The Real Reason

I was listening to NPR on my way home yesterday, and I heard a story about the rising gas prices in the Chicagoland area. We have the honor of paying the highest price for gas in the nation, a distinction we will gladly hand off to whomever steps forward. Right now, while the national average is at $3.18, our local average is reportedly $3.59.

In this news story, announcing our ascension to the top spot nationwide, mention was made of rumblings about Congressional action to curtail record profits by large oil companies. In giving equal time to the other side, the reporter had recorded a statement from a representative of the Illinois Petroleum Council.

I don’t have access to the exact quote, but the gist of his statement was the following: state and local taxes are the real reason gas prices are so high.

I nearly drove off the road.

I’m not angry that the man said it: that’s what he’s paid to do, go out to the media and lie his ass off. I’m not upset that the radio station aired it: that’s what they do, put the lies of big-business spin-meisters on the air in response to accusations that their employers are pillaging the American public.

I’m upset that people will believe it.

Let’s do the math, shall we? The report indicated that Illinois and Chicago taxes are high as compared to the national average. Combined, the two taxes currently total $0.77 per gallon. That, by the way, is a percentage that is dependent on the underlying wholesale price of gasoline. So when the wholesale price of gas goes up, the tax goes up proportionately. The result is that for every penny the wholesale price of gas goes up, the price consumers pay goes up one penny plus X percent.

So if there were no tax, would gas be cheaper? Sure. If there were no tax, would gas prices continue to fluctuate? Absolutely. This dirtbag is going on the radio at the direction of companies whose shareholders are taking baths in gold bullion right now, trying to redirect public complaints away from the people who are actually at fault for this calamity.

Let’s make sure, in the midst of my grousing, that we cover the real reason for the high price of gas: supply and demand.

Wait, you say, how does that make the oil companies guilty of cranking up the price? Because the oil companies have intentionally put a choke-hold on the refinery, storage capacity and distribution channels that supply the country with automobile-ready gasoline.

The price of a barrel of oil has actually been in a reasonably narrow trading range for the last year or so, in the neighborhood of $60 to $65 per barrel. The infrastructure that takes that oil and produces gasoline has been reduced by the oil companies in order to drive up prices. So the supply goes down, the summer driving season means demand goes up, and next thing you know you’re paying $4.00 per gallon. Believe it, by June 30, we will have seen it already. You heard it here first.

How do they do this? Those of you who have the time and wherewithal, go do some research. You will find that over the last 5 - 10 years there has been a discernable pattern of accidents at gas refinery, storage and transport facilities. These accidents all have a number of curious similarities: nobody gets killed, or even injured; repair of the damage takes months or even years; and the capacity of the whatever-it-is is reduced significantly or eliminated completely. Interesting, isn’t it, that these accidents all have the same characteristics? It’s almost as if somebody planned it that way…

But why would an oil company intentionally blow up its own refinery? Two reasons. First, they don’t have to pay for needed equipment upgrades, the repairs are covered by insurance. So they get some shiny new pipes and valves for free. And second, because the news of the reduced refining/storage/transportation capacity causes panic on the trading floor, the price of wholesale gas shoots skyward as soon as the markets open. So the oil company who owns the facility doesn’t have to spend a penny on repairs, and they merely ramp up production on their other facilities to take advantage of the price increase. See how this works now?

The part that you don’t see, and nobody can confirm (but we all know happens), is the chairmen and board members of these oil companies sipping Scotch in walnut-paneled rooms, lighting cigars with $100 bills, and drawing straws to decide who has the “accident” next year.

So don’t fall for the garbage you hear on the news about taxes, or environmental regulation, or EPA compliance, or unscheduled maintenance, or any of the other lies the oil companies try to tell you. This spike in prices, like all of the others, is directly linked to actions taken by the oil companies themselves. In other words, they’re picking your pocket, and lying to cover it up. Remember that the next time you pay $60 to fill up your tank, as I did just this morning.

Bike To Work

Friday was National Bike-To-Work Day. And I tell you, if I dodged one neon-spandexed, granola-munching mountain-biker splitting lanes on my morning commute, I must have dodged a hundred of them.

(*ahem*) Not so much.

I didn’t see a single soul. And faint wonder.

*     *     *     *     *

We all have some story about bicycling. I have a couple, the first of which being the time I took a spill over the handlebars while riding my sister’s bike (that was too small for me, I am still reminded by my parents whenever the subject comes up) and knocking half of my front tooth out. The first day of second grade was never so eventful. That was back in the day of stainless steel caps, so I spent a couple of weeks looking menacing while the dentist waited for the replacement tooth to arrive from the lab. That was also back in the day when the only people who wore helmets when they rode their bike also wore helmets while walking or sitting still.

For some time I have lived my cycling life vicariously through my brother, who has been a competitive road cyclist since his early teens. He had a pretty solid career through his age class as a Junior, then a back injury and the resulting surgery while in college sidelined him for over a decade. About five years ago he got back on the horse, and is now racing Cat-2 and Cat-3 in the Twin Cities, preparing to get involved in track racing. If the past three sentences made no sense whatsoever, don’t worry about it: cyclists invented their own language with the explicit intention of making other people feel stupid.

His “brush with greatness” moment came at SuperWeek in Milwaukee one summer when he nosed out some poser for the criterium championship in his age class, the poser being George Hincapie. Obviously that was before George became a front-runner for the Tour de France with Team Discovery Channel alongside Lance Armstrong.

