Today I passed gas station after gas station that said $3.05 A GALLON, and frankly I could not be happier.

That statement is going to make a lot of people angry at me. People are going to say things like “I can’t afford to feed my children because it cost’s too much to fill up my car” or “my business relies on low fuel costs, I am going to go out of business.” and even “hey I hate paying all of my money on gas.”

I feel for you, I really do. I am poor, I hate paying the high prices, I spend more on feeding my car than I do on feeding myself. I understand the hard choices. So you might be asking “well then why are you happy that gas cost’s so much?” Let me tell you.

We, the human race, and Americans specifically, have gotten ourselves into a sticky wicket. We are living a life style that is simply unsustainable. We simply can not keep living the way we are or we are going to reap the whirlwind.

Think of how much oil you use in a day. You wake up, hit the alarm on your plastic clock (that runs on electricity from burning oil), get out of your bed that is covered in plastic fabric, put on your plastic fabric cloths, brush your teeth with your plastic tooth brush, with toothpaste out of a plastic tube, then floss with plastic string. Then you go eat breakfast that is grown using oil based fertilizers and shipped to you using oil, in trucks full of plastic parts, then you walk over your plastic carpet, to your front door, step out, turn to see your plastic coated house, and then walk to your plastic filled car and drive it to work powered by oil. And this is just breakfast (I am sure I missed a few things made of and/or that run on oil in this list).

Oil is more important to our culture than Buffalo was to plains Indians. Yet they had intricate religious ceremonies celebrating Buffalo, we on the other hand, only think about oil when gas prices go up. Unless you get naked and hike deep into the woods, its impossible to get away from an object that has oil in it , or is made of oil (try it now, try and look in a direction that doesn’t have an object made of oil, you mines well close your eyes). Stated simply, oil is as important as air, food, and water, to our lives.

So why be happy about high gas prices? Because high gas prices make people pay attention. They make people sit up and think about how important oil is to our lives. High gas prices are the canary in the coal mine. It is a warning sign to us, letting us know that we will need to be doing something, and doing it quick.

We can solve this problem, and we can do it quickly. We have done large things like this in the past. During world war 2 we ramped up for total war in a matter of months, the world wide scourge of polo was wiped out, the Apollo project brought together the greatest minds of our time to accomplish what no had done before, during the 80’s the Montreal agreement saved us from a world without an ozone layer.

The price at the pump is only going to go up, way up, we need to get used to that. This ever growing cost is going to start making things like electric cars powered by wind and solar a much more attractive option (and cheaper too). The high price of gas is going to cause city planners to start designing cites with more dense urban populations with cheap public transport. High gas prices are going to cause more local farming, because its going to cost too much to ship food from far away. High gas prices are going to cause more sustainable farming practices (currently several hundred calories of oil are used to create every calorie of food we eat). It will change the way we eat (that $1.50 avocado from Chile is going to cost $10.00). Its going to change the way we make things, and who we get things from. Plastic doo-dads from China are going to cost too much to make or ship to us, causing us to start making things here at home again.

There is two ways to deal with this coming problem, we can wait till the price of gas gets so high that we are forced to make all of these changes. This will be painful and chaotic and cost us all a lot of money and probably a lot of lives as well. Or we can plan ahead and tackle this problem while we still have some (relatively) cheap oil laying around. Lets build electric cars, lets put up solar panels and wind turbines, lets integrate bio-fuels. Lets start growing our food locally, and start making our goods locally. Lets do these things while we still can, not wait around until we have to.

As oil becomes more expensive market forces will force most people to change the way they live. They might not like it, in fact it will be incredibly hard on most people, but they will change. First the poor, then the middle class, and finally the rich. We have ignored this problem for so long that our choices at this point are pretty limited. Hard choices about lifestyle now, or if we ignore it for even longer, hard choices about survival in the future.

I look forward with great apprehension to the coming of higher oil prices. A ruff choice, but much like pulling a band-aid off, better to get it over with than do it slowly.