As Gas Prices Soar, the Marketplace Reacts
Viewpoint: While Washington dithers, consumers are changing their habits— and Jimmy Carter is having the last laugh
By NANCY GIBBS
This was an interesting weekend to go car shopping. We had concluded it was time to replace our trusty Subaru, which after long and faithful service deserved a dignified retirement. So we trolled Consumer Reports and headed off for some test drives, sniffed at the Mazda 3, petted an Impreza, focused on a Focus before falling for the Honda Civic — which thanks to its redesign looks nifty, drives nicely, has more airbags than you can count and, above all, gets 40 mpg on the highway.
But when I went back to one of the Honda dealers this weekend, I found that the Civics had virtually vanished. You may be able to find one, the salesman said, but you'll pay sticker for it, or even a premium above the manufacturer's suggested retail price.
"I don't know what happened," he mused. "All winter long we're selling SUVs, and no one ever asks about the gas mileage. But this week practically everyone who came in here wanted to know, 'What gets the best mileage?' We've never had that happen before. I had nine Civics on the lot last week. I have one left, and I don't know if Honda can make them fast enough."
Even accounting for the blarney of salesmen who will always make their product precious and scarce so you think you'd better act quickly, this still struck me as a harbinger of... something. New York City's northern suburbs, where I live, are home to women who until recently were waiting for the day they could trade their Ford Expedition for an Excursion, maybe some day an Extravaganza that was even more impossible to park. We may shop at Whole Foods and buy hormone-free milk for the kids, but natural sensitivity and ecological awareness stopped at the garage door. As a neighbor once explained to me, when she was behind the wheel of her Expedition, it was the only time she felt completely in control. And as long as gas was cheap, there was no incentive to do anything different, beyond the moral imperative to be good environmental citizens.
But something seemed to change in the conversation over the recent weeks of spring when the warnings about drooping glaciers syncopated with the news of rising energy prices. People aren't about to wait for politicians to take the lead: now it's every buyer, furnace owner and bill payer for himself. One neighbor called me to compare utility bills, to see whether gas or oil was more horrifying. A survey by Standard and Poor's found that family restaurants in the Midwest were hurting because people had decided to eat out less. There's a four-month wait for a Toyota Prius (60 mpg) in south Florida, and a Cadillac dealer was giving away $500 gas cards. A Rhea County school district in Tennessee cancelled classes for two days to save $4000 on fuel for the school buses. People in California talked about switching to motorcycles to get to work.
This time, when politicians reacted as politicians typically do, the public reaction was scathing. Republican senators proposed sending a $100 rebate check to embattled drivers, like an IOU for their collective failure to think seriously about an actual energy policy. Noting the generally derisive response to this plan, the New York Times got to quote Rush Limbaugh on the front page: "What kind of insult is this?" he asked. "Instead of buying us off and treating us like we're a bunch of whores, just solve the problem." But pretty much everyone admitted that none of the proposed solutions would go very far toward doing that. "All too often in the past, the American people have been bought off with short-term political Band-Aids that haven't addressed the real issues." That was Dick Cheney talking to reporters in 2001, a few weeks after he declared in a speech that "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."
On purely political grounds, you can understand his instinct. Jimmy Carter tried to make energy conservation into a great crusade. He had only been in office a few months when he summoned the nation on the evening of April 18, 1977, saying he needed to have "an unpleasant talk" with the American people. He was about to present Congress an energy plan that he said was sure to be unpopular; but given a finite supply and growing demand, failure to take action would invite "a national catastrophe." "With the exception of preventing war," he said, "this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly." He went on to establish the strategic petroleum reserve, pushed for higher fuel economy standards and better home insulation, boosted research into renewable energy sources and had solar panels installed on the White House grounds to heat the water. During his presidency imports of foreign oil fell and exploration into alternative fuels rose. The amount of electricity coming from oil generation dropped from 20% to 3%.
But having a vision is one thing, selling it another. The effort, he said, would require "the moral equivalent of war," which his critics took to referring to that as MEOW. They derided his "Voice of Doom" speech. He was wearing a sweater. He said to turn the heat down to 68. Listening to him over time was enough to make voters want to hibernate until Reagan came into office, declared morning in America, removed the solar panels, savored an oil glut that drove prices down below $10 a barrel in 1986 and postponed the day of reckoning.
So it was understandable that as both a former oilman and a natural politician, George Bush ran in 2000 on the argument that the problem was not too much consumption but too little production. When Al Gore suggested a range of tax breaks for everything from solar heat battery-powered cars, Dick Cheney called the ideas "goofy." During the Administration's first year, when Cheney's energy task force was developing its proposals, he tapped into the deep well of America's romance with freedom, frontiers, escape, extravagance, rebellion: anything other than Carter's clenched, cold vision of duty and darkness and austerity. "If you want to leave all the lights on in your house, you can," Cheney declared. "There's no law against it" — other than the laws of the market. "You will pay for it obviously, in the price." But it is your right as an American to be as wanton as your conscience and budget permits. Cajoling people into conservation was not going to be part of the script. "I think they ought to be able to make that decision for themselves, as individuals," Cheney told reporters in 2001. "And different people have different interests and different value systems."
That tone changed, of course, as prices spiked, and Bush over time began talking about conservation and carpooling and limiting non-essential travel. But as Carter found nearly 30 years ago, moral exhortation doesn't get you very far. Nor did the appeal to reason, prudence, responsibility to our children and theirs. Cheney may turn out to be the one who understood human nature best, that the market has no scruples but great judgment, and change comes when individuals are finally forced to pay attention to something that affects them directly, every day.
A CNN/USA Today poll found that nearly three out of four people think President Bush is not doing enough to solve the energy problem. A Pew poll found that 86% favor raising fuel standards, 82% want more federal funding for solar, wind and hydrogen technology, 68% want more investment in mass transit. Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate about how high gas prices is "a subject that makes congressmen stupid," notes the illogic of Democrats who deplore high prices but also demand progress towards alternative fuels and more efficient cars, as though the first does not drive the second. Given political history, given how spooked and captive and craven lawmakers have been, it looks like people aren't going to wait for Washington to require Detroit to clean up its fleet, or for prices to come down.
It's almost enough to make you swallow hard and accept the $45 bite when you stop at the gas station, because markets bring pain and consolation together: if this goes on long enough, U.S. auto makers are sure to build less wasteful vehicles because that's what people will be buying, and fuel cells and solar power and windmills will all look more cost effective; when more of us take the train instead of driving to work the traffic will improve, if we switch to hybrids the air will clear, if we tap the sun our dependence on nasty or undependable countries for their oil will diminish, and Jimmy Carter's dreams will come true, 30 years later.