So anyhow, my brother was an equipment hound and was always saving his money to buy the latest and greatest toys and trinkets to put on his bike. Most of them had Italian names and looked exactly like the parts they replaced to the untrained eye. He had legs like Christmas turkeys, and at a certain point he started to break frames, just by pedaling. He used to snap the bottom bracket right out of the seat tube. Ask your local bike shop how much torque you would have to put on a double-butted steel frame to do that: the answer will astound you. He broke two of them that way.

When my brother was forced into retirement, he was left with two highly-customized and ridiculously fast road bikes that he was incapable of using. Keeping one as a memento, he gave the other one to me in the hopes that it would get some use while in my care. Now, if you haven’t ridden one of these bikes, you really don’t have a clear picture of exactly what they are capable of. The difference between a competition-grade road bike and the bike you own is like the difference between a Ferrari and a dump truck. Your bike is outfitted in such a way that somebody who is 5′6″ and 350 pounds can climb on it and ride down to the end of a half-mile gravel road and back. Competition-grade road bikes are built with one purpose in mind: riding really fast on smooth surfaces.

So here I am, wwwaaaaaaayyyyyy out of shape, and the unsuspecting owner of a stallion that was just begging to be let out of the stable. So off I went to raid the bargain bin at the local bike shop, coming away with some ugly spandex boxer-briefs and a skin-tight shirt, some shoes that you couldn’t walk in, and socks that didn’t cover my ankles. Add to that the requisite bike helmet and some goofy gloves with no fingers, and I was ready to humiliate myself. And so I did for the rest of that summer.

Since then I have, like many former and wanna-be athletes, followed the Tour De Lance with pretty rigorous abandon, and even some of the second-tier races on the tour, as well as the off-season who’s-leaving-this-team-and-signing-with-the-other-team shenanigans. So I can easily be considered a fan of cycling, and even an erstwhile participant. I have plans to form a tri-generational team of my family members to make a four-day run from St. Louis to Chicago as part of Martha’s Miles next June. You can get the details yourself at www.marthasmiles.org. I’d love to see you there.

*     *     *     *     *

That having been said, I see precious little point in wasting the time and energy organizing and executing the silliness that is Bike-To-Work Day. There are certain places in our fine nation, and certain companies within and around those places, who make it easier for their employees to do such things. Seattle and Silicon Valley come to mind. But 99.99% of the people who are reading this right now are not in any position to ride their Bike-To-Work on that day, or any day.

Why? Number one, distance. My work is 20 miles from my house. I would show up at my office after a 20-mile bike ride exhausted, late, and sweaty beyond explanation. I would need a shower, a change of clothes, and about an hour to catch my breath. So instead of leaving at 8 to get to work at 9, I would have to leave at about 6am to arrive ready for work at the same time. Then, as if a hard day’s work wasn’t enough, I would have to turn around and bike the same distance home again after the 5 o’clock whistle. Plus, at my old job, I was 45 miles away from the office. You gotta be kidding me!

Number two, infrastructure and traffic. None, count them, none of the roads I drive on have the ability to handle bicycles on the same roads as cars. Very few of them can even be expanded to accommodate bicycles. Plus, in the suburban landscape that many of us traverse on our way to work, each little fiefdom has their own budget, their own priorities, and their own prerogative concerning cyclist accommodations. There is not, and will never be, a state-mandated set of regulations regarding local roads and their ability to accommodate cyclists. So the utopian world of bicycle-friendly, smoothly-paved and well-maintained roadways upon which to wheel to work in a carbon-neutral fashion is simply never going to happen. Which means cyclists are forced to either brave the horn-happy and aggravated motorized commuters whisking by mere inches from their handlebars, or carve a residential-street route from A to B and back, taking twice as long as the high-speed thoroughfares.

Number three, facilites. Does my office have a shower for employees to use after biking to work? Does my office have a locker room for people to change in comfortably? Does my office have a proper bike rack, indoors or out, to secure one’s bicycle once there? Of course not. Does your office have such things? Likely not. Do most of the companies we collectively work for out there have such facilities? Decidedly not. And with the exception of the bike racks, do most of the companies in the US even have the capability of providing those facilities? No. Most of these companies rent their office space from building managers, who provide the bare minimum of facilities that they can get away with, since they know that leases are fleeting and demand for such things is minimal.

Number four, family life. If you are dropping those 2.5 kids off at school or the babysitter on your way to the office, where are they going to ride, on the handlebars? And what to do with those groceries you have to pick up on the way home, put them in your panniers? Give me a break…

Number five, laziness. I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that even if you provided a $10,000 per year tax credit for anyone who rode their bicycle to work even 50% of the time, you would still only see about a 2% to 5% increase in bike-to-work participation. There is simply not enough impetus to exert that amount of energy, or give up that level of convenience.

So the question becomes, why are the organizers of National Bike-To-Work Day essentially wasting the time and energy on something that is never going to be more than a passing curiosity that the general population hears about on the news and laughs at? If there is a genuine desire on the part of these people to participate in an activity that will help the environment and encourage physical fitness, as well as inspire others to do the same, why not pick a cause and an activity that has a realistic chance of succeeding?

Using one’s bicycle as a primary daily mode of transportation is simply not feasible for the vast majority of Americans. As much as I enjoy riding my bike for exercise and recreation, moving from a car to a bicycle for my daily running around is as laughable as using roller skates. Unfortunately we do not have a practical carbon-neutral alternative to the automobile as yet. But perhaps if the time and energy from the Bike-To-Work movement were redirected towards the invention and promotion of one, we would have such a tool available faster.