High gas prices hurt, but they’re an opportunity to make good choices

WASHINGTON » The water level in Nevada’s Lake Mead has fallen so low that authorities found two bodies previously hidden in the reservoir’s depths, one an apparent homicide victim stuffed into a barrel. Upstream along the Colorado River, in shrinking Lake Powell, another set of waterlogged human remains was recently found in a submerged car. Meanwhile, the bodies of long-dead mountain climbers are emerging from the melting glaciers of the Himalayas and the Alps.

Those macabre discoveries are the result of climate change, which doesn’t care about the war in Ukraine or spiking gasoline prices or the coming midterm elections. Climate change marches on, and we ignore it in favor of our immediate interests at our grave near-term peril.

A mammoth wildfire in New Mexico has burned more than 370 square miles over the past few weeks and remains out of control. A deadly heat wave is scorching much of India and Pakistan, with daytime high temperatures of up to 120 degrees and lows in the

90s — and it isn’t even summer yet. A new Chinese government report says that rapid sealevel rise poses an unprecedented threat to the teeming coastal cities of the world’s most populous nation.

I could go on. But we all know by now that climate change is ravaging the planet. We just keep finding reasons not to take the steps — or make the sacrifices — that we know are necessary to curb carbon emissions and prevent the worst-case scenarios from becoming our hellish reality.

One of those sacrifices involves paying more at the pump. The nationwide average price of a gallon of gasoline hit $4.42 on Thursday, an alltime high. Low-income Americans struggling to cope with inflation are suffering. The Biden administration and the Democratic Party, looking ahead to November, are worried. But we must keep in mind that paying higher gas prices now will mean better lives for our children, our grandchildren and the generations that follow.

Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine leaves the United States and its allies no choice but to do whatever is possible to keep Russian fossil fuels, which fund President Vladimir Putin’s war machine, off the world markets. We need to see this not as a problem but as an opportunity.

Demand for petroleum products fell markedly during the two years of COVID-19 shutdowns. With major economies ramping back up, demand has rebounded. But refining capacity fell for the first time in three decades in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency, which choked the supply of gasoline. And disruption of the supply from Russia — the United States, for example, has imposed a total ban on imports of Russian oil — sent rising gas prices even higher.

The sky-high price of gasoline is a powerful incentive to use less of it — which would mean reduced carbon emissions. But it is also a powerful incentive for motorists to get angry at the politicians who lead their governments. President Joe Biden has responded with an unprecedented release of oil from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve, a move echoed by allied governments around the world. “We all overrely on fossil fuels,” Cecilia Rouse, chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me on Thursday. “That’s just the reality of today.”

Biden has not, however, given in to the “drill, baby, drill” hectoring of Republican critics, who see the solution to high gas prices as bringing more and more U.S. oil out of the ground — and, eventually, spewing its heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere. On Wednesday, the administration canceled the planned sale of offshore oil and gas leases, including 1 million acres off the Alaska coast and more in the Gulf of Mexico.

The right long-term solution, for the sake of the planet, is not increasing the supply of fossil fuels. It’s reducing the demand.

One impact of high gasoline prices should be to spur greater demand for electric vehicles, which have a much smaller carbon footprint. They allow drivers to blissfully ignore prices at the pump — and, with their terrific acceleration, to embarrass Ferrari owners at stoplights.

The price spike comes as mass-market electric vehicles come on the market in earnest. Ford is about to ship its F-150 Lightning, the all-electric version of the pickup truck that has been America’s most popular vehicle for a generation. The base model will cost around $40,000 — not cheap, exactly, but within the range of what a buyer would expect to pay for a brand-new pickup with a few bells and whistles.

Rivian already has its electric pickup on the streets. Other carmakers, including General Motors, are following suit as fast as they can. Imagine the difference it would make if all the pickups on U.S. streets stopped belching carbon.

These high gas prices, and shallow lakes, are telling us to make good choices. We should listen.