On the Subject of Gas Prices…

Another C+C News Update. Found this while browsing links from the Wall Street Journal article referenced in Shifting the Focus Away from Oil. Called AP IMPACT: What makes up the price of gas?, it starts off as a fairly linear description of the crude oil refining process and its impact on prices. However it quickly digresses into a number of vignettes on the other elements of price people are paying at the pump. One interesting story sheds some light on the non-rational, non-linear elements at play:

Kelly Bosley, who manages Rutter’s, doesn’t even have to look across the highway to know when Sheetz changes its price for a gallon of gas. When Sheetz raises prices, her own pumps are busy. When Sheetz lowers prices, she has not a car in sight.

She calls Rutter’s headquarters to report the competition’s new price and wait for instructions.

“I call a lot of times and say, ‘They went down, hurry up! Hurry up! Call me! Call me!’ Or it could be where theirs goes up, and I’ll say, ‘Take your time! You know, I like being busy.’ But I have no control over that.”

You think you feel helpless at the pump?

The point is its not poor Ms. Bosley who’s responsible or the greed of the oil companies or the oil producing nations. It is a constellation of interlinked, inter-related phenomena that inter-influence each other. Ms. Bosley, the oil companies, oil producing nations, increase demand for oil in China and India, car sales in those nations and others, the fluctuation of the dollar against other currencies, unemployment rates, etc. are all to “blame”. A cause becomes an effect and vice versa. Linear reasoning in this wicked mess will only up our frustration and sense of powerlessness in the world.

We need to take a few steps back and see that we are dealing with a complex system of relationships. It is the interaction of these relationships that affect the price of gas. 

Try this: put all the causes in the article in different areas on a piece of paper and start drawing lines between them as you think of connections. You have just made a crude map of the system. As you can see it is definitely not of the linear, cause and effect family of problems. The next step is studying the nature of the connections between these diverse elements. From there it is possible to design an entry point for an intervention to alter the system. More on influencing and affecting systems later.

Tags: complexity, gas prices, oil prices, systems thinking

Shifting the Focus Away from Oil

Here’s the latest installment of the C+C News. There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal called If $4 Gas Is Bad, Just Wait. The gist of it is that, in the US, gas has gone up and over $4.00 a gallon. Prices in Japan are averaging over $5.00 a gallon and as the graphic from the article suggests, prices are going to continue to rise with Goldman Sachs predicting an upper limit of somewhere around $200 a barrel.

I don’t think we should “just wait.” Wait for what? For things to get so bad that travel becomes simply untenable? C’mon we are smarter and more capable than that. These rising oil prices are a glimpse of a future (and the reality of our present) in which petroleum powered travel and petrochemical manufacturing become non-sustainable. There’s nothing evil or malicious at work here. Oil and oil production are not inherently bad. I’m not suggesting some Luddite shunning of technology either. We are simply entering into a period of transition away from a century of fossil fuel dominated industry and development. Let’s acknowledge it, get over and get on with it.

Just waiting, now, would be about the worst thing we could do. We are being presented with an opportunity to expand our individual and collective capacities to engage the world. We, now, have the opportunity to radically re-imagine and re-create commerce, communities and lifestyles in ways that support our mutual, inextricably inter-related short and long term futures. Forget oil, forget the new “war” on global warming. Let’s stop trying to fix what’s irretrievably broken and shift our attention awareness, intention and attention to a more eco-systemically coherent, resonant and sustainable way of living, working and playing together. Imagine a future where oil dependency and carbon emissions are no longer a concern. Let’s plan and design that. 

Let’s recognize “now” for what it is. It is a gift, the opportunity to change change and respond with a proactive vision of a future we want versus the future we will get if we “just wait.”
 

Tags: climate change, gas prices, global warming, peak oil, sustainability