My friend Katharine has commented on her own LiveJournal on the gasoline that cannot be found in metro Atlanta. Other reports I’ve read note great anxiety in western North Carolina with spot shortages in other Southern locations.
The word is that these shortages are due to hurricane-hampered refinery production, but new refineries aren’t going to be very helpful if we’re reaching the point where easy-to-extract oil ends, and all oil becomes painfully expensive. Hubby and I bought our new place for several reasons: one was to be less oil-dependent that we might otherwise be. (Remind me of that as food transportation costs become more noticeable: you can’t really escape oil use in our economy.)
I wonder if the folks back home shouldn’t welcome this recent shortage as a dry run for times to come.
Thank you very much, Scott, and not just for the link. Thank you for calling attention to the problem. It’s very difficult to convey the reality of the situation. I don’t think I’ve ever written about anything so hard to explain, in a way, because it’s something that we all take for granted. I’m sure we’ve all experienced a power outage due to a bad storm, perhaps even an extended one. After a few days, the candles are put away, the spoiled food is thrown out, and people restart.
This isn’t like that. This isn’t an inconvenience: this affects almost everything we do. Much of metro Atlanta lives in the suburbs, which are utterly dependent on cars. A significant chunk of the citizenry is not within walking distance of a grocery store, much less their workplace. If you cannot obtain food and you cannot get to work … yep. It doesn’t matter how much money you have if gas simply isn’t available to purchase at any price.
It’s disturbing on a profound level to realize how fragile our infrastructure is.
If folks click the “disasters” tag in my LJ they’ll get the last three posts I’ve made about the gas situation.
I know that there are lines in Charlotte and Spartanburg for gasoline.
It pains me to think that we are going to take money that we should use for fixing the transportation problem and giving it to folks who failed in trying to get richer….