Daily Scold: Gas guzzling douchebags

People who drive gas-guzzling vehicles in well-paved, urban areas are douchebags. And now, with oil prices skyrocketing (topping $111 a barrel today), the amount of whining they do about pump prices has increased of late.

Driving on the Washington beltway in my relatively tame, 25-mpg (miles per gallon) sedan, I frequently see Cadillac Escalades (14 mpg) and even Hummer H2s (9!!! mpg) passing me. That's right, speeding past me when I'm going 70 against a limit of 65 mph. Seriously, what possible reason could you have for buying a BIGASS SUV, if you plan on doing city and highway driving 90% of the time? Do big cars mean you have a bigger penis? Or a bigger something? It does seem linked to America's unwritten mantra: bigger is better.

But pure red-white-and-blue stupidity aside, it's the childish tendency to shift blame on everyone but yourself that burns me. What really drives me up a wall, through the ceiling and into the bright blue sky above, are SUV drivers who bitch about oil companies manipulating the price of gas. There's no doubt they've earned absurd profits, but the number one factor behind high prices is high demand. Plus the mildly relevant fact that we're running out of big oil fields that are easily exploited. Now it costs more than ever to recover oil, while the number of new sources has dipped dramatically.

Gas-guzzling douchebags need to fess up: you can't blame anyone but your own stupid selves for spending money on SUVs to cruise highways.

In the last few years, SUV sales have slumped, but only after a meteoric rise. Don't take it just on me relating anecdotes about Hummers on the Washington beltway. Sales data shows the number of new SUVs sold in the U.S. tripled from 976,000 to nearly 3 million between 1989 and 2000. Watching this happen, some Democratic lawmakers tried to increase fuel mileage standards for SUVs and trucks in May 2001, calling for an increase from 20 mpg to 27 mpg (just beating the first American car made, the Model T, which got 25 mpg) over six years. But alas, the automakers and their lobbyists got the better of our government, and fuel efficiency remained flat.

Meanwhile, demand from countries like China and India continues to grow, year after year. With the dollar declining and the economy headed toward recession (truly, look around you -- it would be hard to argue that a recession hasn't already hit), it's time to face the music. Unless you live in Offroadsville, Montana or Snowallyear, Massachusetts, or unless you haul tons of equipment for work, you don't have any moral right to buy a gas-guzzling vehicle and then bitch about gas prices.

People in Europe have long had to deal with gas prices that equate to $5, $6, $7 per gallon or higher. As a result, they walk more, bike more, tend to be fitter on average, and don't face the same obesity crisis America does. Oh, and they have significantly better mass-transit systems as well.

Obviously it's not a perfect comparison, given the U.S. government's massive and continuing investment in highways and other car-friendly infrastructure. But to quote LeAnn Rimes, "something's gotta give."

Sadly, it won't be OPEC or any other oil-exporting country. With the dollar as low as it is, they're dominating the playing field, and there's precious little either Congress or America's major oil players (Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, etc.) can do about it. MSNBC's John W. Schoen says it best: "So far, high prices don’t seem to have curtailed Americans' desire to zoom down the highway in low-mileage, high-powered trucks, most of which will never leave asphalt or haul a load and rarely carry more than one person. Until that changes there's little chance of bringing oil prices back down. Shifting blame on oil companies won’t make it happen."