IT SEEMS A LIFETIME AGO that gasoline was cheap, plentiful, and available in a variety of designer colors and flavors. Who among us doesn't have fond memories of that time when rivers of gasoline flowed in the street and natural geysers of high-octane auto juice spewed skyward, free for anyone who cared to collect it?
For me, it's hard not to smile when remembering the hot summer days of my childhood, when Mr. Schlossberg, the kindly owner of the Esso filling station in my neighborhood, opened wide the spigots of his gas pumps so kids could frolic in a cool fountain of raining, inexpensive fuel.
Of course, perhaps these are just fanciful daydreams I've had while standing at the gas pump watching "total sale" increase to a number that activates massive stomach-acid production.
Whether it's insatiable demand for oil from China, or stick-in-the-mud insurance companies that frown on children playing in gasoline fountains, or radical environmentalists, who insist that rivers of free petrol draining into our water supply is somehow bad, we've entered a new age. Gas is expensive, and sometimes it's not even clear why.
Prices rise like a Saturn V rocket when commodities traders hear that the night-shift supervisor at Bob's Oil Refinery is out with the flu. But after he's recovered, the price falls as slowly as a snail parachuting from 10,000 feet. Frankly, this inconsistency is nearly as hard to explain as the notion of a skydiving snail.
As something of a fuel-economy aficionado — I didn't use any fuel at all between writing "fuel-economy" and "aficionado" — here are my five suggestions for surviving the age of expensive gas:
1. Use Alternative Fuels: Modify your car to run on a renewable gruel made from household trash, grass clippings, saliva, and pig-farm runoff. How? Beats me. But man, if you could do it, that would be totally huge!
2. Travel to a Different 2005: Transport yourself to a 2005 when all vehicles are solar powered and mass transit is plentiful. To get there, just time travel back to the early 1990s when John Kerry and others proposed a 50-cent gas tax to fund development of fuel-efficient vehicles and to build mass transit. Bring news clippings about today's gas prices (and global warming) to show gas-tax opponents. And while you're there, make sure George McFly punches out Biff and then kisses Lorraine at the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance!
3. Buy a Tribrid: Taking the hybrid engine to the next level, this innovation briefly uses a gasoline engine to charge the electric battery that powers your vehicle. But that's where hybrid ends and tribrid begins: Once at cruising speed, the tribrid smoothly begins to draw power directly from your personal life force, or "ch'i." The tribrid will spur massive conservation, because an energy-wasting drive into town for pizza and beer won't seem so appealing when it will cost you some of your essential life force!
(By the way, Ford's 2006 "Nirvana" sport coupe plays nonstop meditation music to increase the flow of ch'i to the engine.)
4. The Flintstones Option: If you can't afford a hybrid (or tribrid), modify your current vehicle by punching two holes in the driver's-side floorboard, placing your feet on the ground, and propelling yourself forward with your leg muscles. You'll save gas, protect the environment (byproducts are just sweat and lactic acid), and develop rippling thighs that even Lance Armstrong will envy!
5. Telecommute: To save gas, tell your boss you'd like to "work from home." When she notes that a phrase combining the words "work" and "home" is preposterous on its face, promise that you'll really be working and not developing a renewable fuel gruel, time traveling to the early 1990s, taking a hacksaw to your car's floorboards, or going skydiving with your pet snail.
Actually, probably better not mention your skydiving snail.
by Bill Shein
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