Globally Rational

It seems that BMW will be sending 500 electric Mini Coopers to California sometime in the near future.  To the untrained ear, this sounds promising and exciting… it’s about time that we start accepting the use of clean energy (which we can get from water power, wind power, solar power, or nuclear power) in our everyday lives.  But the big question, of course, is whether it will stick.

This isn’t the first time that a major auto manufacturer has tried to sell electric cars to Californians.  Of course, gas prices are a much bigger motivator this time around, but that incentive only applies to the consumer.  What about the incentives for the richer-than-ever oil lobby?  I find it hard to believe that they won’t do everything in their power to keep us away from cars that don’t use gasoline… and they’ve been successful in the past.

The question is this: why does the oil lobby have more power than the voters?  And I think the answer is something simple that we really don’t want to accept… as much as we hate high gas prices, we don’t care enough about it to get seriously involved.  The only reason why your local legislator would side with the consumers is the fact that he wants more votes in the next election.  Meanwhile, he/she has a fierce incentive to side with the oil lobby, which will donate money to his next campaign so that he can just buy back the small number of votes that he lost because of his support of their company.

The only thing we can do is to balance the incentives in our own favor.  If enough people start to care about fighting the oil lobby, then the legislators won’t be able to justify defying us.  They would lose too many votes by siding with big oil, and the money they get from the lobbyists wouldn’t be enough to make up the difference.  So why is that so hard?

Our problem is that we are too concerned with gas prices.  As long as our priority is to get cheaper gas, the lobby will keep pacifying us by trying to open ANWR (which would have almost no real impact) or by pushing for a gas tax holiday (which would cause bigger long-term problems) or by finding some other popular but hopeless way to make it seem like they care.  We’re acting like a heroin addict during an opium drought… instead of trying to find more opium, we should be looking for ways to stop being dependent on heroin.

If we want to beat the oil lobby and our gas addiction, we need to stop falling victim to their games and tricks.  Don’t vote for the person who has been voting against you.

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