Um…no. You see, other countries (and more specifically other companies in other countries) can, you know, sell products in the US. So…even assuming the problems is here (I don’t buy that we us 95% of the total world wide energy btw but will go along for the sake of arguement), the solution can come from anyone…anyone interested in making money that is. If a Japanese firm figures out a new hybrid that gets 75 mpg then they are more than welcome to put it on the market here. If a German firm comes up with a workable hydrogen or methane fuel cell vehicle thats cheap enough to produce that its competetive with the cars we currently have then its in their best interest to develop it and market it here. The market in the US is huge…and the company or companies that get in on the ground floor of the ‘next big thing’ are going to make billions. It won’t hurt that they can sell it in other countries too…like perhaps the emerging Chinese market, the European market, in Japan, South Korea, India, etc etc etc.
So John Mace is quite correct…the solution doesn’t HAVE to come strictly from the US…there are a lot of other countries who have a stake in this too…and a lot of other countries that are currently feverishly working the problem. With the rise in the price of oil more than any other factor we will begin to see a sea change as countries who have been developing various alternatives that are waiting in the wings trot them out to see how they do on the market. We are already seeing hybrid technology, sort of a red headed step child for years, begin to really emerge this year…and a lot of companies are jumping on that bandwagon.
We also produce more goods and services than the rest of the world. The gross national product of the U.S. in 1998 was just over 8 trillion dollars; the world total was just under 29 trillion. Therefore, one could make this statement: The United States produced 27.6% of the world’s production, while only using 25% of the world’s oil.
We certainly can and should cut down on our use, but it’s not like it’s all going to waste.
The US uses per person more than twice the energy what France, Germany or Japan uses, about 25 times more than India and about 150 times third world countries like the Sudan and Nepal.
The world’s people sucks from the same general pool of earth’s finite resources. Are Americans claiming a sense of entitlement? If we in the US consumed gasoline and diesel at the same rate as much of Europe and Japan, oil imports would largely vanish.
It is simply impractical to believe that we can now, within 10 years or ever, replace the volume of oil now being used by anything else.
But we don’t. There are a variety of reasons why we don’t…but the bottom line is, we can afford to maintain our present lifestyle and we choose to continue to do so. What other countries do with reguards to this issue is their own business. We buy our oil from the same sources as everyone else does…its not an entitlement, its business.
Why? IIRC crude oil replaced whale oil in about that same time table. I don’t see how its ‘impractical’…could you go into some details as to what would make it so? Myself, I think when the market forces finally dictate a switch over to something else (i.e. when the price at the pump and at the plug finally reaches a point where its seriously hurting our economy, and where other alternatives suddenly are cost effective on a wide scale), that switch over will be pretty rapid.
10 years? Yeah, that sounds about right…maybe even less. Say we go to hydrogen (just an example…could be any number of alternatives). The gasoline infrastructure is there already (transport, service stations, etc)…its just a matter of logistics (getting the hydrogen safely to the new stations). It will simply entail engineering (designing a distribution system that is easy to use and safe for the average consummer to use) and capital.
Whats holding things back is that the price of gas, for instance, is still cheap enough that its less expensive than most of the alternatives. Hybrids haven’t been in wide scale use because the cost of buying a new one wasn’t reflected in the potential savings to the customer…so why should they invest in something that costs more, doesn’t give a real return on investment reflected in savings on gas, has potential maintenance issues, etc. But with the rise of gas prices suddenly every manufacturer is talking about bringing out a line of hybrids in the near term…in significantly less than ‘10 years’ in fact. Alternatives will be exactly the same…we’ll cross some price point where suddenly an alternative like hydrogen can compete and will be in demand.
Remember the consumption rate of fuel in this country has much to do with how this country grew. Suburbia already exist and therefore we simply cannot just reduce our consumption to European levels. We cannot bike to work. We often cannot even find housing that avoids commuting as 2 family incomes work against this.
We can buy into Hybrid & Hi-Gas mileage cars. We can do away with SUV’s. We can encourage more telecommuting. We can invest as NJ is in much more solar.
We can try to build wind farms but NIMBY somehow kills even this quite often.
We can build new modern safer and cleaner Nuclear power plants.
We can stop selling incadescent bulbs and switch over to spiral Florescents.
We can remember to turn off the lights. We could have building codes that encourage/require more efficient housing.
We could start designing Enviro friendly/family friendly towns were walking would be possible (way out of my league)
We could improve high speed rail and decrease dependance on cars & jets.
We could ensure fuel cell developement is funded.
We could ensure Fusion research is funded.
We could require aplliance to be more efficient.
example: I have 3 digital clocks in my house. They are all equally readable but they draw < .1 amps, .25 amps and .5 amps. they all should draw <.1amps.
