Have you been driving less because of the high gas prices lately?
The flexibility to work from home has been a boon for us while higher gas prices have coincided with some office renovations that made it even easier for Len to avoid his daily commute some days. While I have been working remotely since March 2020, there are other commutes I've made less frequent in the last few weeks. We've biked to church, for example. It's a 17.2-mile round trip we've previously taken just for the exercise and environment's benefit, but I admit the gas prices were what recently motivated us to make the time for it two weeks in a row.
We're not the only ones choosing to stay home or use alternate transportation. I just read a news article that these high gas prices are coinciding with lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently gasoline sales in June were about 5% below June 2019 levels and 2.6% below a year ago (since the pandemic affected travel and decreased air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as well). In April 2020, as pandemic restrictions set in, Americans drove 40% fewer miles than the same month the previous year. Two years later, people are driving more again but still a little bit less than pre-pandemic levels -- reports are that Americans drove 6% fewer miles this past April than they did in April 2019.
That's a good thing, driving less. Continued high gas prices ought to encourage continued reductions in driving. However...
First of all, people just hate the high prices. So, we'll all be grumpy. But second of all, and perhaps more important, if we're only focusing on the high gas prices, we're not looking at the big picture of our environmental impact. That 6% drop in driving resulted in only a 1% drop in overall U.S. carbon emissions. That's the bad news. If we (the U.S.) are going to meet our goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030, simply driving less is not nearly enough -- but it's also not nothing. We should continue to drive less.
To sum up: On one hand, the high gas prices can be a good thing for making us think about how much we really need to drive vs. walking, biking, telecommuting, or taking public transportation. On the other hand, the gas prices are painful to the people who do not have the luxury of working from home or living close enough to the grocery store to walk there, so it would be great to see prices go back down. It would be even greater, though, if those of us who have been able to change our travel habits because of the gas prices keep up those changed habits -- even when cheap gas makes it easier to drive -- for the global good.
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