There’s a silver lining to high fuel prices.
In 10 Things You Can Like About $4 Gas, Time magazine contends that higher transportation costs are bringing overseas jobs back home to the U.S., cleaning the air, reducing traffic fatalities, and cooling urban sprawl. It may sting your paycheck, but expensive gas can mean less emergency room trips for kids with asthma and other individuals whose conditions are worsened by pollution.
To Time’s list of benefits, I’d add that increased car pooling, mass transit, and urban living give people more social interaction than they’d get spending hours behind the wheel as lone drivers. Isolation is well documented to carry health risks, and exacerbates psychological problems such as depression.
In addition, bringing manufacturing operations back to the U.S. may slow the crazed pace of industrial development in places like China, where they’re burning so much coal that skies turn grey.