Look, a Manhatten/Apollo style project is a complete waste of money. A megaproject essentially means that the government will choose a technology to convert to, create the technology, and force everyone to convert to that technology.
This is recipe for disaster. OK, our Manhatten project has developed a new generation of hydrogen fuel cells. Now what? These aren’t going to be magically cheaper just because they’ve been developed.
The simple easy way to decrease energy importation is just to slap a huge tax on gasoline and diesel, on the order of 2-3 dollars per gallon…for everyone, including commercial trucking. Suddenly alternative fuels become viable, trucking collapses to be re-replaced by rail, mass transit is the only economical way for most people to get around, etc. It would be up to the collective decisions and innovation of the 270 million people in America to determine exactly how to switch from gasoline powered automobiles to some other method of transportation or substitute for transportation. It doesn’t require that the government pick a technological winner or lock us into any one solution.
Yeah, France and Germany and the UK use half as much gasoline per capita as the US, because gasoline costs twice as much there, due to high gasoline taxes. The US doesn’t “grab” gasoline that other countries could be using, we BUY that gasoline. If other people in other countries want gasoline they can pay for it. Everyone pays market rates for gasoline, it’s just that in other countries demand is kept artificially low by the gasoline taxes. Of course, if you contend that gasoline has significant externalities that aren’t paid by the gasoline consumer, the gasoline tax is a way of making the gasoline consumer pay those. And gasoline consumption is a very good proxy for road use, so using gasoline taxes to pay for road construction and maintenence makes much more sense than paying out of general revenue.
Better idea: Don’t spend gas-tax revenues on road maintenance, spend them on building light rail and high-speed rail systems. (After all, the less driving there is, the longer a given road surface will last and the less road maintenance we will need.)
You’re describing “transit-oriented development.” This site should help you get up to (walking) speed: http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm45.htm
Also check out the Congress for the New Urbanism (which is mainly an association of architects, and appears to be more concerned with the esthetic and quality-of-life value of walkable communities than with energy conservation, but it all tends in the same direction): http://www.cnu.org/ The architectural firms of Duany & Plater-Zyberk (http://www.dpz.com/) and Peter Calthorpe (http://www.calthorpe.com/) are pioneers of that kind of development.
In fact, designing new walkable communities is relatively simple. The really tough nut to crack is retrofitting existing sprawlburbs. It might be flatly impossible. Consider your average suburban PUD pod: Density is too low for mass transit to be workable. Everybody would have to drive to get to the nearest regional light-rail stop – and once you’re in your car, why get out? OTOH, how can you “infill” such a neighborhood to give it a high enough population density to justify a rail stop of its own, no more than 15 minutes’ walk from every home? Insert new homes in the lawn-spaces between the old ones? Even if there were unlimited government funding to spend on such a project, just imagine the zoning and land-acquisition problems. And the result would be a pure mess, esthetically.
Some thinkers have predicted that in the future, the inner cities will become where the rich and prosperous live, and the poor will be relegated to the 'burbs – where their practical problems of daily life might be even worse than they are now.
The tobacco companies apparently no longer enjoy the protection of the politically-organized business comunity. They’ve been thrown to the populist sharks. Maybe the same thing could happen to the oil companies?
A lot of people are working under a false premise, that the shareholders of, say, XOM benefit financially more from petroleum production than the government(s).
Anybody want to take a guess how much in taxes Exxon paid in the first 6 months in 2005 on $170 billion in sales?
$10 billion? $5 billion? Nothing?
$47 billion. Over 25% of total sales of XOM goes to various governments. In that time, XOM had profits of $15 billion, or $32 billion less than what the worlds governments were taking from it. That $47 billion is 11 times what XOM can afford on drilling, exploration, and R&D.
So, the simple explanation of why the government isn’t “forcing” XOM and other companies to move away from oil is because the governments of the world profit the most from the oil industry!
$17 billion in R&D and exploration vs. $94 billion in taxes. $15 billion in profit vs. $94 billion in taxes. 4 billion in dividends, spread out among 6.3 billion shares (a whopping .63/share) vs. $94 billion in taxes. Is it any wonder the governments of the world have no desire to stop the burning of oil?
I have been unable to find figures on whale oil production at the time of its decline, but I imagine the amount of replacement is at least one and perhaps two orders of magnitude smaller than the US oil situation.
Last year the US produced about 5.4 million barrels a day, net imports were about 11.8 MBD and consumption about 20.5 MBD. US production has fairly consistently gone South since Alaska peaked in 1988 and barring a large surprise find, is likely to continue to decline. Total consumption has increased at about 1.5-2% per year over an extended period.
Things like hydrogen, ethanol etc all take considerable energy to produce and usually have one additional state change compared to crude, which means adidtional energy loss.
Without negative oil/energy growth, alternatives much catch a train which is increasing. That’s why I said its impractical to believe it ever will, without actual declines in consumption.