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Sun Setting On Cheap Gas And Easy Choices

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By STEVE OTTO

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 20, 2008

Thanks to a teacher's discount we managed to spend two nights last week at a resort on St. Pete Beach. The room had a spectacular view of the gravel roof, but the price was right and the beach was just beyond the back door.

We even found a great little hole-in-the-wall place called the R-Bar and happened to be there for their Tuesday night all-you-can-eat snow crab claws. We started in early and it was still daylight outside when I pushed away the last mound of shells and suggested we'd better take a hike up and down the beach.

I was surprised that there must have been a thousand or so people on what was about a mile strip of beach. Some were sitting there taking pictures and there were even a couple of artists with easels set up facing the water. But mostly it was strollers, all meandering in the general direction of the setting sun.

I hope you've taken the time to experience what it is like as the orange ball touches the horizon and seems to spread across the sky in colors too gaudy to be real. Along the shore it is almost silent as the crowd stops to stare at the sheer grandness of the event.

Golden Boy

My guess is that Gov. Charlie must have picked up his golden tan on these same beaches not too many years ago. Surely he must have paused for a few seconds some evenings, taking his Ray-Bans off, if only for the moment, to gaze at the glory of the sunset, before packing it in after another day on the sand.

It might have been those days that caused him to promise during his campaign to keep "clean rivers, beautiful beaches and coastlines free of oil drilling."

Gov. Charlie folded on that one this week. Nobody is quite sure whether it happened after filling up at the pump or getting a phone call from someone looking for a running mate, but Charlie now believes drilling off the Florida coast might be good for America.

What gnaws at you, or at least gnaws at me, is not the idea of drilling so much as the way we have been pushed up against the wall to find solutions. Where were these same politicians and the rest of us 35 years ago when it dawned on Americans that we were being held hostage to a very finite supply of fossil fuel?

It's easy to blame what has passed for leadership these past three decades, but at the same time we are the ones who bought the SUVS, went with energy inefficient McMansions, and generally blew off worries about the future.

Never The Twain Shall Meet

We've all been reading the sad saga of that east-west toll road the city would like built in New Tampa. Traffic is a disaster in that part of the county and even if the road, with its excessive toll fees, were to be built, it would not be for years.

Something has to be done, but only because local governments failed to demand responsible development or to ensure an infrastructure that could handle the load. And again, we were the ones who put those same politicians in office and watched as they raised their well-greased hands into the air to approve project after project.

So now here we are watching in shock and awe as the cost of everything soars daily and we are forced into doing all of those things we said for decades we would never do. Yeah that's what is gnawing as me as I think of that sunset on St. Pete Beach.

Keyword, Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

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