But that's exactly what needs to happen. Change. We've had our chances, and we've let them slip by. Forty years ago the fire bell was being rung. Yet through the seventies, cars got bigger and bigger. Then, in 1987, we hit a CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) for light-duty vehicles (defined by the EPA as cars, light-duty trucks and SUVs) of 22 mpg. Today, (are you sitting down?) it's 21.1 mpg.
And there are a lot of people out there who hate the prospect of our government telling us what we may or may not drive. Well, if you continue to have your way about it, they won't have to. Gas will cost ten bucks a gallon, and you'll be happy to buy a hybrid or plug-in.
But one problem is that not everyone will have the money to either buy that gas or a new-technology car. Americans already spend about $5,000 annually on their car, between gas, maintenance, repairs, and insurance, along with other associated costs. For many, that's a very sizable percentage of their budget. Gas costs about $3 a gallon now. Should it double, many would have to start making some tough choices about where to allocate their income. Tough choices like whether they should go see a doctor, paying credit card bills, paying the mortgage, all for the sake of keeping a job they have to drive thirty miles to get to.
There's going to come a day, not likely in my lifetime, but likely in the next generation or two of adults, that things are going to get bad and quick. And I'm not going to say, 'Unless we act now...' because I think we're past that. No matter what, it's going to suck. How bad it sucks will depend on what we do in the next twenty or thirty years.