No more cheap energy: when does the U.S. hit the wall?

The BBQ Pit
1

I suppose this is more fit for Great Debates, but as I’m so freakin’ frustrated by the mass stupidity I see, I’m putting it in the Pit where I can use the language I feel like using.

The era of cheap energy is over, and Americans seem to be too stupid and shortsighted to realize it.

Sales of SUV’s have been dropping, but I still see far too many of these gross examples of wretched excess tooling around the highways. Development of mass transit is virtually at a standstill. The whole idea of energy efficiency seems to be a joke to most Americans. We still continue to design our communities so that it’s virtually impossible for an ordinary citizen to get through an ordinary week without having to use a car.

Oil supplies have peaked. I don’t expect sudden catastrophe, but the fact that the easily exploitable supplies of oil are now on the decline combined with rising demand in Asia necessarily means that petroleum is going to be more expensive for us than it’s ever been before.

And I don’t see us doing a damn thing about it. We go right on buying and driving gas guzzlers. We seem to think that the concepts of fuel efficiency and public tansportation was spawned by Satan. We continue to build suburban subdivisions where you can’t get groceries, get to work or school, or get the kids to soccer practice without a land yacht.

Would it really kill us to have more energy efficient homes and transportation? Has it never crossed anybody’s mind here that a more modest lifestyle might also be a more stable and secure one? (I’m lookin’ at the righties now with a jaundiced eye; it wasn’t the left that invented consumerism.) Has no one given any thought to energy alternatives to petroleum? Why are we not developing nuclear energy for use in our homes? (And now I’m aimin’ my baleful glare at the lefties; enviro-wackos are the main reason the U.S. is so far behind in developing nuclear energy.)

When do we hit the wall?

Do we think this is just going to go on forever? Do we not understand that our heavy dependence on foreign oil creates all sorts of political problems for us abroad? Do we really think that God takes care of fools, drunkards and the United States?

What’s it going to take to convince Americans that our oil addiction is a serious threat to the nation’s economy? Will it take some kind of total freakin’ disaster?

Can we really be as stupid as we seem to be? Are our egos so completely tied up with our cars that we absolutely can’t look at transportation in any kind of rational way? Does anybody really believe that urban sprawl is a good thing? Do I ask an awful lot of rhetorical questions?

And in closing, a message to SUV owners: IF YA WANNA DRIVE A FUCKIN’ TANK, JOIN THE FUCKIN’ ARMY!!!

Thank you for reading my bad-mood-on-a-rainy-Monday-morning rant. You can get back to your lives now.

2

Look at Supply and Demand factors. Then apply to Oil. Rinse and repeat.

3

So…all the people who currently own SUVs should toss them out immediately because gas has become more expensive? That doesn’t sound very energy efficent to me.

4

In the summer of 2001, I was paying rediculously low prices for gas. At one point I could get it for about 75 cents a gallon, which might mark the low point for gas prices in history once prices are adjusted for inflation.

That doesn’t sound like any kind of oil shortage to me. Kindly explain how peak oil has happened in just over three years.

5

P.J. O’Rourke noted that it’s hard to reach the drive through window from a speeding train.

Make mass transit more convenient, and people will actually use it. As an example, I’m able to carpool every day because the carpooling system I use doesn’t require me to conform my schedule to those of my passengers.

That would explain, I guess, why a modern freezer costs less to use than a constantly running 40 watt bulb. Modern appliances use less than a third, typically, of the power of an appliance from thirty years ago.

How else would you design them? It’s impossible to do this in a country our size, with significant numbers of people living in rural and semirural areas. By contrast, Europe is almost entirely urbanized.

See the above point about appliances. Also note that fuel economy for sedans used to be as bad or worse than today’s SUVs.

6

Right on, Brother. You should read some of the works of Paul Erlich. He’s been preaching this same stuff since the late 1960’s. According to him, we will be facing severe shortages of engery and massive worldwide famine by around 1985. He keeps pushing out the date of course but one of these days he might even be right.

Haj

7

We pay about $8 a gallon for gas in the UK. Some people drive gas guzzlers. When prices hit the same levels in the US, fewer people will drive them. Like here.

8

Yes.

btw Moto it’s almost 2005, get with the times. :stuck_out_tongue:

9

You make a good point, but your righty/lefty dig, “leftys didn’t invent consumerism,” is one of the more ludicrous statements I’ve seen on the Dope in some time. Get you some mint-flavored shoes, stat.

