As oil and in turn gas, prices continue to increase and no action or plans in sight that suggest any near term reduction, I’m seeing articles and comments along the lines of, “It’s not uncommon in Europe to pay $7 for a gallon of gas. If they can stomach it, so can we.”

An example of this logic is in this opinion piece by Paul Krugman. Krugman takes what is otherwise a thoughtful argument i.e. all the talk about speculation driving an “oil bubble” may not be based on well reasoned economics but rather on wishful thinking, and destroyed his credibility with:

The consequences of that (oil) scarcity probably won’t be apocalyptic: France consumes only half as much oil per capita as America, yet the last time I looked, Paris wasn’t a howling wasteland. But the odds are that we’re looking at a future in which energy conservation becomes increasingly important, in which many people may even "” gasp "” take public transit to work.

Why is this kind of logic silly? How about a quick geography lesson.

France has an area of approximately 250,000 square miles, about the size of Texas which is approximately 269,000 square miles. France has a population of 64M people which means they have a density of approximately 256 people/Sq. Mi. Texas has a population of 24M people which means they have a density of approximately 164 people/Sq. Mi. Beginning to see an issue? Let’s extrapolate that to the entire United States. To be generous, I’ll exclude Alaska and Hawaii. The continental US has an area of 3.2 Million Sq. Mi. The continental US population is approximately 302 million people. That translates to a density of only 94 people/sq. mi. I won’t even drag you through the densities that exist west of the Mississippi and east of the Pacific coastal states. To suggest that a European country that is a fraction of the size of the US with a population density nearly 3X the US is comparable in energy use is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

OK, let’s try a different tact. Let’s assume we could get rid of all those nasty, hydrocarbon burning, carbon dioxide spewing personal vehicles. If tomorrow we banned the use of all personal vehicles we would at most, reduce our oil per capita consumption by 40% (it would be less than 40% because of course, we’d have to provide transit solutions for those people and many of those solutions involve petroleum as the fuel). Even with a 40% reduction, we’d still be using 10% more per capita than France.

My point in all of this is that trying to compare the US to a European country, especially one that is a fraction of the size of the US with a population density nearly 3X the US, as comparable in energy use is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

The only way that we are close to being comparable to Europe is in the taxes and other costs waiting to be imposed to “solve” our energy “problem” by forcibly removing our need for oil. Oh, and another way that we’ll be like Europe, we’ll be heading for our own “Dark Ages.”