Projo Cars Blog

I remember a cartoon from my youth showing the driver of a sports car racing through the countryside and assuring his nervous companion, "Darn it, I can afford high gas prices."

Without doubt there are many folks who can pay $4 a gallon and not really worry about it. It is, after all, just a few extra hundred dollars a year.

But the run-up in prices this spring and summer has certainly focused our attention on the cost of driving and the effect has been dramatic: Americans have driven 53.2 billion miles less since November than they did in the previous year.

In addition, we have been turning away from the SUVs we so dearly loved through the 1990s and looking into smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.

In a sense, it's been a game of catch-up. High gas prices have forced us to join the folks in most developed countries who have been used to high fuel prices for years. And our prices are still low compared to theirs!

And the smart money says there is no return to cheap gas. All the automakers are betting on smaller cars and making dramatic investments to stay ahead of the curve.

Meanwhile, I do not know if there is a connection between the price of fuel and environmentalism, but there seems to be an acceptance of global warming as a fact of life in such places as Europe and less endless debate about whether it is fact or fiction.

For example, the notion of carbon footprints, or the "measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide" seems widely accepted and employed in various ways in social planning at all levels of government and industry.

Maybe it will catch on here.

- Peter C.T. Elsworth

 Tags  Environment fuel prices

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