Matthew Lewis Explains It All

Other than an occasional Tweet in my monthly round-ups, it looks like I've only mentioned energy analyst Matthew Lewis (@mateosfo) once back in December 2018, where he talked about the root cause of our country's oil consumption for driving.

He had a related thread yesterday, spurred in part by the continuing kvetching about the price of gas:

The stupid discourse over the price of gasoline is the quickest way to conclude that everything is galactically broken. Here's a quick primer.

Consumers think they're being creamed by the "price" of gasoline, but they're not. They're being creamed by the "cost" of transport.

For most of the past 30 years, the car industry has been transitioning its products from cars that got increasingly good fuel economy, to trucks and SUVs that are essentially stuck around 25 miles per gallon....

As a result: Rather than enhanced fuel economy and electric vehicles reducing oil demand, oil demand for transport is growing....

As usual, the car industry has mostly been lying and bullying its way to converting fleet from more-efficient models, to gas-guzzling SUVs. VW got caught; US automakers cheated the old fashioned way, and just rigged the process. Yes, this was predicted. [Links to a Washington Post story from 2011.]

So, now that the car industry has driven gasoline demand through the roof, and a (completely predictable) price shock has hit the oil industry, car consumers are angry about the cars they bought. Which are mostly trucks and SUVs.

Except ... they don't know the problem is the car they bought. They think the problem is price of gasoline....

In the USA, we do two things:

First, we mandate driving. Yes, it's a mandate: The government throws a couple trillion dollars per year at driving subsidies, and backs up the subsidies with land use patterns that prohibit people from moving around without a car.

And second, we let the car industry govern us.

Directly, the car industry sets fuel economy standards, controls how our tax dollars are spent, and controls land use with highway and road funding policies. Indirectly, the car industry is the reason our military is so well-equipped — oil wars are expensive!

Even worse, the car industry has proven that it can convince Americans to tolerate a massive amount of death and destruction caused by their products. Nothing causes more death and destruction in the USA than the car industry — nope, not even guns.

All of this is to say, the political salience of "high gasoline prices" is really a thin veneer for how everything in the USA is about cars. We wouldn't even need to "ban cars" to solve it! Just banning gasoline cars, or even forcing real fuel economy standards, would make a huge difference.

Of course, the real solutions do, in fact, involve reducing car use dramatically, reforming land use in our cities, ending parking mandates, pumping a few trillion into transit and bike lanes ... that's the only viable pathway. It's not optional.

So, either we defeat the car industry, which has no problem handing the government over to Republican fascists if it allows their SUV sales kick to continue, or ...

They defeat us. I sure hope they lose! Go, us!