Appeasement?

It's that time of year again. Mother's Day has come and gone. Graduates are graduating. Students are applauding the end of school and dreaming up summer antics. Memorial Day weekend is happening.

I dig back into my memories and recall the annual disturbing pattern: day by day, sometimes hour by hour, once you get past Mother's Day, gasoline prices sneak upward. A penny here. A nickel there, and before you know it, gasoline prices are poised to reach their summer peaks and profits.

Sure, the companies take advantage of the least little bump or nudge or gallop of potential fiscal chaos throughout the year, whether caused by someone dampening a spigot in a foreign country or the natural calamity of a hurricane. But generally, regular as clockwork, you know when summer's about to start and the companies get ready for people to spend bucks for vacations.

But not this year.

Over the past week, ten days, it has seeped into my consciousness that gasoline prices haven't been tracing their usual trajectories. Two weekends ago, when I traveled to preach in other cities, I was thrilled to find a couple of stations where the price was less than $2.70/gallon. (Ok - I'm aware that that's really cheap in some parts of the world, and cheaper than it was during 'the great gas price crisis', but for my purposes at the moment, $2.75+ was the norm.)

I've been economizing by not driving unless I absolutely have to, so my encounters with gasoline prices have been somewhat intermittent. Over the past two weeks, though, my forays through the community have brought an odd phenomenon to my attention: gasoline prices have actually been headed downward. I went past one of my usual stops yesterday and the price was below $2.60/gallon! The day before the Memorial Day weekend starts? What's going on here?!

Seems to me that someone's trying to appease the driving community and keep them from thinking about things like the massive impact of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, and potential outrage leading to a desire to develop alternative sources for energy and many of our products made of petrochemicals today. Guess they figure if they take a bit of a hit financially right now, it'll keep us addicted to the petrochemicals that inhabit huge chunks of our lives and ensure their own futures once the immediacy of the ecological catastrophe has slipped from our awareness.

Problem is - petrochemicals are not a renewable resource. We're going to be at the end of our ropes someday, even if it isn't within the next 50-100 years (just guessing at a timeline). Yet isn't this the perfect time to seriously refocus our creative resources to develop alternatives to the way we do so much today?

Lost jobs in the petrochemical industry? Well, yes. But there will be new jobs in whatever field evolves from research into alternatives to petrochemicals. I truly cannot imagine that whatever the alternative is will ultimately slice the number of jobs available to virtually nothing. New technologies tend to open new opportunities.

Don't quite know how to get large numbers of people onto the alternatives bandwagon, but did want to raise for consideration the question of who's to benefit from the recent slippage in gasoline prices and what we might do to avoid similar catastrophes in the future.