As May 15th approaches, I become more and more engrossed with my fight against No Gas Day. A quick reiteration: I’m not fighting this because I love high gas prices and hate hippies – quite the contrary: I filled my tank up for $50 the other day and screamed and cried, and I also hug quite a few trees myself. But I find No Gas Day to be a bunk idea that takes away from real plans to lower gas prices and help the environment. And now MSNBC is backing me up:
Why one-day gas ‘boycott’ won’t work
The article addresses the accuracy of the No Gas Day email itself (no, gas prices did not drop 30 cents in one day after the first No Gas Day), and goes on to speculate about what would happen if no one used any gas for one day (no cars, lawnmowers, ambulances, or fire trucks) and who exactly would feel the pinch from that. In the end they come to the same conclusion I did: the best way to impact the price…
“is to reduce the amount of gasoline consumed per person. And the best way to do that is to improve the efficiency of cars on U.S. roads. If you doubled your average mileage, you would cut consumption in half.
Now that would put a big crimp in gasoline sales and almost certainly send pump prices tumbling.”
In reality, though, wouldn’t “they” just create less gasoline, keeping the supply/demand ratio about the same and therefore keeping prices where they are? The entire “cut consumption” argument centers around them foolishly continuing to create a similar level of supply, as opposed to cutting production to balance out and maintain high prices.
Eric,
You are correct, especially about the short term. A single day of no one using any gasoline could possibly have no effect on gas prices – it would just give oil companies a chance to build up their reserves for the following day, when everything returned to normal.
A long term decrease in the use of gasoline, however, would hopefully create an environment where companies had to fight for their piece of now smaller pie – decreasing their prices to compete for our business.
Also, a decrease in fuel consumption saves consumers money anyways – whether price itself drops or not.
I’d love to figure out how to -double- my mileage. Good grief!
What America needs (at least in Birmingham, AL) is a public transportation system. In London, UK, you can go just about anywhere on a train/subway. Then hop on a train and go up to the northern part of the country. That just doesn’t happen here.
off topic…
I love this wordpress layout (with the 2 right side columns) and room for a header/footer design!