Environmentalists don’t get economics.

Last night at dinner, a person relatively close to me (not my wife), who is unfortunately a flaming liberal like the rest of my in-laws and a knee-jerk environmentalist wacko to boot, responded to my assertion that a cessation of all offshore drilling would result in $6 – $10 per gallon for gasoline with the following: “That’s fine with me.”
Without even thinking what that would mean to the price of food, or of any other commodity that they take for granted in the small northern PA town where they live. From which town, by the way, they had just driven three hours to spend the evening with us.
Later in the conversation, this person and spouse were telling us that the new boiler they need at home will cost $4500 to install. I said (aside from “you’re getting screwed”), “oil-fired boiler?”
“Yes.”
“So what are you going to do when the price of heating oil goes as sky-high as you want gasoline to go?”
“Well, I wish we didn’t have to use oil, but we keep it really cold in the winter.” (They keep the house at about 60 degrees.)
I was tempted to ask why they weren’t installing a wood-fired or coal-fired boiler but I was pretty sure the answer would have been something along the lines of, “what, and contribute to global warming with all that CO₂?”
The sad thing is that this person is not stupid, but l guess living in a small town all your life and taking things like fresh groceries and plenty of consumer goods in the stores for granted doesn’t give one much perspective with regard to what happens when the distribution system breaks down due to the high cost of transporting goods.
(This is a small town that barely has cell service because none of the local farmers are willing to allow trees to be cut down to install a cell tower…)