We all get those emails with grandiose ideas to boycott certain gas station brands, or to not buy gas on a certain day. The naive belief is that this is a way consumers can bring down the "high" price of gasoline. Certainly that is the way it works sometimes. Consumers can boycott a brand or they can stop buying a certain product. Then supply goes up, and prices come down.

This doesnt seem to work for gasoline.

Most of us cannot stop using gasoline. Our society and lifestyles and geopgraphy require gas for our transportation, which for most of us is our cars.

But even if we cant bring the cost per gallon down, there is a way to reduce our costs for gasoline. We need to drive less. We need to walk to the corner store, or the post office or the bank. We can ride bikes to locations that are within a mile or two. We can car pool or we can take a bus or a train.

We can also start buying cars with better mileage. The days of the giant suv land yaughts is drawing to a close. Like the dinosaurs, the days of lumbering Suburbans and Excursions and Hummers will become history.

Americans still have cheap gas at $3 a gallon. The rest of world pays closer to $6. We have grown fat and lazy over the decades since we first learned we were at risk to the whims of politics, mideast turmoil, and dwindling resources. Instead of getting smart, and using technology and knowledge to reduce our addiction to oil, we built and bought giant vehicles that sucked gasoline like drunken politicians. And we built more freeways so we could live far from the cities in the country.

We are paying THAT price today. Will we be making the same mistakes tomorrow?