High gas prices: the truth that can set us free. Can we handle it?

By KC Golden
Climate Solutions

The ritual is familiar now: another presidential primary season, another run up in oil prices, another flurry of national finger-pointing -- a brief encounter with the truth about the consequences of our addiction: fossil fuels are way too costly.

We can expect the price at the pump to cycle down again – suppliers don’t want to gouge us to the point where we get serious about reducing our dependence. But when the price drops, it’s lying.

No matter how prices spike or plunge at the pump, fossil fuels are bleeding us. Their impact on the climate alone is an epic heist of the planet’s wealth. Add the price we pay in blood and strife to navigate energy geopolitics, and we’re totally fleeced.

What’s causing oil prices to rise again now? Growing Asian demand? Iran? Big Oil’s greed? Speculators? Election year politics? Pick your poison; the take-away is the same: as long as we’re strung out on the stuff, we’ll keep taking high costs on the chin. If we square up to this challenge, we can free ourselves with clean energy, cleaner cars, and better transportation choices – available solutions that remain underdeveloped because we shun the truth.

This truth faces an especially steep uphill battle in presidential election years. Reality, insiders warn, isn’t going to get anybody elected. This is conventional political “wisdom.” But is it right?

The data are sparse, since the political market for the truth has barely been tested. But there are encouraging signs that voters are rejecting the most egregious lies. Newt, with his $2.50 a gallon pledge, won’t be the first candidate to go down waving lollipops for voters who can’t be trusted with the truth.

In the last presidential cycle, Senate Majority Leader and presidential hopeful Bill Frist suggested that Uncle Sam write everyone a $100 check to ease the pain of high gas prices. This shameless pandering wasn’t the only reason Frist fizzled, but it clearly hurt his prospects. 

Then, after McCain had pretty much secured the nomination, came the “gas tax holiday” debate.  Candidates Clinton and McCain supported it. Candidate Obama didn’t. This helped establish Obama as a credible change agent - a leader more interested in solutions than political puffballs. Voters rewarded the truth.

So far in this cycle, President Obama has been more willing to wrestle with the truth than his prospective challengers.  He’s calling BS on “drill baby drill”: “I mean, the American people aren’t stupid… You know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” he said in a recent speech.  

But the President is still hedging the big truth – you know, the Inconvenient one. His “all of the above” gimmick conspicuously ignores the IEA’s recent warning that expanding fossil fuel infrastructure would make it virtually impossible to avert dangerous climate change. Burying this truth exposes us to costs far greater – if less politically salient – than $4 gas.      

Oil disrupts democracy and undermines economic security. Carbon emissions from burning it disrupt the climate. Addiction to it threatens deeply held American values of responsibility, fairness, and self-determination -- it hardly matters whose soil it comes from. We’ll pay its exorbitant costs until we free ourselves from it.