LOCAL IMPACT Getting the gas face BY SAM PFEIFLE

The price of gas had risen 60 cents since that morning’s fill-up. I’ve read too many sci-fi novels not to have been seriously freaked out when I saw that on my drive home from work last Wednesday night. Scenes from Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon flickered in front of me: an 11-year-old girl, covered in fur, siphoning gas from a rusting hulk as she and her dream-projector protector race along deserted American highways. Or from Asimov’s Foundation series, where the greatest civilization in history crumbles because no one remembers how any of their technology works anymore.

I was reminded of this again during a press conference Democratic Congressman Tom Allen held on Thursday. Allen, as part of a larger plan, called on President Bush to use his "position as the nation’s Chief Executive to insist that the big oil companies limit their profit margins to the levels that existed before Hurricane Katrina first threatened the Gulf region." It appears that Tom Allen doesn’t remember who his president is, or that oil-company profits were unconscionably high to start with.

For the rest of his plan, Allen called for the nation to "increase energy efficiency" (not "decrease energy use," you’ll notice) by five percent before 2006 rolls around. He wants us to tune up our cars, drive slower, lower the thermostats. I pictured New Orleans residents covering a failing flood wall with band-aids.

Not that I’m being entirely fair to Congressman Allen. He’s one of our more liberal establishment thinkers, and his speech was littered with calls for investment in solar and wind energy, in references to legislation he’d proposed only to have it shot down by the oiloholics who passed our recent laughable energy bill. But when I asked him about what Maine residents who heat with wood could expect in terms of price-control efforts, Allen replied that he "imagine[d]" that some residents still heat with wood, and that it might be efficient, but that he didn’t see what he could do about keeping independent dealers from jacking up the price of a cord this winter (for the record: six percent of us heat with wood; a cord was running roughly $135 in 2002 and is roughly $215 now).

That’s even a progressive like Allen’s reality: Oil is what we heat with, solar and wind are things we talk about, everything else is an afterthought. Who can blame him?

Maine Republicans are no better. On Tuesday they outlined a plan for keeping gas prices in check in an open letter to Governor Baldacci. Their solution: suspend the gas tax for 60 days (I think that’s called throwing good money after bad), repeal the heating oil tax on businesses (see idea one), repeal the automatic increase of the gas tax, reduce state vehicle traffic by 15 percent (because now they just drive around aimlessly?), move state employees from five eight-hour days to four 10-hour days (a good idea, actually, though I can’t get my license renewed at the DMV as it is), and two other things that involve "investigate" and "efforts" (but not actually doing anything).

Things that never got mentioned, by anyone: improving public transportation so we actually have options besides our cars, severely limiting home-building outside of urban areas, offering tax breaks for people who don’t own cars, indexing excise taxes by fuel efficiency, any number of solutions that might make a difference, but that would piss of some political constituency.

I’m reminded of another sci-fi book. Animal Farm. I’m afraid I soon won’t be able to tell the pigs from the humans.