Say we drop all the other wars as (literally) practically irrelevant. The war on drugs. The war in Iraq. The War in Afghanistan. Your stupid personal war. The jihadists’ war against America. The unknown foreigners’ war vs. The State (somewhere). Drop 'em all and send 'em all home. New mission.
War on oil. We aren’t going to buy it anymore. Make it happen in the real world.
Is it time yet?
I don’t know. Are you ready for a long-lasting global depression? Are you equipped to grow and/or kill your own food? Are you prepared to see people die because hospitals are unreachable? Can you keep warm when the temperature hits single digits where you live?
Oil contributes to all of those things. Some are more direct like oil-fired burners and automotive fuels, while others are less direct but just as vital as the means to deliver goods and services and other fuels needed to power a modern household.
There is no fuel on Earth better at what it does than oil or its derivatives. If there were we would have long since turned to it.
No, it’s too useful, and we are too committed to it in terms of infrastructure. What we can do in reduce our intake, wean ourselves off it over time. It certainly doesn’t have an infinite supply, and has plenty of bad side effects so we need to do that anyway. Increased energy efficiency, nuclear power, recycling plastics, etc.
Just saying “we won’t buy it” won’t work.
Well, I certainly don’t want anything nasty to happen.
At the same time, I am not convinced anything will happen without significant antipathy towards Oil.
So, conduct the war v. Oil on oil-based infrastructure? Until the Big Transition?
The concept is rubbish.
No one in their right mind is going to “hate” oil.
Investing in efficiency and viable alternative energy is all quite right and sensible, but a war on oil? that’s merely daft.
I think governments should invest money in developing a *cheaper, more efficient *alternative to petroleum. Trying to fix a purely scientific problem with social and legal tools just won’t work.
Go back to hunting and gathering, living in harmony with nature, cats and dogs living together? I guess it depends on who you mean by ‘we’. If you mean you and the mouse (plus the eco-nutball faction) in your pocket then perhaps. If you are including the other 99% of society then I think you will be sadly disappointed.
Unless you can think of a way to get a large percentage of humans to decide to die horribly, I’d say the answer is ‘no’.
Instead of a silly war, why not simply learn what a ‘market’ is and how things are already starting to shift in this direction? Even leaving aside the ‘daft’ aspects, from a practical perspective a war on oil would be even less effective than a war on drugs, since people so heavily depend on oil (even more so than drugs). What you need to do is to invent a process or device that can challenge oil based transport on an even or near even basis (i.e. has the same performance characteristics and ease of use for the consumer).
-XT
So you want to change the entire basis of our economy, but you don’t want anything nasty to happen. Good luck with that.
Why would you expect ‘The war on oil’ to work out any better than the examples you list in the OP?
None of them have exactly gone to plan so far…
Interesting that you both chose doomsday as your arguments against the OP.
It wasn’t that long ago that oil meant whale blubber. Imagine, having the audacity to suggest not using whales to light our lamps! We’d all be living in the dark, that DARK! What are you going to do when the sun goes down?!?
It also wasn’t that long ago that the internal combustion engine was just as shitty and unreliable as the steam and electric engine.
And it wasn’t all that long ago that products could be made out of things other than plastic.
If not for the millions of deaths at Three Mile Island we might have more nuclear power plants.
And if not for the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways cars might not have been so popular.
It is possible for a train to run off of electricity. It is possible for houses to be heated by electricity (although not particularly efficiently). But it’s stupid for both of those to use electricity developed by burning fossil fuels.
There are alternatives to crude. It’s laughable to suggest we’d all die without it.
So, who’s blocking nuclear? It would seem like we have defined a good alternative, but we can’t get it done.
Is it time to declare War on Unreasonable Environmental Wackos?
Dropping oil in a short time frame would probably cause a great many deaths. We aren’t living in the whale-oil world. Our cities would starve without having food shipped to them.
The way I see it, we could build nuclear reactors and probably get the country off coal in a decade. We could probably swap over to natural gas for trucking during the same period. But changing the entire country’s auto infrastructure over to non-oil would probably take a lot longer There are hundreds of thousands of gas stations that would need to be refitted. There are millions of vehicles that would need to be rotated out of service. Do we even have the capacity to build all the batteries the cars would need? Would we exhaust the world’s supply of lithium?
And back in those days we wouldn’t have had any problem weaning ourselves off of oil, because we had not yet embraced that as the basis of our whole economy or our lifestyles. Now that we have it will be incredibly painful for us to do so.
When you didn’t have any money you learned to live one way. When you got money you adjusted your lifestyle accordingly. Now take the money away and you’ll find that life is infinitely more difficult than it was before. That’s the way of things. We cannot simply wish things away.
As for electricity, how is that generated? Coal, mostly. But how is that delivered? Trains, right? And what are trains run on? Typically diesel/electric. We don’t have the infrastructure to electrify the entire country for trains, and maintenance of such will be no less of a nightmare than with roads. And how are goods delivered? Typically by truck. If electricity is only just barely practical for a 2-ton car, how could it be even remotely adequate for trucks?
You have to factor these things into your equations. Oil is a necessity and will remain so for a long time. My so-called doomsday scenario is not an unreasonable result of what you suggest, just quitting oil cold turkey. We can, and we should, wean ourselves off of oil. But that’s a long-term goal. It cannot, will not, and should not happen overnight.
EDIT: Also, millions of deaths at three Mile Island? What?
YES! Oh please God yes.
