America has no God-given right to guzzle gas

• November’s US election will be decided on two issues: "gas and jobs". And as the jobs market starts to recover, it is the price of petrol that is uppermost in the minds of voters I’ve been speaking to in Florida, Ohio and Michigan.

• Politicians on both sides like to gloss over the issue in favour of scoring quick points, but as the price of petrol goes up towards $4 dollars a gallon, as it is now, America is reaping the bitter harvest that previous generations have sown.

• You’ll be hearing lots more about energy this week as Obama goes on a three-day tour to highlight his ‘all of the above’ energy policy, while the Republican candidates – “flat-earthers” according to Obama – whip the voters into a froth over the punitive prices at the pump.

• To quote Obama from his keynote energy speech last week: “For a lot of folks, just doing what you have to do to get your kids to school, to get to the job, to do grocery shopping – you don’t have an option. You’ve got to be able to fill up that gas tank.”

• And there it is in a nutshell: most Americans don't “have an option”. The US is built for cars, which was fine 50 years ago, and made the great suburbs of America possible, but today it threatens economic revival as energy experts say the long-term price of oil is almost certainly going to continue to rise.

• Ongoing instability in the Middle East, a gradual dwindling of available global oil supplies and a massive rise in demand for cars in India and China make that inevitable.

• Americans might scoff at European tax rates, but they do at least mean that in cities “you do have an option”, where often in America you do not. Compared with Europe, America’s public transport infrastructure ranges from barely functional, to pitiful to non-existent – Washington’s major airport, Dulles, for example is presently not connected to the capital by anything but a clogged motorway.

• And even if $4-a-gallon petrol is dirt-cheap compared to Britain, where a gallon now costs $8.30 (£1.33/litre, AA supermarket average for February), that is no comfort to Americans who have been conditioned over the years to expect cheap fuel.

• Newt Gingrich can holler all he likes about “$2.50 gas” and Mitt Romney – who might win the election if petrol hits $5 a gallon – can joke about the fact that "windmills can’t power cars", but Obama is right when he says there is “no quick fix”. But even that phrase doesn’t really do justice to the scale of the problem. Even if America wants to start investing in alternatives, the small matter of a $15 trillion national debt burden simply makes it too expensive to rip up the roads and start again – witness California’s high-speed rail programme, which is now hitting the cost buffers.

• That is why China, which is also heavily dependent on foreign oil, knows it has a golden chance not to repeat the mistake of America and is building metros and railways at breakneck speed – sometimes too breakneck, but it is the right strategy all the same.

• The US motorist will just have to pray that ever-growing necessity will prove the mother of American invention. Perhaps we’ll all soon be commuting to work above those cracked and neglected highways on water-powered hovercraft, but until then, an already painful situation is likely only to get more so. ~THE TELEGRAPH