Memorial Day Weekend: Hit the Open Road, America!

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 23, 2019

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe much unseen is also here.

– Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

The American Automobile Association predicts that 37.6 million Americans will hit the open road this Memorial Day weekend, a 3.5 percent increase from last year. Overall, counting travelers on airplanes (3.25 million) and trains, buses, and ships (1.9 million), the total increase is 1.5 million.

A strong economy and attractive pricing of car rentals and vacation lodging are part of the anticipated strong start of the summer driving season.

Get happy. Summer beckons. Not only bike and hike but also drive, bus, train, and fly to a better environment–your self-selected environment.

The automobile is environmentalism-on-wheels. The open road is freedom to escape the concrete for the great beyond. Mountains, rivers, hills, forests, even beautiful green golf courses–it is all a drive away. 

Don’t worry about the anti-travel crowd like the folks at Climate Progress who fret about emissions of the trace green gas, carbon dioxide. Everyone else: forget the spin and go for a spin!

Each year, MasterResource celebrates the beginning of the peak-driving season knowing that our free-market philosophy is about energy abundance and affordability and reliability. And there is little to apologize for. When is the last time you got a bad tank of gasoline, anyway?

Oil, gas, and coal have been and continue to be technologically transformed into super-clean energy resources. Carbon-based energies are growing more abundant, not less. And energy/climate alarmism is losing steam on all fronts (except the shouting).

The real energy sustainability problem is statism, not free consumer choice. As Matt Ridley concluded: “There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds the damage being done by climate change.” As Alex Epstein is telling each one of us to tell our neighbors: I Love Fossil Fuels.

Energy is the master resource. Motorized transportation is freedom-of-movement. So, like that old Shell commercial said, Let’s Go!