Fossil Eyes

It seems the price of a barrel of crude hits a "new high" every other day -- thanks in no small part to the commodities speculators. But they didn't create the problem, they're just making it worse for the rest of us by capitalizing on it.

I wonder how much a gallon of gas in this country will have to cost before it radically changes my driving habits -- $4? $5? We've just upgraded our vehicles so that we can be safer and more fuel efficient, but that's only a matter of degrees. I used to spend upwards of three hundred dollars a month just to get back and forth to work. If I've shaved off even one hundred dollars a month with the new vehicle I'll consider myself lucky.

Not that I'm straining my arm to pat myself on the back for my Herculean conservation efforts. I had briefly considered a hybrid, but the technology is relatively new and I've read conflicting reports regarding their efficiency, reliability, and so on. One of the stories I read went so far as to discourage buyers from considering the hybrids because the extra money spent on the technology would outweigh any fuel savings. Apparently, the reviewer didn't consider that some would buy a hybrid to conserve our fossil fuels irrespective of the slight additional costs.

An electric vehicle is out of the question at the moment. They must be plugged in to the house or a charging station to recharge, so I don't see any conservational advantages as long as most of our electricity is made from the burning of fossil fuels. Also, battery technology -- which hasn't changed much in the last hundred years -- is just starting to evolve past the point of needing large, heavy cells to store power.

So for the foreseeable future, I'll just have to content myself with driving smarter and looking forward to another vehicular upgrade in a few years when oil will be even more dear than it is today and automotive technology will have (hopefully) advanced to offset it.