“For years, the lobby of small gas station owners worried they would be crushed by big oil companies, which then owned most stations, and could afford to install the modern pumps and canopies self-service demanded. ‘They would have been 10 or 15 cents a gallon less than mine, so they would have buried me,’ said Sal Risalvato, who opened a station in Paramus [New Jersey] in the late 1970s.”
– Kate Zernike , “Drop That Gas Nozzle: New Jersey Is Full-Service Island, and Likes It,” New York Times, May 23, 2015, A1.
Saturday’s New York Times front-page article, Drop That Gas Nozzle: New Jersey Is Full-Service Island, and Likes It, brought the peculiar politics of New Jersey’s ban on self-service gasoline/diesel to a national audience. Fines for self-pumping start at $50 and grow to $500 for repeat offenders.…
“Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.”
– Center for American Progress (and Climate Progress), two years ago.
Dear CAP: Get a life. Get happy. Summer beckons. Not only bike and hike but drive, bus, train, and fly to a better environment–your self-selected environment.
The automobile and the open road are environmentalism-on-wheels and freedom to escape the concrete for the great beyond. Mountains, rivers, hills, forests, even beautiful green golf courses–it is all a drive away. (And if it makes you happy CAP, those ‘huge profits’ of “Big Oil’ are absent.)
“Climate change can seem like such a huge and intractable problem, its causes so beyond our control, that it’s easy to throw up your hands and say, “There’s not much I can do about it.” It seems like we’re always being told that no matter what steps are taken, it’s not enough.”
– Anastasia Pantsios, “MIT Crowdsourcing Project Asks for Your Help in Solving Climate Crisis,” EcoWatch, April 3, 2015.
Anastasia Pantsios has unwittingly described one of the major problems of the climate crusade–so little temperature effect from so much activism. But policy activism (carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, command-and-control) is actually bad climate policy because it allows weather/climate to impose its greatest costs on the human condition.
Public policy towards the climate-change issue should begin – and end – with reforms that make sense in their own right; that is, ‘win-win’ initiatives that reduce emissions but do not hurt energy consumers or taxpayers.…