A Shift That's Sticking

Dear readers:

I write this to praise high fuel prices, not to condemn them.

We are a nation without an energy policy and so happily would have remained had it not been for the misery of gasoline at $4 a gallon.

We would have continued our wasteful ways, content to expend fuel on ever-increasing amounts of horsepower, comforted by a Congress that is good at pandering but seemingly incapable of drafting sensible measures to control our consumption of energy resources.

Efforts to stick the automobile industry with the task of fuel conservation absent consumer involvement have proved insufficient. We forced car companies to improve the efficiency of their vehicles in the 1970s. They did that. We responded by driving more miles, demanding more horsepower, buying bigger vehicles.

We swallowed so much gasoline from 1975 to 2006 that we obliterated all technical fuel economy gains made during the same period. But we blamed the car companies instead of ourselves. So, we again laid the car companies on the congressional altar and demanded sacrifice. Congress last year obliged, forcing the car companies to give us more miles per gallon but asking us to do nothing.

Our demands for cost-free fuel economy were unrealistic in a world struggling to meet growing demand for oil. But we didn't want to hear any bad news and elected politicians who wouldn't give us any. They were enablers, setting us up for another round of self-destructive behavior -- consuming oil like crazy at the cheapest retail prices in the developed world.

But the world caught up with us and changed all of that.

We're paying in excess of $4 a gallon for regular unleaded gasoline today. We could be paying more than $5 a gallon by summer's end. So be it. The market is doing what Congress would not do, what regulation could not do, and what consumers would not do without cause. It is forcing us to make realistic choices about how we use energy -- particularly in the matter of personal transportation.

We are becoming conservative in the generic sense of the term. That means we are driving less -- 4.3 percent less in March, 11 billion fewer vehicle miles driven than in March 2007, according to the Transportation Department.

That is a major shift, a behavioral profundity matched by what consumers are doing in the automotive marketplace. They are moving in droves from consumptive trucks to more fuel-efficient vehicles. High pump prices are doing what Hummer-bashing, both literal and figurative, could not do. They are killing Hummer retail sales and threatening the Hummer line's longevity.

I am aware that all of this has brought considerable pain and that it is likely to bring even more. High prices at the pump coupled with price increases at the grocery counter are undermining family budgets, pushing middle-income families to the fiscal wall and crushing those beneath the poverty line. Cadillac dealers who invested millions of dollars in Cadillac-Hummer superstores stand to lose much money and jobs if General Motors scraps its Hummer franchise altogether.

All of this will hurt. We will need the political will, imagination, innovation, and compassion of government and community to help ease the agony. Change is not easy. Forced change is even more difficult. We're being forced. We're also being given an opportunity.

Entrepreneurs, such as Shai Agassi and Malcolm Bricklin, are preparing to seize the moment. The two men are separated by generation and geography. Agassi, born in Israel and now living in California, is 40. Bricklin, a Philadelphian by birth now living in New York, is 69. Both men share a vision of future personal transportation dominated by the electric automobile.

Agassi views the electric car as the four-wheeled equivalent of a cellphone in which the service -- transportation -- is more valuable than the hardware itself. His Palo Alto, Calif., company, Project Better Place, has signed agreements with Israel and Denmark to set up personal transportation networks, replete with charging and battery-swapping stations, to support a mass movement toward electric cars.

Bricklin remains wedded to the "personal" in personal transportation. His electric cars would be plug-ins serviced by regional networks of park-and-charge stations. The cars would be outfitted with a variety of batteries, depending on vehicle design and intended use.

Both visions are ambitious. But neither is wishful thinking. High fuel prices have turned them into realistic possibilities, at least as realistic as the continued viability of fossil-fueled cars and trucks in a world where oil is priced at $135 per barrel.