Some Ways to Cut Oil Dependency and Help Reduce Gas Prices Now

During the heat of the political debate about what government should do to help reduce dependence on oil and help to lower the impact of swiftly rising gas and heating oil prices, many measures have been suggested,  These include opening up the strategic oil reserve, allowing increased exploration and drilling offshore and in ANWAR, setting new rules against oil futures speculation, and cutting taxes on gasoline.  Experts (and common sense) say that none of these will have much benefit longer term and can widen government deficits which, in turn, causes weakening of the dollar and thus higher cost of imported oil.  Many suggested measures just keep the US in the hamster cage spinning round and round as domestic and international consumption continues to increase. The truth is that demand from the rapidly rising middle class consumers in China, India and other emerging regions will continue to increase long term demand on all forms of energy.  This makes the limited or short term measures desperately being sought merely band-aides  for a systemic wound in the economic fabric.

1. Provide businesses with tax and CO2 offset incentives for employee ride sharing programs.  Encourage this through public-private advertising and internal organization promotion campaigns.  Provide rideshare participants with Bennie's such as extra vacation days, gifts and parties.
2. Provide similar incentives for participation in telecommuting programs.  Every day worked from home/SOHO is a 100% savings in gas otherwise burned into the atmosphere. About sixty percent of U.S. and European workers are considered 'information workers'.  If half of them worked 2-4 days per week from home or local office kiosk, millions of gallons of oil would be saved every day. (This is a guesstimate but you can find facts to support the general assertion).  To reduce gas consumption through the use of higher efficiency standards will take several years and should be pursued vigorously.  Ridesharing and telecommuting can happen as soon as organizations and people adopt it.
3. Reduce the work week from 5 to 4 days where feasible. This can be combined with telecommuter programs for combined promotion, education and incentives.
4. Aggressively spur development of dynamic ridesharing and public-private transport programs similar to www.Piggyback.fr, a Google Android sponsored dynamic ridesharing program, and the effort being started by eRideshare.com, a web-based service that claims the largest subscriber base. People can and will share rides if it saves them money, is easy to schedule and reschedule, reasonably safe, easy and pre-negotiated to pay for.  Dynamic ridesharing combined with public transit and private cab and shuttle connection services that Google and other web search and mapping companies have developed is at the stage of development that now awaits promotion and adoption.  These services will become made less expensive, media-friendly and more widely available as next generation wireless networks roll out.
5. Develop alternative energy that does not conflict with the food supply or that uses more oil than it displaces.  R&D into alternative biomass fuels, switch grass, algae, wind, solar, and, one of my favorites, ocean power, should be pursued, partly using money now given to oil companies in the form of low cost oil leases and depletion allowances.
6. Encourage greater use of teleconferencing, webinars, and other virtual seminars forms of meetings and exchanges in place of destination travel.  This has direct economic benefits to participants and also reduces energy consumption and environmental impacts.
7. Encourage further development of personal and group productivity and social networking uses of personal broadband that displaces the requirement to travel.
8. Develop community transit, ridesharing facilities, and encourage use of government funding to help develop and promote the use of the NG personal broadband Information Super Highway instead of and to augment the use of transit.
9.  As Marshall Mcluhan famously put it, "The medium is the message".  The use of personal broadband medium in the era of the information society age is the message that needs to be heard above the din of the old ways of government action and commercial promotion. Action is needed to create advocacy for the use of the new personalized, rich, always-connected  media instead of relying on measures that keep people and organizations trapped on the treadmill of the pre-information age.
10. Informed legislation that supplants the building of more roads, highways, rail, pumping up more oil and mining more coal that poison our environment should be promoted.  The most direct way to stem dependence on oil is to stop using it. The most efficient,socially beneficial vehicle to do that is through the use of next generation personal broadband media communications.

The communications industry has a very significant role to play in helping reduce dependency on fuels that cause personal and national economic hardship, political vulnerability and long term disastrous environmental impacts.

 

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