Ford Motor Company (F), Toyota Motor Corporation (ADR) (TM): Trending Toward Less Gas Usage

As fellow Fool Dan Caplinger recently pointed out to me, high gas prices also create a situation where our resources may not be allocated for our long-term good. When the short-term reward for finding gas is high, lots of capital is put toward new, smaller companies with the hopes of striking black gold.

Take Pengrowth Energy Corp (USA) (NYSE:PGH) as an example. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the company; it was founded in Canada in 1988 and develops oil and natural gas properties. But it wasn’t until early 2002—when the price of gasoline was rapidly rising—that the company held its IPO, raking in around $148 million .

More recently, Chesapeake Granite Wash Trust (NYSE:CHKR) held its IPO in 2011. The company was able to obtain $436 million by taking itself public,  and used that money primarily to repay the costs associated with developing its land in Washita County, Oklahoma . Since going public, the company’s shares—including its outsized dividend—have underperformed the market by over 40 percentage points .

Again, these companies can’t be faulted for taking advantage of a market looking for places to invest in oil. The problem is that investors can sometimes be shortsighted—going after the quick buck—instead of investing with a decades-long time horizon.

All of the money going to projects like this is money that’s not going to other projects—like renewable energy, infrastructure or medical research. On a case-by-case basis it might not seem like a big deal. But taken as a whole, there’s more money being funneled into extracting fossil fuels from our earth than ever before.

The article The Real Costs of High Gasoline Prices, in 3 Charts originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Brian Stoffel.

Fool contributor Brian Stoffel has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Ford. The Motley Fool owns shares of Ford. 

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