busyUntil the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, "Hit me! Please, hit me again!" You can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you repossess. Take my job and I'll just slink off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and take my health insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.
Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take - inaction. Faced with $4/gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching "as far as the eye can see," according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 mph. Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg PA; they slowed down the Port of Tampa where 50 rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off "to pray for the economy."
My maternal grandfather was a mechanic who worked on semi-trucks. A few folks in or on the fringes of our local magical community are truckers. So that's my bit of background for this issue. My thoughts include:
1) Rising gas prices could shut down the economy more effectively than most other threats. The simple fact is, if gas goes too high, people cannot afford to go to work. I already know several people who have quit or turned down jobs because the transportation expense approached or exceeded what the job would pay. For truckers, whose job IS transportation, this is especially crucial.
2) Truckers tend to be tough-minded individualists. They know how to organize and work together at need, though. They have a lot in common with America's founders. They're really not people you want to pick a fight with. Some of them work for big shipping companies, but many of them are "owner-operators" -- small businesses unto themselves. So there's minimal opportunity to quell a trucking strike via managerial leverage, as can often be done to quell a factory strike. It's like trying to fight a hydra without benefit of a torch.
3) Truckers can shut down the country if they choose to do so. We have designed a society that absolutely requires large-scale constant shipping of almost everything all the time. A three-day snowstorm can be a hazard if it cuts shipping access. Welders or teachers have to strike for weeks before ordinary people notice. Truckers can clog a major interstate in minutes and if they quit altogether, the country would be in fairly desperate straits in less than two weeks. We are simply that dependent on long-range transport, and we did it to ourselves so we have no one else to blame.
4) Truckers cannot be replaced quickly or easily. If contracted teachers strike, you can hire out of the substitute pool, if you can convince the scabs to cross the picket line (not easy most times, but if they're starving broke, some will cross for survival). If factory workers strike, many of them can be replaced by ordinary people who will get the hang of the work in a week or two (factories often have a split between skilled/unskilled labor, with more of the latter). But the trucking industry doesn't have a whole lot of leeway like that, and driving a semi-truck is a skill so fancy that it requires a whole different class of driver's license. Professional drivers are just that: professionals. Their skills take a lot of time to create, so you can't just bribe a bunch of random people to take over their jobs. They're vitally important to our society and they are not dispensable.
5) Remember that "owner-operator" thing? The truckers actually own a lot of the trucks. That means they can take their trucks and go home, and there will not be enough shipping capacity left to supply the country even if people could be found to drive it.
6) Most businesses have a "hard bottom line" somewhere, a point at which it becomes impossible to break even or turn a profit. So it's not like the truckers are striking for a frivolous reason: even if they were willing to be taken advantage of by the oil companies, they would not be able to continue driving once fuel costs exceed a certain level. Most of the time, insufficient pay means people go cold or hungry, and insufficient benefits means they can't come to work because they're sick or tending sick relatives. But for truckers, insufficient pay or exorbitant fuel costs mean they go nowhere; just imagine that the trucks run on money, because that's about what it comes down to. There's just no way to scrimp on gas if driving is your livelihood.
I'm glad to see the truckers striking, though. They've set some clear goals, like demanding an investigation into why the oil companies are reporting record profits when ordinary people can't afford to drive to work. Yes, a trucking strike can be monstrously inconvenient, but we need to support them. Why? The government and the oil companies don't have to care if the population in general is slowly crushed to death by rising fuel prices; they can ignore that until it's far too late to solve the problem. But the truckers can force them to care, because there's no way to rearrange things quickly so that truckers are unnecessary. As much as the government and the big businesses have forced on the American people lately, it's good for them to remember that they are not the only ones with access to devastating leverage. They still govern by the consent of the governed, and if that consent is withdrawn by a crucial mass of people, they will have to respond -- and their options for negative retaliation are substantially curtailed by the fact that they can't afford to destroy the people who make wide-scale shipping possible.
Hopefully the truckers will be able to leverage some interim changes that will make life easier for all of us. In the long term, we need to seek alternative fuel sources, more efficient vehicles, and an economic structure that meets needs locally as much as possible. Save the long-distance shipping for crucial items that can't be made locally.
For more details on the trucking strike, the effects of fuel prices, your Constitutional rights, and how you can support truckers -- look here.
