Payin’ at the Pump

I spent the 1970s waiting in line to buy gas. This was the epoch of the oil cartel, and a full tank of gas was the holiest of grails. Lines would form before sunup and stretch for blocks. A Santa Ana station owner told about “people who just ride around looking for gas . . . like a woman who drove in Thursday and said, ‘Fill it up,’ and it took just one gallon.”

Like all panics, this one wasn’t a model of rationality. At the peak of the Gas Crunch, it’s been estimated, Americans wasted on average 150,000 barrels of oil a day idling in service station queues. Fistfights were common. There even were reports of gas line homicides. Psychologists submitted learned papers exploring whether gas line tension would tear asunder the American family.

I can’t recall now if I was an “odd” or an “even.” At the time, the distinction was crucial. To ease tensions among fuming motorists--in newspaper accounts, they were inevitably called “fuming motorists,” much like firefighters must always be “weary firefighters”--a rationing system was devised. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, pumps were open to people whose license plates ended in even numbers; the odds could gas up on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday. On Sunday, stations closed and everybody stayed home and cursed Ahmed Yamani, the OPEC oil minister.

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These memories, of course, do not arrive by accident. In the past couple of weeks, gas prices have shot straight up, particularly in California. Once again, there is a whiff of panic at the pump. Last Thursday, a station owner in the Northern California town of Fremont dropped prices to 99 cents--in protest, he said, of “greed.” People drove from as far as 50 miles away, waiting in line for as long as six hours, to take advantage of the “bargain.”

“I want to wake up the people,” Ray Olyaie, owner of the Exxon station, told reporters. “The oil companies are ripping them off.”

Wasted breath. If there is one truth “the people” don’t need to be awakened to, it’s that Big Oil is not in the business of doing good deeds for the American consumer. It’s in the business of selling hydrocarbons, as fast as they can pump ‘em and for maximum profit. One byproduct of the 1970s energy crises was a loss of innocent trust in the man who wears the star and everyone else engaged in the gas game.

There were other significant changes fostered by that dark carnival, not all of them bad. Americans turned to smaller, more fuel efficient cars. The speed limit was lowered to 55 mph, saving oil and also thousands of lives. Interest picked up in alternative energy, everything from electric cars to windmills. Americans came to understand--and it was new thinking then--that every barrel has its bottom, and that conservation could bolster supplies just as effectively as new oil wells.

Not that all these happy lessons endured. Big Oil conspiracy buffs no doubt have taken note that the current spike in prices comes at a time when the hottest selling vehicles are four-wheel-drive gas guzzlers, and in a year that saw the 55-mph speed limit junked and the push by California state government for development of electric cars all but abandoned. Ah ha.

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In truth, the cause of the price increase remains a mystery, the subject of much gas pump speculation. The oil industry itself has failed, almost comically, to keep its story straight. Initially, its many spokespersons attributed rising prices to stalled United Nations talks with Iraq, which has not marketed its oil since the Persian Gulf War. Then refinery fires and equipment malfunctions were blamed. Then it was California’s insistence on cleaner-burning fuel. Then it was not the cleaner fuels. Then it was seasonal demand. And so on. One senses that the oil companies regret not having a Mr. Yamani to hide behind this time.

Beneath the tortured whys and wherefores, however, there resides a much simpler proposition: The oil companies have raised prices because they can. One thing America did not learn in the 1970s was how to create real options for getting from Point A to Point B. Mass transit is not exactly a national strength. The anger bubbling at gas stations now is not so much about paying 50 cents more a gallon. It’s about not having any option but to pay.

This is one of those times when “we the people” are given a hard lesson in who actually runs the world, and the answer is: Not us. Humbled, we will wheel into the station, pay their price and, through gritted teeth, thank those sporting chaps known collectively as Big Oil for letting us save a nickel by pumping the gas ourselves.

If we’re really good, sometimes they let us borrow the squeegee.