Bring on the unleaded cooking grease...

Round-trip, I have about a 65-mile commute to and from work. Quick math...let's see...65 miles x 5 days a week...divided by 23 mpg or so...thought the Rav4 was going to get better than that when I bought it, but I'm a bit stuck with it for a while...but I digress...that means I'm using about 14 gallons of gas per week just for commuting...never mind errands, et al. Right now, that's $42/week for gas...about $180/month. Now, I'm paying no rent right now (thank you, in-laws), and the other bills are minimal, so that's really not all that bad for me...but start to throw in rent/mortgage and maybe what's likely to be an obscene electricity bill for the summer months (it's gonna be a hot one), and you can see that something's gonna have to give for a lot of people. And honestly, I don't know what realistically can be done about it with oil/gas holding as much power as it does.

Lance Mannion wrote a good post about the gas crisis yesterday.

We all should be driving less. Even those of us who are forced by circumstances to live where long car rides are necessary and unavoidable can cut down. We have it in our power to decrease the demand. This actually began to happen after the gas crisis, but then Ronald Reagan became President partly by promising us two cars in every garage and a third in the driveway and all of them big and fast. I don't remember what he said about chickens in pots.

...

President Bush has finally noticed that folks are not happy about the high price of gas. He has responded by being his usual compassionately conservative self, promising to help by doing things that will make his rich oil buddies richer.

He then links to the video of a quite audacious speech from Nancy Pelosi (who, on a side note, pisses me off something awful. Why can't she be like this all of the time? Can she now retract every word she said about the censure issue and try again?) in which she verbally gives him the finger (sorry, not using the correct blogspeak...she basically told him to go Cheney himself).

Where have you been, Mr. president? The middle class squeeze is on, competition in our country is affected by the price of energy and of oil and all of a sudden you take a trip outside of Washington, see the fact that the public is outraged about this, come home and make a speech, let's see that matched in your budget, let's see that matched in your policy, let's see that matched in and you're separating yourself from your patron, big oil, cut yourself off from that anvil holding your party down and this country down, instead of coming to Washington and throwing your Republican colleagues under the wheels of the train, which they mightily deserve for being a rubber stamp for your obscene, corrupt policy of ripping off the American people.

Good. It's nice to see Democrats at least occasionally stand up to the president...even going over the top with it and being, dare I say, a bit shrill. You'd think it would have gotten easier as his approval rating slipped below 50%, but apparently they needed to wait till it hit 30%. Oh well. It's at 32%, so I guess everybody's almost playing the same ballgame now.

But are the solutions offered by Democrats (the short-term one: a gas tax holiday made up for in the budget by cutting tax breaks for oil companies) any better? Do they need to even offer solutions since they're not in power? Is there actually a good solution out there that doesn't involve bacon fat or removing every member of every branch of government and starting over? All I can say for sure is, it's probably a good idea if you didn't a) propose solutions that were blatantly cutting oil companies a break, or b) ignore reality.

Bush:

Under federal quality—air quality laws, some areas of the country are required to use fuel blend called reformulated gasoline. Now, as you well know, this year we're going—undergoing a rapid transition in the primary ingredient in reformulated gas—from MTBE to ethanol…

Yet state and local officials in some parts of our country worry about supply disruption for the short term. They worry about the sudden change from MTBE to ethanol—the ethanol producers won't be able to meet the demand. And that's causing the price of gasoline to go up some amount in their jurisdictions.

And some have contacted us to determine whether or not they can ask the EPA to waive local fuel requirements on a temporary basis … So I'm directing EPA Administrator Johnson to use all his available authority to grant waivers that would relieve critical fuel supply shortages. And I do that for the sake of our consumers.

Reality:

In last year’s energy bill, Congress actually eliminated the requirement that cleaner
reformulated gasoline contain MTBE or ethanol. MTBE makers—including ExxonMobil—decided to stop shipping its product after Congress refused to give them a deal absolving these big water polluters from product liability lawsuits. But the companies have known about that congressional decision for nearly a year. They could have arranged a smoother transition to new gasoline blends. But scarcity drives up prices—and oil profits.

Then again, he's made it this far ignoring reality...