Gas sticker shock goes deep

High energy costs affect us all. We feel it right where it hurts the most - our pocket book.

The steep rise of gasoline prices over the past six months is a pain felt by everyone in Montana, where our mobility is much more than a luxury. We're absolutely dependent on our wheels to get us there and back, on a much longer trip to the store than our cosmopolitan cousins in the city.

We chuckle wryly at the thought of alternative modes of transportation - riding a bicycle to work just isn't feasible when you log 26 miles a day just to get to the office, let alone haul a load come rain or shine. Riding a bike (or a horse) or walking to work are attractive alternatives for most of us, but not very realistic.

So now that gas prices have risen an average of 50 cents over the past seven months, we conserve as best we can. But we still face the dreadful (and expensive) chore of filling up our tanks almost as frequently as ever.

We also realize it affects business.

For example, it's fairly obvious that truckers cannot entirely absorb a 25 percent rise in fuel costs without eventually passing that cost on to consumers or going out of business. And our farmers and ranchers haven't seen any direct relief from the market to compensate for their higher expenses.

Fuel price increases are a part, some say a large part, of inflationary pressures that are forcing the cost of goods and services to go up this year.

Some of the impact, however, is more indirect and more difficult to measure. That impact, at first glance, may not appear as widespread on our small valley.

Though traffic seems as heavy as ever this summer, tourism experts warn us of the statistical impact of higher gasoline prices.

The Research and Analysis Bureau of the Montana Department of Labor and Industry recently released a snapshot look at the impact of rising fuel costs on employment. Its conclusion may not be a surprise, but its impact is sobering.

Based on a study by Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, a one-percent increase in gasoline prices is associated with a 1.74 percent decrease in lodging demand. And it doesn't take much extrapolation to figure out that less lodging demand means there is less work for those who take the reservations and make the beds.

The bureau used the study to estimate that for every one-percent rise in gasoline prices there was a .18 percent drop in employment in Montana's Hotel and Motel Industry. A similar, though less severe, impact would also be felt in the food service and gambling industries.

The study points out that there are many factors that impact jobs in the tourism industry, but it is logical that our increasing dependence on tourism dollars, whether direct or indirect, is largely impacted by fuel costs.

You don't have to work at a motel to feel the impact, either. Fewer workers mean less dollars spent in local stores or paying taxes or donating to charities. Tourist dollars trickle down to many of us in this diverse economy, so we should probably be even more concerned than how it impacts our wallet at the pump.

As we become more frustrated with our increasingly expensive dependence on gasoline, we Montanans can at least feel unified in our growing interest to break free of those bonds. We might all be more willing to accept higher fuel costs typically associated with alternative fuels, such as ethanol, and be more willing to trim down our gas-guzzling demand.

Conservation is an obvious solution, but so is weaning ourselves from non-renewable fuels that force us to depend on oil shipped from halfway around the world. The technology exists, but we as consumers must make alternatives a priority.

We may be mad as hell, but we better be prepared to do something about it beyond complaining at the gas pump.