I was in my garage the other day, mentally re-organizing the mess, making lists of things that needed to get done, sketching work and storage areas, and, finally, visualizing a nice clean environment for my next project. Now some people might take that kind of high level planning as just a form of laziness, but I find that the actual planning phase of any project can be the most arduous.

 

I was, in fact, so fatigued by the thought of the Sisyphean task that was in front of me, I had to sit down.

 

As I sat there my mind wandered off. I watched it go. Maggie came across me a few moments (okay 20 minutes) later and poked me in the shoulder. “How come I’m sweating in the garden and you’re sitting here staring off into space? And why does the garage look like it did an hour ago?”(Time flies when your mind wanders off!)

 

“I was thinking about the price of gas.” I tried to sound convincing, but she just fixed me in a steely gaze and pointed to the mess, turned on her rubber booted heel and left. “I don’t think the price of gas is high enough!” I called after her.

 

Or, perhaps, more to the point, the price we pay for gasoline at the pumps reflects only a small proportion of the costs that are associated with driving a car, and ultimately with the consumption of gasoline.

 

Take my messy garage for example. There is a city by-law that states that I need to have a garage, and attached to that garage, a driveway with parking for two cars. We only have one car, and because of the mess have never parked the car in garage. If I didn’t have to have a garage attached to the house, I could have lowered the total cost to build it. My driveway abuts the road, and that road is paid for with the taxes that the city also collects every year from me. All roads lead to a parking lot, not to Rome as previously thought, and that parking lot was purchased and is maintained by the company that owns the mall or office, and those costs are directly added onto the price of the loaf of bread, or your accountants bill.

 

And the costs don’t stop there. According to recent North American statistics, the average car travels 19,000 kilometers per year. At an average 11.3 km/liter, each car burns 1681 liters of gas per year, producing 4,035 kilograms of CO2.  Even if you don’t buy into the global warming concept, there are direct correlations between the amount of pollution and cancer, asthma and other diseases. Those are treated with your tax dollars.

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( A quick aside. How does a liter of gas create more CO2 by weight? Gasoline is comprised of carbon and hydrogen, often C8H18. As it burns, oxygen is added, replacing the hydrogen on the carbon, and then creating water, H20. Oxygen has a weight of molecular weight of 16 versus hydrogen's 1. )

 

When you add the cost of global warming, diseases caused by air pollution, loss of farmland, suburban sprawl, government subsidies to oil companies ($1.4 billion in 2005), parking lots, garages, oil spills, and other environmental degradation, the price comes out to between $4.15 and $5.00  per liter.

 

So the $1.38 per liter you spend right now? Chump change. Don’t worry about it. And don’t worry about the real cost of gasoline. That’s way too scary.

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For further reading, try A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Breakpoint and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World by Peter Tertzakian and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany et al.