Special Series
Word on the Street
In a Series
High Gas Prices, Healthy New Habits
Teaching old dogs new tricks? It took soaring fuel prices for old habits to shift. But they're shifting alright. Just take a look at these poll results - Gallup finds that big numbers of Americans are making changes in their daily lives to deal with higher gas prices. Here's a snapshot:
Most telling, perhaps, is that 7 out of 10 poll respondents are considering a more fuel-efficient car. That's a change that'll help control energy costs for years to come, no matter what happens to the price of gasoline. (And given recent history, hoping for a return to cheap oil is a risk that fewer and fewer families are willing to take.)
Even though we can't control the price of gas, we can control our consumption
- we can drive less, take transit, consolidate trips, drive slower, put
air in the tires, carpool, walk...choices that are good for our
pocketbooks, the climate, and our health. So, it's no surprise that
Americans are already choosing smarter travel habits. Over the long
haul, it's just common sense.
Rising energy costs--and our demonstrated ability to adjust our
consumption in response--gives us all the more reason to support a cap on climate-warming pollution. A cap will allow us to take charge of
our energy future, invest in alternatives that are more stable, and
keep more of the money going to foreign oil in our local economies -
with the added bonus of taking action to turn around our impacts on the
climate.
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