Reading the responses to this little post has been entertaining.

I was struck by the fact that all the vehicles consumed gas at a rate of around 13 mpg or less. I gave the post the necessary trappings for debate, but I think I failed to sufficiently make clear the context which set the stage.

Here, AC means survival for 95 percent of the residents who are not wiry thin skeletons. It's not a luxury, but rather a necessity. The oversize utilitarian vehicles are the only real "decadence" in this tale - but I note they ARE utilitarian. That seems like a minor point, but in the greater context is important.

The folks around me were surviving and combatting nature using western technology and consuming fuel.

I have been in other settings, where FAR more selfish indulgence was in evidence. Sitting at a light in Socal with a Bentley, several Mercedes and a convertible Diablo around one deserves the cake for a self-indulgent and self-conscious, fuel consuming vehicular orgy.

In the US cheap gas is part of the equation. The distances we travel exceed the distances traveled by any other nation. Unlike Europe, we are not living in centuries old cities built up so dense that you can walk nearly anywhere and have public transport at your beck and call.

Here, environment requires some sort of vehicle/shelter. You can't walk even five minutes here without risking heat exhaustion and radiation burns. This is true for much of New Mexico, Nevada and much of inland CA around the Mojave as well. So the US has unique needs.

When you buy more of something, you usually get a discount.

The US price for gas was understood to be part of this equation. We use more, we need more, and so we get a discount in comparison to Europe or Japan.

As we speak, speculators are intentionally manipulating the commodities market to profit on oil and harm America at the same time. There is no actual oil "crisis" other than that. That this happened after the US successfully negotiated with France and a big payoff to end the "crisis" in Iraq and to give TOTAL a contract to expand fields and increase Iraqi output another 300,000 bpd is not an accident.

The enemies of the US are siphoning out wealth at a shocking rate.

The bureaucrats are slow to respond because the high gas prices mean windfall tax revenues. The government is in on this gravy train and it amounts to a HUGE NEW TAX on the US taxpayer and businesses. Look for the deficit to go WAY down after the gas companies pay taxes in January 2009.

So expecting the government to stop what's going on is naive. Only when folks catch on that they are complicit and intentionally look the other way will they do something to save themselves from being voted out for someone else in their next election.

So to summarize, this orgy had been orchestrated in large part by necessity and the rest by western indulgence and marketing. While the vehicles here are mandatory, the choices are often certainly westernized marketing ideals.