Chapter 12 in the Great Oil Conspiracy

October 27th, 2008 at 06:07pm Annette LaCross

First published Aug. 18:

Like many people, I’ve learned to tolerate some things I never thought I would.

I’ve learned, for example, to give merely a resigned sigh before deleting the spam choking my inbox. I can now sit patiently as the latest unfounded conspiracy theory is explained in painstaking detail to me. Heck, I even caught myself thinking happy thoughts when the price of gas dropped to $3.99 a gallon.

Of course, if $3.99 was enough to provoke happy thoughts, you’d think I’d be well on my way to becoming hysterical. As of this writing, gas was threatening to fall to $3.75 a gallon in the Rock River Valley.

Why, even the Energy Information Agency, the beleaguered arm of the federal government that predicts (not terribly successfully) what we’ll be paying for gas in a few months, has lowered its previous prediction of $4-plus-a-gallon through next year.

It seems others are paying attention, too. At least, the number of truly hysterical conspiracy theorists who have identified the wretch conspiring to keep gas prices high — one day, Big Oil; the next, gas station owners — has dropped in proportion to the price of gasoline.

I’m just hoping that the latest round of EIA predictions, released last week, hold true through the fourth quarter. Or at least through August.

In September, you see, Congress will be back in session. And lawmakers have their own method of introducing conspiracy theories. They call it legislation.

There has been a veritable flurry of it lately, much of it directed — or, rather, misdirected — at the latest darling of the conspiracy world: oil speculators. And lawmakers, as they are wont to do, started throwing hastily written and poorly researched bills around to convince their constituents that they feel their pain.

It’s human nature to look for someplace to lay the blame for whatever is troubling us. It’s just no fun to get mad at the laws of economics. And it seems pointless to blame a third of the world’s population. Congress hasn’t yet identified a good way to legislate the 2.5 billion people living in China and India, and nobody is suggesting another economic ideology, so it looks like capitalism is here to stay.

And the rest of the usual suspects — Bill Gates, Wal-Mart, Paris Hilton — don’t really fit.

But someone must be to blame for this. Who’s left?

According to proposed legislation, it’s the American public’s failure to demand renewable fuel sources (no argument there) or the malevolent oil speculator.

And blaming the American public has never gotten any politician very far. Therefore, it must be the other guy.

If that speculator alone set the price of a barrel of crude oil, I’d probably agree that something should be done.

But he doesn’t.

The problem is, there is no simple, or quick, solution. And we are, after all, the land of immediate gratification: of ATMs and drive-through restaurants, microwave meals and Internet shopping.

If we want to pin the blame on our dependence on petroleum, I have no argument. I’m actually quite interested in studying wind as a power source, and I think the sun is an underutilized resource as well.

But one of the reasons renewable energy has been such a hard sell is that fossil fuels are easy. We’re already hooked up to one pipeline or another. And let’s face it: If we were feeling truly pinched by high energy costs — to the point that we had to change our lives dramatically to compensate — we wouldn’t have enough money to make politicians care about us anyway.

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