I am getting tired of hearing people whine about high gas prices. It seems that it is a topic for constant complaints on the radio and at the water cooler.

Perhaps you're tired of listening to people like me complain about the people who are whining about high gas prices...in which case you should skip this entry (except for perhaps the last two para's which are on a somewhat different topic).

The amount of gasoline we use is one thing that almost all of us have a great deal of control over; it's just that most of us don't exercise that control. The alternatives are many and varied, for example:

Ride a bike!
Get a hybrid!
Carpool!
Bus!
Train!
Subway!
Ferry!
Motorcycle!
Move closer to work!
Get a job closer to home!
Or at least, for Pete's sake, stop complaining!

Oil companies are making absurd profits, but by having an insatiable thirst for oil, we collectively are helping to keep prices north of $70 per barrel. We Americans, in the aggregate, have a *great deal* of control over how much revenue these oil behemoths generate (e.g., if a lot more of us did a lot more of the things on the above list, oil company revenues would plummet.)

I am guilty of not doing much on the list, but at least I don't complain about high gas prices. Of course, with high oil prices, we are also funding, among many others: all manner of terror groups who receive middle east oil money; Iran's nuclear weapons program (let's stop kidding ourselves, of course they have one); and nutcases like Hugo Chavez. All these folks and others are cheering wildly every time the price of oil goes up another buck, because their extraction costs are in the teens or lower.

The only thing these oil kingpins likely worry about in connection with current prices is that such prices will likely cause all manner of other more expensive oil extraction methods to be employed, and I understand that a world-wide ramp-up of such methods is well underway; a great deal of capacity is supposedly coming on-line in 6-12 months that is expected to dampen prices. Or not; there are smart folks out there who think we will see $100 per barrel long before $50.

And of course, it's all relative--the Economist just ran a list of gas prices in many countries around the world. Several (after conversion to gallons and US dollars) were in the $5-$6 per gallon range. I think at or near the top of the list was Norway (whose high gas tax helped put them into their position), but I will give details in a comment to this entry, after I get the list from home.

And speaking of relativism, or "misery poker" as Jed says, I got a good lesson/reminder in "misery poker" recently. This will be the topic of a future blog entry, but the summary is that I went to the Festival of Books at UCLA, and one author panel consisted of two young men who served in Iraq who had written books about it. One of them related the story of talking to his wife on the phone just after a night of horrible combat...basically, her first words were about how furious she was that the dog messed on the carpet, and that the traffic was especially miserable that day. After listening to her rant, he (as told by the fellow who was speaking to us) mentioned to his wife that his close friend had gotten shot in the face by insurgents that day...and another guy got blown up, and our speaker had gotten the dead man's brain fragments literally splattered on himself. Talk about misery poker. Talk about a giant chasm between what we face and what our soldiers face every day.

Out. And back to work!