April 8 2008, 18:29:47 UTC 13 years ago
You're right about the deeper problems, of course; oil is a finite resource and we're running out of it. Hence the need for more fuel efficiency, local production, and other alternatives to a country that depends on mass transporation for basic needs.
If we're lucky and diligent, the trucking strike will buy us some time. We'd best use it carefully.
April 8 2008, 19:12:36 UTC 13 years ago
I think the real underlying question is: Why are oil companies reporting record profits?
I think the real answer to that question is: Because people are buying record amounts of gas, even in the face of current gas and oil prices. And that is because our population is expanding exponentially and because we are living more decadently than we ever have before. And by "we" I mean the whole population of planet earth, not just the U.S. or North America. I don't have the numbers to back me up on this (please correct me if you do and I'm wrong!), but I don't think that the big oil boys are actually making significantly more off of each barrel of crude oil or each gallon of refined gas. I think they're just selling a lot more gas and crude. I really want to look into the numbers on this issue, too, but I don't have any links now.
Far be it from me to defend big oil in general, but in terms of the question of current gas prices I don't think big oil is actually acting any differently or less legally or even ethically than it has ever acted.
A climbing guide that I had the pleasure of working with last week does a lot of his guiding work in the Chinese Himalaya. He told me a statistic that I haven't had the time to verify either, but the idea puts this question in good perspective, I think. He said that there exists on average 2.7 cars for every American citizen. In China, there currently exists only one car for every 8 people. But that is rapidly changing, and people in China are trying to close that gap as quickly as possible.
Personally, as much as it will negatively impact my own lifestyle, I think rapidly increasing gas prices may be one of the strongest factors pushing change that actually makes sense in terms of Americans changing thier practices and perceptions of what basic transportation needs are. And to me that is a good thing. It doesn't make sense for people to have long expensive commutes to work or to transport a lot of things super long distances by truck the way we are doing it these days. So I tend to think it won't be bad for those practices to be forced to change.
I don't want us to "win" more time functioning the way we are. I want positive change to happen.
Thoughts
April 8 2008, 20:35:55 UTC 13 years ago
1) I, too, would like to see more details on how oil companies are making their money, who it's going to, and why. I suspect you're right that part of the increase is due to population growth. But wherever it's coming from, it's coming; they're taking money from people who can barely afford it now, and rapidly pushing towards taking money from people who *can't* afford it. So then the system breaks down, which is not good for anyone.
2) Cheap gas encourages people to waste it, yes; we've seen that. But when it's too high, it kicks the legs out from under the entire structure of society as we've designed it. That's bad; it shouldn't be allowed to happen. We need to protect against sudden spikes or too steep a rise, because the cost will ultimately outweigh the benefits.
3) Some European countries can afford prices of $5-7 per gallon for gas. Most of them are smaller than some of our states! The population is denser, the farming is done differently, and they also have substantial infrastructure for mass transit and long-range shipping. We don't. America has always been big and sprawling in comparison to old-world countries. We never did have much of the infrastructure they do, and we've demolished much of what we did have -- taking up railroads, for instance. So we can't afford gas prices as high because our infrastructure is not designed for that and will not work with it.
4) Yes, we need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, a lot. We cannot do that instantly or even quickly. Either we find ways to buy time and use it wisely to reduce our need for massive amounts of gasoline, or we allow our society to hit the wall and have to reassemble what we can from the fragments. This kind of thing has happened before, historically, with other vital materials; hence, ruins.
I really, really, really do not want to do that again. Especially when I've spent my life screaming at people to apply the brakes before they hit the wall. This makes me deeply resentful of governments that waste resources in warfare, businesses that behave like parasites, and consumers who gorge without heed. But none of that changes the size or shape of the functionality envelope. Higher prices might be good for discouraging fuel wastage, but we can't afford to have our shipping industry killed by prices that truckers can't pay, because right now we have not enough other capacity to transport food and other vital goods.
All the philosophizing in the world won't change that. Either we find a way to address the root causes of this mess, and get to work on it promptly, or the society we've built will grind to a halt.
Re: Thoughts
April 8 2008, 21:38:58 UTC 13 years ago
(1) I, too, would like to see more details on how oil companies are making their money, who it's going to, and why. I suspect you're right that part of the increase is due to population growth. But wherever it's coming from, it's coming; they're taking money from people who can barely afford it now, and rapidly pushing towards taking money from people who *can't* afford it. So then the system breaks down, which is not good for anyone.
