What’s That Got to Do with the Price of Gas?

I got a text from a friend last week: “Paid $4.09 per gallon today. A 30-cent increase from my last fill-up.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of the message. My friend knows I don’t own a car; the price of gas is immaterial in my life. Yet even I understand that pump price is the immediate barometer of our national psyche. As gas prices spike, our collective mood plummets.

The price of gas, at any given moment, is universally known down to the fractional tenth of a cent. It’s posted along roadsides in big, easily changed numbers. It towers over freeway interchanges. And it fluctuates in irrational yet immediate relation to demand, supply, and the news cycle.

Tankers queue, unloaded, outside the Port of Long Beach, and the price of liquid cisterned beneath pavement in Waltham, Massachusetts automatically shoots up. Shut off imports from Russia and the value of crude flowing through New Jersey refineries skyrockets.

The spontaneous correlation between the price of gas and perceived threats to our way of life is not new. Sixty years ago, in 1962, I recall my father dismissing a news report about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “What’s that got to do with the price of gas?” His subtext was clear. Science, environmentalism, harmony with nature. That’s all fine, so long as it doesn’t affect me. One iota.