Who’s Counting? Gas Prices, the Stock Market, and Dead Children

Collapsing in panic over the price of gas is a characteristically incoherent American tradition. The highly paid press, political officials, and the same people who ignore as a matter of routine the rising costs of housing, health care, and higher education treat a 25-cent-per-gallon jump in fuel as tantamount to the apocalypse. Meanwhile, something similar to the apocalypse actually threatens livable ecology on Earth (the universe’s only habitable planet for those keeping count), largely due to the extraction of fossil fuels, but biodiversity in a boiling world is hardly relevant. Or, at least, that is what one could discern from watching CNN and MS-Now, formerly MSNBC, both of which keep a running tracker of the average cost of gas, breathlessly announcing a three-cent increase or one cent drop as if they are reporting live from the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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