The “boiled frog” theory of gas prices

Have you heard the story of the boiled frog?  The didactic tale tells of putting a frog in water and gradually, oh so slowly, turning up the heat, until, in the end, the frog is boiled.  And the frog has made no attempt to jump out.  The “moral” of the fable is, from what I’ve been told, that you can get someone to be accustomed to any situation simply by changing the environment very, very slowly.  And the person, or people, is “boiled” before they know it.  While it’s probably not true that you can boil a frog , the image still has some appeal.

We have become boiled frogs.  We have become accustomed to increasing gas prices.  The prices go up, then they go down a little, and we get upset and complain, and we don’t buy SUV’s and Hummers, and we stop using so much gas.  Then they go down a little and we breathe a sigh of relief, and we go back to buying our SUV’s and Hummers.  Then, after we have become accustomed to this slightly higher price and we’re using gasoline like crazy again, the cycle starts again.  Gas prices go up, and … here we go again.  Over time, we have become “boiled.”  We are back to the high gas prices of 1981.  And we don’t even realize that we’ve been “boiled.”

Gas prices in the U.S. in 1981 were at their peak.  The inflation-adjusted price of gas in 1981 was $3.17; the inflation adjusted price back in March 2008 was $3.22.  In the years in between, the price of gas fell dramatically after 1981, because people stopped using gasoline.  They got rid of their gas-guzzlers and bought smaller cars.  Then, gradually, we started buying larger cars, and gas prices started creeping up.

Bottom line: Unless we get wise and jump out, we’re going to keep seeing increasing prices, and we’ll never get out of the boiling water.  You can holler about the awful oil companies, and you can say we need to find new sources for oil, but the best solution may be to … STOP USING SO MUCH OIL.  The question is whether we can do it, unless we are absolutely forced to.

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is so concerned about U.S. dependence on foreign oil (up to almost 70% in mid-2008), that he has developed a plan  (called, of course, the Pickens Plan) to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by supplanting it with wind and natural gas and other energy sources.  I’m particularly interested in natural gas vehichles (NGVs) which are cheaper to run and cleaner environmentally.  And natural gas is plentiful in the U.S.

What do you think?  Are we boiled frogs?  What do you think is the solution to the “gas crisis”?