A Wider Net

Gas prices. The most common answer to “what’s up?”

Take a look at this map from gasbuddy.com, a cool zoomable mashup of gas prices across the continental USA. As a “temperature map”, the hotter the color, the higher the price. So you can look at this and divine two painful facts instantly: Gas is expensive as hell, and you’re probably in a rougher hell then most of the country. Visualizations like this are designed to tell a story, and I’m not sure what story this one is best designed for. It’s not like you can afford to drive from a red area to a green area in search of lower gas prices.

Colorful heat maps like this help support the irrational backlash against the oil companies for their “record profits”. I’m not a big fan of oil companies by any means, but their margins aren’t very big when you compare them to other massive corporations like Coca-Cola, who sells us flavored water that dissolves our teeth and makes us obese. If the oil companies gave all their profits back to the consumers, it would amount to a relatively small adjustment at the pump. Then, because the oil companies would have no profit to reinvest, it would ultimately lead to higher prices as their fields ran dry and their equipment failed. We don’t want another Valdez so let’s make sure they have enough money to build safe tankers.

I don’t know, maybe I’m extra sensitive to misleading information as a result of all my years in marketing and communications. But consider this: If you were to plot this same heat chart on a global scale, and include areas like Europe where gas costs $9-10/gallon, and the Arabian peninsula where gas prices sit below $.50/gallon, then it would plunge the entire USA into a uniform shade of pale green. That would tell another story entirely.