The High Cost of Death

I was thinking on the way home from work tonight about the cost of gasoline. Everybody whining (like Phil Gramm says!) about the prices. It's about $4.25 these days. Listening to NPR over the weekend report on how our Congresspersons went back to their districts over the 4th of July and got an ear full. One guy told his Representative, "If you want a revolution, let the gas prices keep going up."
It's pretty funny I think. I was thinking about this in terms of the cost of cigarettes, which Massachusetts and New York recently raised taxes on (in Mass, it was raised by $1 a pack!). Not many people are complaining about that. And yet we are just addicted to gasoline as we are to tobacco.
In the early 1990's, a pack of cigarettes was something like $1.35 ($2 in 2008 dollars). Now they are $7.50 -- a 375% increase. I think this is all good though. Cigarettes are a horrible pleasure for one person, but in the end, we all pay the monetary costs (the smoker pays the mortal costs, which of course, cannot have a price put on it unless you are an insurance adjuster). Smokers put a strain on the health care system and the economy. On the health care side, many smokers are getting some sort of government subsidized insurance, either because they are lower incomes or because they are of the generation that has a pension. On the economy, money spent on cigarettes cannot be spent or invested other places, so we loose out there too.
Gasoline is similar in that the immediate user is the person in the car, living miles from everything. They have to fill up their tanks and pay the costs for the vehicle. But we all pay for the climate change, the pollution, the kids with asthma, the environmental degradation, the noise, the loss of farmland. It's not much different: Tiny individual choices with costs involved for broader society.
Gasoline in the early 1990's was like $1 a gallon. It's only $4 now. With inflation that's a change from $1.5o to $4 - a 260% increase. That's a big jump, but way less than the rise in cigarette prices. And it's worse though, because a lot of the costs of cigarettes go to taxes funneled into health care, to child prevention and community education, to those courts have determined are victims of the tobacco industry. But the rise in gas prices have only benefited the oil producers. It's not paying for mass transit, sprawl mitigation, highway removal, farmland restoration, education programs on how to live without a car, or paying the doctor bills of those asthmatic children. And that's deeply sad.
We need to understand that oil is just as much as an addiction as tobacco. We lived without it for millennia, yet now, because everybody's a user, it's difficult to face up to fact that we're addicted.
It's time for an intervention.