I agree that when the system breaks down, it might really hurt people. But the system we're talking about breaking down here is the free market. So that's pretty huge. There is no constitutional right to cheap gas, or to a good job in times of a rough economy, you know. From an ethical standpoint, I think that we need to watch out for each other as best we can. But how do we do this now? I don't know.
(2) Cheap gas encourages people to waste it, yes; we've seen that. But when it's too high, it kicks the legs out from under the entire structure of society as we've designed it. That's bad; it shouldn't be allowed to happen. We need to protect against sudden spikes or too steep a rise, because the cost will ultimately outweigh the benefits.
I'm not necessarily against some subsidization of fossil fuels if it comes to that. That may be part of what we need to do keep the economy smooth. But wouldn’t any such subsidization come from tax revenue which would come from the pockets of the people and industries hurt by the rising prices, too? That's a pretty sticky wicket to get into. I would also argue that what we really need to do here is change the structure of society as we designed it, instead of band-aiding it with subsidies. We designed a society that runs on a nonrenewable resource which has some seriously nasty side effects when we burn it like we do, which was silly of us in the first place. But here we are now with knowledge and choices. I think we need to advocate change first as we also continue to limp along with our flawed and now expensive system. Because we have to stop ignoring those other nasty side effects, too.
Re: Thoughts
April 8 2008, 21:52:44 UTC 13 years ago
(3) Some European countries can afford prices of $5-7 per gallon for gas. Most of them are smaller than some of our states! The population is denser, the farming is done differently, and they also have substantial infrastructure for mass transit and long-range shipping. We don't. America has always been big and sprawling in comparison to old-world countries. We never did have much of the infrastructure they do, and we've demolished much of what we did have -- taking up railroads, for instance. So we can't afford gas prices as high because our infrastructure is not designed for that and will not work with it.
Yup, you're right. But I think changing our basic infrastructure, be it with new vehicle technology or something more akin to railroads, or something weird like subsidizing trucking, or some combination of any and all of those is likely to be much more effective than ignoring something like the price of oil, which is at its heart a supply and demand problem that isn’t going to get any better.
(4) Yes, we need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, a lot. We cannot do that instantly or even quickly. Either we find ways to buy time and use it wisely to reduce our need for massive amounts of gasoline, or we allow our society to hit the wall and have to reassemble what we can from the fragments. This kind of thing has happened before, historically, with other vital materials; hence, ruins.
Here is where I disagree with you the most. I agree that we cannot reduce our dependence instantly. But I think that we must do it quickly from an ethical standpoint if we want to avoid hurting the greatest number of people in making the switch over. All of the "time buying" in the world doesn't change the fact that fossil fuel supply is finite, and the effects of continued fossil fuel burning are getting more and more dire. I see sticking our heads in the sand and promising "time buying" solutions as the situation that is far more likely to end us in ruins when we finally reach the point of fossil fuel scarcity. If we haven’t gotten in on the first floor of whatever solution can be found, we’re less likely to reap it’s rewards.
What we are left with here is a really complex problem. It is a problem much more complex than something that any amount of holding hands and singing "Stick it to the Man," is going to solve. This is a complex problem that needs a complex solution. So let’s work on solutions! Let’s not cling to the technology and resource that made most of the rich people in the world today rich (and is continuing to make them rich). Let’s work on something that makes more sense from the ground up.
I don't like being the guy to say, "This isn't the fault of those money grubbing oil and gas guys," but I really really don't think the problem is the fault of big oil in this case. The problem is our whole society being based on an infinte supply of a nonrenewable and finite resource. What we see here is more of a "Hey, look where free market capitalism got us, and can we get out of here?" kind of thing. The thing that used to make lots of people money isn't making everybody money anymore. And now something's gotta give. I think dealing with the problem in the context of today’s world requires innovation and change and forward thinking. It requires pusing the functionality envelope in the face of the people with the most money trying to continue hanging onto "their share." Of course you're right, we can't switch from trucking to future magic to transport our goods overnight, but if we don't start working on actual alternative or new solutions now, perhaps instead of pushing stopgaps and spending energy raging against straw men that aren't the actual problem, we're in for a world of hurt.
Re: Thoughts
April 10 2008, 00:47:28 UTC 13 years ago