High Gas Prices Are Good

This article was written about 2 and 1/2 years ago. Not that 2005 is so long ago, but at the time gas was about $2.20 a gallon. In gas-price-years that probably feels like an age to any regular driver. Anyway, the author makes a good point, and I've been saying the same thing for some time now: high gas prices are a good thing. If you don't want to read the entire article, there are two main points. First, expensive oil makes expensive alternative energy sources look more favorable to those who must fund their creation. Second, enormous profits from high-priced gas put these same companies in a great position to make some headway in alternative energies. It comes down to motivation: if we continued on with $20/barrel oil for the next 100 years, I can safely promise you that you'd be putting regular unleaded in your car come 2100. However, if that same barrel of oil costs $250 by 2050, you can bet your sweet sweet crude that energy moguls will have a trump card up their sleeves. There is no motivating force in the history of the human race to compare with greed, and I'm counting on it to save our collective bacon.

Oil companies are the only entities on the planet with the wherewithal and the motivation to research, design, and implement alternative energy sources and infrastructure. If it means that we have hydrogen powered cars sometime in the next 20 years, I'll pay $10 a gallon for gas...and I'm not kidding.