Nelson’s Corner: Don’t Whine About Gas Prices

Oil hasn’t been in the news this much since Diddy’s trial last fall.

In another essay I ranted about the media’s obsession with gas prices. Children are slaughtered in Iranian schools and thousands have died elsewhere in the Mideast, but those damn gas prices!  If I see one more entitled American whining about the cost of filling the ravenous tank on the pickup they use only to drive to Starbucks…

Oil is in the news these days in my hometown of Erie. A political flare-up has been sparked by our Town Council’s rather sneaky negotiations to either sell or lease the town’s mineral rights. The process is driven by the conservative majority and their methods are Trumpesque: Highly secretive, probably self-dealing, and rife with obvious conflicts of interest.

A note on the euphemistic phrase “mineral rights.” In policy and public discourse this phrase is employed to wash a patina of innocence over the dirty business of the oil and gas industry. “Mineral” is a class of substances including diamonds, emeralds, gold. and quartz. 

Our no-longer-little town is not haggling over the rights to mine for gold or emeralds. It’s all about “Drill Baby Drill.” Most community chatter is about the comparative benefits of leasing vs. selling. The esoteric economic calculations should be of little interest. Whether in our town, the nation, or the withering planet the only calculation should be the toll on our communities or the planet’s health. 

The local quest for more oil and gas includes horizontal drilling of nearly five miles. This bit of trickery allows a greasy corporation to set up extraction businesses in a more sympathetic or stupid jurisdiction and then access the “minerals” from beneath homes like mine. Health and environmental concerns be damned. The oil and gas companies assure us that there are no health and environmental risks. Ummmm…yeah, sure. The risks are significant and quantifiable.

As with bitching about gas prices, the earnest capitalists in our community are focused on money, not ethics. “The sale or lease of “mineral rights” will benefit the town!” “Imagine the tax savings!”

Should the odd conservative or oil baron accidentally land on this essay, I will acknowledge that the topic of the world’s energy resources is complex, perhaps beyond my progressive educator ken. I know that a windmill in every backyard or a sudden total switch to so-called “renewables” is not possible.

But it is undeniable that burning fossil fuels is bad—inarguably catastrophic—for the planet and our survival as a species. But despite that inevitability, ya know – those gas prices! We’ve gotta keep that oil swooshing through the vulnerable pipes beneath my grandchildren and through the Strait of Hormuz.

The enormous, and enormously complex, global economy largely runs on fossil fuels. Starving that beast can have dire consequences. The world, at least the privileged world, is gluttonous. A gastric band—pardon the pun—might reverberate through the world economy in ways that would also cause great harm. But as with gluttons everywhere, a little diet wouldn’t hurt. 

In a chat with one of my many doctors this morning, we commiserated over the broad abdication of our collective responsibilities for the future of our children and (my) grandchildren. I used to claim, with empirical justification, that my environmental conscience was selfless, that I would not be alive to see the devastation being wrought by our greed and ignorance. Now, through the years gifted by my medical treatments and by way of several decades of flaccid environmental activism, the effects of global warming are bearing down on my retirement years like a freight train of oil cars.

Pushing back on powerful corporate interests, climate change denialists, and oil-slick local politicians is like trying to stop that freight train. It takes every set of hands we can muster.

The answer to Erie’s “sell or lease” question is “none of the above.” We should hold on to  “mineral rights” as if they are the diamonds and gold they are not. Will saying “no thanks” have economic consequences? Perhaps. Can it even stop them? Perhaps not.

The struggle to save the planet requires all world citizens to do what they can. Conserve energy, use alternatives when feasible and point out the gas and oil industry’s greed and dishonesty to your family, friends, neighbors, enemies and Town Council members.

And don’t whine about oil prices. The higher they are, the less we burn.

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