I’m mulling this morning over the similarities between the subprime mortgage crisis and the high fuel price crisis. Both strike me as little garden paths that the unwary were led along, by people willing to make a buck over the inability of others to visualize the future.
In both cases, people were sold a dream of the unaffordable made affordable, and sold the products that go with it: big new homes in the suburbs and plush low-mpg vehicles to make their long commutes comfortable. Now however the payment rates are being radically readjusted and the balloon payments are coming due. The purveyors of this dream – the subprime lenders of U.S. energy policy, the oil and auto companies and others aided and abetted by a subprime administration – are escaping with their gains and leaving people made destitute by their deception.
What’s needed is action that materially reduces our dependence on oil forever – higher fuel efficiency, plug-in hybrids, alternative energy. Solutions such as drilling for more oil are merely a continuation of the cruel deception. For starters, it will take about 10 years for any new well to actually produce any oil – no help whatsoever to those being squeezed hard right now by high fuel prices. But the main point is: more oil, from any source, amounts to no more than taking out a second mortgage on a subprime energy policy, something that only puts the inevitable foreclosure off another year or two.
Photo by DigitalHowie via Flickr. Click through for his narrative that sounds eerily like World Without Oil. All rights reserved by DigitalHowie.
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June 16, 2008 at 11:23 am
Tennessee Jed
It must be time to pay the bills for short sighted foolishness.
We should have seen it coming since we saw a glimmer in the rear view mirror from the seventies.
June 18, 2008 at 6:45 am
WriTerGuy
Yes, it’s like a subprime mortgage, and lo, the rate is readjusting. Many people just never realized how shaky their “energy loan” was.
April 27, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Adam
There are problems with all energy options. With nuclear the problem is what to do with the spent fuel. With ocean energy there needs to be much research into the impact of fish and plant life. But this research needs to be done – otherwise it will be lights out.