Gas Theft: Welcome to the End of Oil
Sun Apr 20, 2008 at 09:15:15 PM PDT
I was talking to my mom yesterday, and one thing she told me about was having her gas tank broken into. Somehow, the police were able to apprehend (or whatever the precise procedure they used was) the thieves and my mom got her gas back. (The thieves also did some damage to the car in the process.) The police officer my mom spoke with mentioned that it’s becoming increasingly common for people to go around stealing gas out of other people’s cars, in some states it’s a much bigger problem than it is in California. Apparently, with SUV’s it’s common for people just to drill a hole in the gas tank itself. With gas prices the way they are, what else would you expect? I did a Google search on "gas theft," and got 662,000 hits. A couple more thoughts about this on the flip
Apparently this trend is already well underway. A 2005 web article notes that gas cap locks are selling out - Gas siphoning hasn’t been this prevalent since the Great Depression, when gas cap locks were invented. Yet another sign that Bush policies have done wonders for our economy.
My mom isn’t rich, by a long shot, so she can’t afford to go around providing free gas to the neighborhood. So, it’s good that the thieves were caught and my mom got her gas back. But it’s an issue that raises larger questions about just solutions to the energy crisis. With people completely dependent on cars in order to be able to work (and my mom lives in L.A.), gas isn’t a luxury item. It’s a necessity for many to maintain a livelihood. So, I can see the situation my mom faced from a couple of angles. On a microlevel, stealing is wrong and should be discouraged. This is what the folks at gastheft.com focus on. But, unlike the owners of that website, I definitely see the incident as symptomatic of a larger injustice, namely an oil-based economy that concentrates wealth among the few and is a threat to the ecological balance on which we all depend for life.
- Point for faith/politics reflection: How do you see the inter-relation between a just society in a larger sense and individual responsibility within unjust structures? (Is establishing a just society part of your faith mandate, to begin with?)
Other people have thought through the dilemmas of an oil-based economy much more than I have, and everyone needs to acquaint themselves with arguments about Peak Oil:
Life After the Oil Crash Website
A Crude Awakening, Documentary Movie
The End of Suburbia, Documentary Movie
So, could we please see more investement in Light Rail now, while we have access to the oil we’ll need to construct it?
Mom gets the connections: She asked me for help in finding places to invest Green. Some advice on this from The Motley Fool. I’ll be digging some more in the coming month on that one.
Crossposted over there.
