Sunday, June 11, 2006

Do We Really Want Gas Prices to go Down?

In my opinion -- No.

We need gas prices to continue to go up, so that people can make good decisions in relation to fuel efficiency.

If the prices of fuel were to start falling, people would go back to their old bad habits of buying fuel inefficient cars. This has happened multiple times. Each time gas goes up, fuel efficiency becomes more important: the gas shortages in the early 70s, the early 80s, and once again right now. When prices stabilize or go down, the interest goes down. In recent years the average fuel economy of cars in the US has gone down. Forget that technology has done great things to improve the efficiency of a car, people went for bigger (even though there is usually only one person in the car), faster (even though there is a speed limit, and even the most efficient of cars can travel that fast), and more powerful (even though all those SUVs I see in DC are never hauling tons of stuff like you see in commercials).

Keep prices going up and people will come around to making the right choices.

-- Andy

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home