How to fight back against high gas prices

Do you worry about the ever increasing gas prices? Are you seeing your income eaten away by the once unimaginable, but now real, two, three, or even four dollar per gallon prices at the pump? Do you worry that someday you may not be able to afford the trip to work, if the price keeps rising?

Are you outraged that you struggle every day to make ends meet while your money is being taken away to fill in the already overflowing coffers of the Arabs sitting on top of oil, or even being used to fund the terrorists?

And are you worried about all the problems caused by the use of oil, bad and polluted air, environment damage, global warming, rising oceans, terrorism and war over resources? What can you do about it? How to fight back?


Well, we all heard of the proposed approaches to reduce the consumption of oil. "Clean" energy from sunlight and wind, the use of electrical cars, hydrogen power, public transportation, or human or animal powered transportation. While all of these proposals have merits, none have proved themselves capable of providing short term or immediate relief to the dependency on oil, or even for the long term, capable of economically and efficiently fill in all our needs currently fulfilled by oil. So we keep talking and discussing, but we keep driving and burning oil in our daily lives, making more CO2 and warming the globe (and keep paying more and more).

The situation is getting critical, and we can wait no longer. It is time for action. But what can we do?

Let us think for a moment (don't do this too often; once a while is fine). What makes us use the most gas? The summer trip to the lake? The once a year visit to GrandMa's house? No, none of these. We use the most gas going to and from work.

Except the few people who live very close to their offices or who live in New York where they go around by subway, most Americans have to drive to work from home. Drive to work in the morning and drive back home in the evening. For the majority the office may be in the city while the home may be 20, 30, 40, or 100 miles away. So we spend lots of time on the highway, sitting in traffic, running the engine idle and emitting CO2. We see our hard earned money vaporized in the process.

So to address the issue we have to fight the habit of "going to work" head on. "Going to work" is the biggest problem in America today. If we keep "going to work" every day we will see more pollution, warmer earth, more storms, higher oceans, richer Arabs and more terrorism.

So we don't work? No, that's not what we are proposing. Of course we have to keep working. We need to earn money to feed our families. So "not working" is not the solution.

Instead, we keep working but do less of coming and going. We propose that employees should stay in the office and take turns to go home once every other, or every third, day. Except for these who come to and leave from work by bikes, walking, buses or subways, human powered vehicles or horses, employees should stay in the office overnight and sleep in their desks or some temporary beds in the office. And people can take showers and sleep with their spouses once every two, or three, days when they get to go back home for a night. And if the office does not have facilities for taking showers, as most offices do not, people should be prepared to accept the bad smells of their office mates, for the good of the environment.

If we carry out this plan faithfully, we shall see the rush hour traffic in our cities reduced by a half or even two thirds, and the gasoline consumption in America reduced by the same ratio. This will go a long way toward reducing the foreign oil dependency and saving the environment and is more effective than any other methods currently proposed and is doable without any technical difficulty.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. And Americans are tough. So it is time for us to come together to fight back against rising gas prices and to reduce the dependency on oil, and to save the environment. We will refuse to "go to work" every day, by staying at work and not going home!