To some, high gas prices have a silver lining
A sprinkling of experts and consumers welcome paying extra at the pump.
By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the June 11, 2007 edition
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When Jim Cunningham pulls into a gas station, his fondest hope is that prices will have risen. Instead of $3.25 a gallon, he'd rather pay, well, $4 a gallon – or more.
"I just like the positive impact high gas prices are having on public consciousness – like getting people to buy more fuel-efficient cars," says the industrial-package designer in Denver, who spends $50 to fill a gas guzzler that he hopes to unload soon.
Hank Leukart, a Seattle travel writer, pays about four times more for gasoline today than he did nine years ago. But "I love high gas prices," he wrote in a blog essay last year. In the long run, "high gas prices have so many good repercussions [in the form of less traffic, accidents, air pollution and a boost for renewable fuels] that the temporary loss of expendable income seems worth it."
Such views aren't limited to drivers. Across the American landscape, a sprinkling of economists, authors, bloggers, and pundits are making the case that there's a silver lining to high gasoline prices. Instead of pain at the pump, they see payoffs: less traffic, fewer accidents, reduced air pollution, better efficiency, more reliance on renewable fuels, and less dependence on foreign oil.
While most motorists may wonder whether these iconoclasts are sitting at the wrong end of the tailpipe, they're nevertheless reviving debate over a long-dormant idea – boosting federal gas taxes so that pump prices stay high. Permanently.
"People use vehicles less or buy smaller, more efficient cars the longer prices stay high," says Ian Parry, an economist at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank. "They put greater demand on manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, which, in turn, cuts oil use and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions."
Of course, there's a downside. High gas prices act as a drag on the economy. The more they rise, the more consumers have to spend on fuel and the less they have to spend on other goods and services. The effects are also uneven. People who drive a lot and the poor feel the pinch more than the average consumer. Such costs are regrettable, high-price proponents say, but pale in comparison to the gains that can be had – and can be somewhat compensated by federal tax rebates. The key, they say, is to keep gas prices high enough long enough to force permanent change.
That didn't happen in the last price spike. After soaring in the 1970s and early 1980s, gasoline prices plummeted due to expanding supply. Falling prices torpedoed public support for further fuel efficiency.Today, the US auto fleet is less efficient: 25.4 miles per gallon versus 26.2 m.p.g. in 1987.
"Had we been able to keep gas prices up throughout the 1980s, the nation would be far more fuel-efficient today," says Frank Zarb, who was the president's chief energy adviser during the Ford administration, now managing director at Hellman & Friedman LLC,, a private equity firm.
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