Gas prices rising all over GTA

I read an article in the Toronto dated Wednesday March 12th titled “A Real Pain in the Gas: Think gas prices are bad now? You just wait”. At a first glance, one may not think this can relate to place and scale, but in fact I realized it does. The steep gas prices have much to do with the price of crude oil, which has a lot to the US dollar. Because the US dollar has not been doing well lately, it has pushed the prices of gas. Furthermore, they are predicting that we may see price as high as between 1.40 to 1.50 by the month of May! And think about this, in the next decade it will hit 3.00! So what will bring gas down? This here has to do with place, as it would involve great worldwide changes, such as a depression. What I found interesting was that an oil analyst said even if all of Toronto stopped driving, it would still not do much to alter gas prices. And to get an idea of scale, in August 1989, record high gas prices created a huge chaos at Ontario-US border because the price of gas was 54.2 cents a liter, where was in Niagara Falls at the time it was 32.3 cents. The following year, gas reached its record high of 60 cents a liter, which was an unbelievable high at the time. The other thing in this article that I could relate to this course was when a oil analyst said “There's nothing on the horizon that suggests oil or gasoline are going to drop in price, and yet, there's more and more consumption." This made me think of our lecture on consumption. I remember in Guy Sparkes’ article The Society of the Spectacle, he speaks of the dictatorship of the vehicle. I think this is certainly true. While people will complain and complain about high gas prices, people will always rely on their cars and need to drive. Of course, depending on where one lives, they certainly do need to rely on their car. However, for many, the car is a luxury rather than a real necessity, but yet they still refuse other forms of transportation. In reality though, if the oil analyst is saying that even if we all stopped driving in Toronto it wouldn’t lower gas prices, what is the point if we just want to try and lower the costs. They do give a list of suggestions on how to save gas though, which can be found on this website:http://www.torontosun.com/News/TorontoAndGTA/2008/03/12/4977616-sun.html

-Maria Marrella