill up my mom's car, which I will be borrowing tomorrow while mine is in the shop. It cost more than $42 to top off her tank. And I got off easy - the station across the street was $3.49/gallon.

When Douglas Adams traveled to Beijing in 1988 on his quest to see a Baiji dolphin as part of the Last Chance to See expeditions, he encountered a city of bicycles. There were motor vehicles, of course, and massive pollution, but bicycles were the primary form of transportation.

Not anymore. Cars have become far more common in China than they were two decades ago. As the economic status of the Chinese people improves, many of them are emulating the lifestyle long considered standard for Americans and other Western cultures - including two cars in every garage. India is following suit.

In Lester del Rey's short story "The Coppersmith," one of the Little People awakes from six score years of slumber to find himself in a world he does not understand, where aluminum pots and pans resist his copper-mending skills and automobiles belch filth into the air, smoke that irritates him in a way that his beloved pipe tobacco does not. In the end he comes to an accommodation with this new world. In order to earn the honest living required of him, he takes a job in the only place where he finds that his skills with the old metals are sought after: a body shop, where he mends the copper and brass parts that once comprised critical parts of auto engines. (del Rey wrote this in 1939.) He reasons that, even though the pollution from automobiles sickens him and keeps others of his kind in enforced slumber, the more cars there are on the road, the sooner they will use up the finite natural resource that fuels them. So he puts his skills to work to speed the day.*

If only it were that simple.

How soon will we use up all of our available oil? It's hard to say, and it really depends on what your definition of the word "available" is. Once upon a time crude oil could be found bubbling to the surface in some places, but later it became necessary to drill to get at the big deposits. And then to drill deeper, and sideways, and in more inaccessible places. Someday all that may be considered low-hanging fruit as oil exploration turns to more and more difficult sources of oil.

Not that the availability of oil is what's driving the price up. No, there are other factors at play, economic factors too complex for me to even think about reading up on this close to bedtime.

But oil is a finite resource. And even if we're not in danger of running out of it yet, at some point we will run low on the easy-to-get stuff. And then the question will be, what premium will consumers be willing to pay for the oil that was more difficult to get?

My Economics professor in college told my class that the world will never run out of oil...technically. The price of oil, he maintained, would climb as the availability dwindled, rising as high as the market would be able to bear. Finally a day would come when the market - the consumers - could not afford to buy any more oil at a cost that producers would be willing to sell at. And there would be one last barrel of oil that would be unsold, because no one would be able - or at least willing - to pay the asking price. And that last barrel of oil would go in a museum, with a velvet rope around it and a small plaque explaining the history of petroleum in just a few sentences.

I believe the solution to fuel oil availability lies with plants. No, not with the generation of Ethanol from corn or sugar beets or weeds or what have you; I think that process is too inefficient, too energy-intensive, to make sense in the near term. No, I think the solution rests with plants that don't exist yet, genetically engineered plants designed to use the power of photosynthesis to manufacture plant oils that can be used as fuel oils with minimal processing. (Isn't this how The Day of the Triffids started? The book, not the movie.) Of course, this wouldn't do a lot to curb greenhouse gas emissions, or to slow down our headlong charge towards...well, see my last post.

In the meantime the price of gasoline keeps going up. Yet I haven't seen a reduction in the number of gas-guzzlers on the highway during my daily commute. Nor have I done anything to reduce the distance that I commute, or to reduce the amount of fuel I consume during that commute, roughly 1.75 gallons a day.

Nope, all I can do is bitch. $3.39?! Who's crazy here?


*Lester del Rey was a remarkable writer, but you shouldn't need me to tell you about that. For a similar "mythological creature seeks employment" story, read "The Pipes of Pan", in which the Greek god Pan seeks a way to earn his daily bread after his last devotee has passed on.