A Tight Squeeze

Last night on my drive home, I heard a report about the price of gasoline going up today. I don't know if all the publicity was such a good thing, but here in Canada, higher prices are more news worthy than before. Ever since our Canadian dollar soared to trade above par with the American greenback, a lot of Canadians have been complaining to suppliers and retailers about prices being too high. This is good, but what exactly does that mean? Well after hearing about the rise in gasoline prices, I knew there would be some kind of report the next day telling us that we have to pay higher prices. This has been done to death lately and all this complaining about high prices is not going any where in terms of the price of gas.

The inlayed photo on this post is a graph of U.S. average gas prices from 1974 to 2000. As you can see, the price of gas through out the years has been on a steady climb. Here in Canada we have been doing a lot of complaining about the price of gas in social circles, but not very much in the media. We do have to use the media wisely if we are going to see any change. But in terms of gas prices, I think it is time for all of those alternative fuels that everyone has been talking about to make more of a debut than just hear say and research reports. Granted the change between gasoline and alternative fuels will be hard, but no change that is worth making is with out sacrifices.

One of the reasons for delaying our cross over to alternative fuels from gasoline and crude oil products is the enormous cost of the infrastructure needed to complete the change. I may not be an expert, but wouldn't switching to a form of ethanol instead of gasoline be a little cheaper. We could use the same infrastructure we have for gasoline and begin selling alternative fuels on a much larger scale then we are currently. Some countries frown on this, especially ones that have rich oil reserves but the time for a change is now.

Burning fossil fuels have put our planet in grave danger and we need to start using alternative fuels before its too late. I'm sure that the cost of alternative fuels maybe high right now, but unless you start producing them, more cost effective ways of producing them are merely theories. Everybody is being squeezed by the high cost of fossil fuels and the only way to change that is to change our way of thinking. We definitely need to switch to another fuel source that is renewable and clean before we end up poisoning our world beyond the point of no return. Well that's my opinion, what's yours?

Image source: Wiki Media Commons
Inspiration for this rant:
Canadian pump prices soar
And an empty wallet after filling up at a gas station!