10

Comments about the cost of oil were intended to illustrate that oil is quite plentiful indeed. Otherwise, it would have been expensive back in 2001 as well.

What caused the price jumps is a world economy now out of recession and certain geopolitical uncertainties in South America and the Mideast.

11

The problem is that if the supply falls off sharply with no alternatives in place, one would be in something of a tricky situation. This site, for all its hysteria, raises some genuinely interesting points about the lack of feasibility of implementing renewable energy in a realistic timeframe.

(Also, do you have to quote a 15-paragraph OP for a one-liner?)

12

I think that point is flawed.

There are tons of viable alternatives to oil. The problem with all of them is that they’re not economically attractive right now. Oil is cost effective and has a distribution network in place.

When the prices rise enough, the other formes of heating, electricity production and auto fuel will become much more attractive. Since the market will bear them, they will be sold.

A similar thing happened between 90 and 80 years ago, as feed stores went out of business and gas stations opened at a rapid clip. The first drive-up gas station opened in Pittsburgh in 1913.

13

One of the points he makes is that to create the alternative energy sources, one needs oil. If the price of oil has risen so high that precludes making the stuff, then the stuff doesn’t get made, or is only available to the super-rich. And indeed food production relies on oil, and everything we own, is made of petrochemical products.

Even though his worst-case-scenario is unlikely to happen, I trust, it could still be a rather unpleasant transition.

14

Do you think the owners of the feed stores thought it was an unpleasant transition? Or, to use a more frequently cited example, the buggy-whip manufacturers?

15

Was this the throwaway post of the day to inflate your number of posts?

Demand is short-term inelastic for petroleum. People and industry still need to purchase it to meet their requirements and can only adjust their demands downward over a long timeframe. Even if prices go up $3 per gallon tomorrow, most people will bite the bullet and fill their tanks, making cutbacks in other areas. They may drive less and skip a driving vacation but they will still need the fuel. Perhaps the person will buy a more fuel-efficient car in 3 or 4 years if gas prices stay elevated but that won’t change the immediate situation.

16

The gas stations and whatever-buggy-whip-manufacturers-became had a new technology that already worked, with a (seemingly) inexhaustible energy supply. Is there an alternative energy supply that could be implemented throughout the developed world over the course of a decade or so?

17

The transition to motor vehicles similarly took years. The problem is that you are looking at this upcoming period, if it does come to pass, as an economic problem instead of a situation that can be easily resolved by a dynamic market economy.

If you really think the future is in these other technologies, I encourage you to work in these fields or invest money there. You stand to make a killing.

18

IMO, basically the current situation where oil is used mostly as fuel for personal vehicles is unsustainable at pretty much any but the lowest levels; the only question is where the end point occurs. From that standpoint the problem will take care of itself; whether we want to or not, we will be finding other means to power personal transport or we won’t be using personal transport.

Looks to me like the real, absolute, no-bullshit wall looks to be somewhere between 2040 and 2060, when daily production is projected to fall to the levels of the 1950s.

There will be generally increasing prices and 1973-style spot shortages before then, of course.

19

That’s not true. Sorry.

At least at the outset, there was a lot of competition among different types of engines, and it was uncertain which ones would win out. The early 1900s was the heyday of both the electric and steam car. In this period, there were other engines made that ran on everything from kerosene to fuel oil to gasoline.

How this is different from today, with new electric, fuel cell, hybrid, hydrogen, and natural gas powered vehicles proven to work?

20

I don’t know where you live, but here? Public transportation WAS spawned by satan. It’s better than it used to be, but for a real person’s life? It just doesn’t work.

To make it work, would take so much more money and planning than this gov’t is willing to even look at. Where would that money come from? You? Are you willing for your taxes to jump up to 60, 70 percent, just to fund redesign of existing comunities so that pedestrian and public transportation needs would be met. That’s not even counting new designs or new public transportation.

IANA City planner, but I’ve worked for a few designers, and the cost of this sort of thing is way out there. Everyone keeps saying “we need cheaper energy sources, ‘they’ need to design it”.

Well, who’s “they”? The oil companies? When people complain about this, they act as if it’s the SUV manufacturer or oil companies’ responsibility to come up with this new, clean, cheap “alternate energy source”.

Why is it that “they” mysteriously and suddenly have the knowledge to do this? “They” are oil drillers and producers and auto designers, how on earth does this qualify them, or even make them responsible for these new “alternate energy sources” the greenies are always clamoring at them for?

The “they’s” that DO know about cold fusion, corn liquor fuels and the like are the ones we need to be clamoring at. imho that is.