Let the good times roll. What are the visuals in your mind after reading the headline? For me bottoms up represents good times with friends enjoying adult beverages with uninhibited conversations. Top down represents wind in the hair on a winding road in a red convertible. Talk about mutually exclusive good times!

Unfortunately this is a political blog. I write because uninhibited conversations are a thing of the past. Wind in the hair should still be a thing, yet it is not what top down represents. I will try and define political movements here.

Bottoms up is a reactionary movement. Think Love Canal. Or the environmental movement of the sixties. People saw the effects of pollution. The dirty water, the foul air. The sickness of Love Canal. The people then demanded change from their politicians. I might say the problems at the southern border was a bottoms up movement. People dying in the desert should not happen. People should not be paying smugglers for admittance into this country. There was something wrong going on. The end of the Vietnam war was definitely a bottom up political movement, along with civil rights.

The alternative to bottoms up political change is change driven from the top down. What would you call change that nobody asked for? Change from the top down. I will go fully politically incorrect. No group of people suddenly realized that we were putting to much carbon into the atmosphere causing distress to a segment of the population. It was true we were putting plenty.of bad things into the atmosphere affecting our health. Anyone driving from the country to the city fifty years ago would have had their eyes water from the smog. Now there is almost no difference between the air in the city and the country. Things had gotten a lot better, because of science. Then we were told CO2 was bad. In fact we were told.that CO2 was.so had that we had to revert to diesel engines, that spewed all sort of nasty stuff to reduce CO2. That is where they lost me. The earth has been getting warmer for ten thousand years. So what else is new?

Not that I really care. Yet what I do care about is the cost of transportation. The cost of transportation effects everyone. The rich do not care, the poor suffer. The rich make money on carbon credits, the poor pay. The rich fly and add more carbon, the poor stay home. That is the way the rich like it. Top down policy, for their benefit.

I know a guy with five doctorates. He has been saying we are going to run out of oil for 50 years. Of course we have not. He is simply keeping his employers happy. The are happy when the price of oil is high. Artificially high.To my great surprise we are making all the oil we need. We can do it if allowed.

I actually have nothing against electric cars, they can be more efficient. Faster and more quiet too. Even better they can remove the source of pollution from the roads. What is not the way to promote more electric vehicles is to raise the cost of everything else. Compeate on merit.

Yup, in one month the price of gas has has gone up 50¢. At this rate summer driving season will be brutal. I am simply extrapolating, 50¢ a month for five months. We are looking at $5 gas. Ouch! I sure hope I am wrong.

Bottoms Up