It’s that ‘reality’ stuff. I know, it’s like a wet blanket thrown on the smolder hopes of the neo-Luddite…
And if you had suddenly banned whale oil before figuring out a transition path to the new technology? Do you think that it would just have happened? Research and development into oil happened BEFORE we ran out of whale oil, as the prices rose and people were looking for alternatives. We started transitioning from whale oil lamps and whale oil as a lubricant BEFORE we ran out of the stuff.
And while I know this will be a shock to you, we are much more dependent on oil today than they were on whale oil in the 19th century. To them it would have meant an economic meltdown if there had been a complete moratorium on whaling. To us, today, it would mean the entire destruction of our world…‘doomsday’ as you put it. While the Peak Oil crowd are generally clueless, they have that part right…if suddenly the oil was turned off it would bring down our entire civilization.
We can make plastics out of stuff other than oil today. It’s not that difficult. But you need a fairly large transition period to ramp up to something else. You can’t just do it tomorrow and expect the flow of products to continue in a business as usual way.
I’m guessing this was tongue in cheek.
It’s possible to run trains off of dead babies. It’s not a matter of possibility, but of practicality. We COULD run all our trains off of electricity, but it will take TIME to transition to something like that. Time and MONEY (I know that’s a dirty word and all).
Yes? And? Even if you could just wave your magic wand, declare war on oil and force people to go to all electric in their houses (simply another of the myriad things you’d have to do in order to do this), how will you FEED them? How will they get to and from work?
It’s laughable that you don’t seem to understand the scale or the scope of what you are suggesting. No one is saying there aren’t alternatives to crude…if there weren’t we’d be fucked in the next 20-30 years. The trouble is you don’t seem to grasp the magnitude of what you are suggestion. It’s all about time frames and transition. If you wanted to declare a really SSSLLLLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWW war on oil (over, say, the next 2-3 decades) then that would probably work. It would be useless, since we are ALREADY transitioning off of crude and will probably be well on the way to something different in that time frame, but what the hell? People seem to need useless gestures, even when what they seemingly want is already happening (just not fast enough to suit their purposes). But if you wanted to declare your war (and if you were able to get enough insane and clueless people to join you and actually make it work)…THEN you are talking about a serious and perhaps fatal impact on society and civilization.
We wouldn’t ALL die, of course…just a couple billion of us. And it’s laughable that you don’t get that.
-XT
Then why are you calling for a war? Wars are nasty by definition.
The tenor of the OP, and the suggestion that we should encourage “antipathy” toward oil [a thing], reminds me how apt the notion is that even when a society moves beyond a religiously-centric model, the type of cosmology that animates traditional theocratic thinking has by no means disappeared. The environment as G_d, oil and CO2 as The Fiend. Yet enviros are no doubt convinced of their essential sophistication and distance from what they’d see as childish beliefs in cosmology v.1.
It just so happens that I know of a land FULL of lithium…
We shouldn’t be so scared of restructuring our infrastructure system. People don’t drive oil powered cars because they researched the alternatives and made a sound decision. Hybrid cars are less plentiful and more expensive, electric cars are unavailable.
If you look back at when the price of oil peaked a few years ago, a lot happened in a short period of time. Driving was reduced 5% over the spend of a few months. People ran out and invested (unwisely) in solar. Insulating homes, replacing windows, updating furnaces suddenly made sense. The demand for gas guzzling SUVs plummeted, demand for high mileage cars went up. The value of my shitty little Hyundai actually appreciated!
You also mentioned retrofitting gas stations, but we’ve already done that several times over the past few decades. They haven’t always had three kinds of gas to choose from. And the safety standards for in-ground oil storage has been changed a couple of times. What you’re describing is entirely possible. Hell, all the local gas stations near me just went through a major retrofit to offer multi-flavoured coffee drinks.
If driving an oil powered car was slightly more expensive, or slightly more difficult, people wouldn’t do it. I’d love to have a diesel car, but it’s too much of a pain in the ass to drive around looking for diesel. There are people that use bio-diesel which is even more rare.
None of this is impossible, it just requires a certain amount of political will. Maybe next year when we have another recession it will be what the government spends a trillion dollars on.
For all values of “slightly” greater than “well above double.” You can’t just use weasel words like that – you know that retail gas prices doubled between June 2005 and 2008, right? And the most you’ve pointed to is that at the height of the price spike, with gas at $4.10, you could maybe show a 5% dropoff in driving?
Oh and also for all vaues of certain greater than suicidal. The great majority of Americans do not believe that the great majority of their driving is discretionary or negotiable. They will drive with $4 gas, perhaps a little less. They would drive with $5 gas and a goodly number would drive with $8 gas a la some other countries (N.B. that becoming such a country, where public transit is a more widely used option, is not an option in the short or medium term due to lack of infrastructure and geographic dispersion).
You’d be amazed how cheap gas is in the US. So to say “it doubled” is kind of a meaningless statement. It went from a small number to a slightly larger small number, and the result was that Americans drove less.
Oddly enough, when you mention driving as non-discretionary and non-negotiable, I giggled. Driving is a choice that people make.
This morning, millions of Americans got up, went to their cars, and drove by themselves for half an hour to get to work. Crank up the cost of gas, and unsurprisingly many of those Americans who thought driving was non-negotiable turn around and negotiate a car pool.
Public transit isn’t available in my area, because no one needs it. Driving is too cheap. But make it expensive and people will demand alternatives.
It’s funny that you think public transit isn’t an option because of geographic dispersion. Why is geographic dispersion considered a viable option in the first place?