Note: I blogged this to another site yesterday. But it bears reposting to the family site as well. Just as a data point, I bought gas today at $1.58.
This chart is sourced from GasBuddy.com. I used their tools to plot the Portland area average gas price against the US national average. We're all pretty acutely aware of the rapid run-up, followed by the plunge in gas prices. What's on this chart really just confirms what we all know already, right? As the head of a household, I look at the 2008 chart and I breathe a sigh of relief. I felt the pain in June when it cost $100/tank and my family spent almost $800/month just on gasoline. I shake my head a little and chuckle when I realize that our family road trip to southern California coincided with gasoline's all-time high (figures...) I feel better knowing that our gasoline, food, and part of our utilities now fit inside July's gasoline bill. That's how this graph affects me.
But the gas data takes on some new meaning, when charted on a six-year scale. From this vantage point, you can start to see how gas prices affect us all. It becomes a larger issue than my own pocketbook. Here's what I mean:
Imagine if this graph represented your paycheck. I don't care whether you were overpaid or not, if your family income went through this sort of change, it would be destabilizing to say the least.
Now, what if this were the income stream for a company? Or the income stream for a country? For Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, et. al, this in fact, is their country's main revenue stream. Viewed from a long-term perspective, the plunge in the price of oil is probably going to do us more harm than good as a global economy. So, what's good for my family checkbook right now may be worse for lots of families globally (again, mine included) over the longer term.
Oregon's state plan, as led by Governor Kulongoski, to increase Oregon's sustainable energy programs is intended to reduce the impact of oil in our local economy by reducing our need for oil to run our region's economic machine. With our oil dependence reduced, whipsaw changes in petrochemical markets don't transfer so easily into our economy. In the short term, we may pay a premium (in the form of reduced tax revenues) in order to encurage the building of the infrastructure. That investment comes in the form of Business Energy Tax Credits (BETC's) in which the state trades short term monies for long-term stability in the economic machine.
It starts to make sense, doesn't it, when you see it all from the right vantage point?
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