People are trying to make the point that alternative fuels are eventually going to be cheaper than oil, but they’re probably never going to create a transportation fuel that’s cheaper than $3.00/gallon gasoline.
Which is true. Even in Europe people pay the equivalent of $7.00/gallon or more, rather than drive electric cars or hydrogen cars. It’s pretty much trivially true that alternative fuels are never going to be cheaper than today’s $2-3/gallon gas, because if they were they’d have already pushed out gasoline.
Gasoline is the fuel of choice because it is cheaper than all other alternative fuels. This is why we use gasoline to power our cars, because it is cheap and plentiful.
But why in the world do we imagine that a world where transportation costs have doubled or tripled compared to today’s transportation costs is a world where modern civilization is impossible? Is civilization impossible in Europe? How does Europe survive as a high-tech modern civilization when gasoline is $8.00/gallon over there?
It’s true that if gasoline prices jumped from their current price of $2-3/gallon (I just paid $2.06/gallon at Costco yesterday) to $8.00/gallon in a very short time frame, like a year or two, that would cause a pretty severe economic dislocation. But a gradual rise over a decade or two can be dealt with.
How will we deal with it? Build more trains. Build more subways. Build more buses. Mass transit of all sorts. Build more alternative personal vehicles. Build more fuel-efficient gasoline vehicles. Get used to the idea of living closer to your work. Get employers used to the idea of working from home. Carpool. Get used to the idea of paying higher prices for goods where the transportation costs are a very large percentage of the total costs.
The idea that gasoline can only be replaced by some future magic technology and since that future magical technology doesn’t exist yet we’re just deluding ourselves and clapping to bring Tinkerbell back to life is nonsense.
No magic technology is required. We already know how to build nuclear power plants. We already know how to build coal power plants. We already know how to build windmills. Why is this important? Because our modern lifestyle depends just as much on electrical power as it does on cheap transportation. Take Kunstler’s neo-peasant example. Even if we postulate that the age of cheap transportation will be over permanently in a generation, why in the world aren’t these neo-peasants still watching TV? Why can’t they listen to the radio? Why can’t they have computers? Why can’t they have cell phones? Why can’t they have every modern gadget known to man except a personal automobile?
Sure you have to transport iPods and GameBoys and Xboxes and Laptops from the factory to the store to the consumer. So if transportation costs are ten times what they are today, the fraction of the cost of today’s iPod due to transportation costs will be ten times higher. But the thing is, the costs of shipping an iPod and the cost of shipping the raw materials to make an iPod are very small compared to the total cost of an iPod.
The notion that a declining supply of oil will inevitably result in the collapse of civilization is to imagine that the only source of wealth in the world is oil and every other good or service available on planet earth is directly dependent on oil for existance.
Which is nonsense. You don’t need oil to build a nuclear power plant. You don’t need oil to build an iPod. You don’t need oil to watch “American Idol” on cable TV. You don’t need oil to call Grandma a thousand miles away on her cell phone.
And the notion that we need to have cheap oil to build the infrastructure we’ll need to survive the end of cheap oil is likewise nonsense. We need transportation, sure. But trains count as transportation, right?
And even if it turns out that transportation will be much more expensive in the future, well, a more prosperous world can afford to pay higher prices or pay higher prices for alternatives to transportation, such as telecommunications. Future generations might see transportation as a luxury, but if we’re enjoying a prosperous economy luxury goods are more affordable than ever.
And when we get down to it, the notion that the only form of personal vehicle that will ever be economically viable is a gasoline powered sedan is just nonsense. We don’t have to wait for Tinkerbell to hand us some magic technology of the future, we already have the technology. We know how to make electric cars. We know how to make hydrogen cars. We know how to make biodiesel cars. We know how to make natural gas powered cars. We know how to make compressed air cars. We know how to make motorcycles.
Maybe cars of the future will look more like this: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=corbin+motors+sparrow&gbv=2 than like this: http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=h2.
But how does it permanently cripple the global economy if people commute to work in a tiny single seat electric vehicle rather than an SUV? If future fuel prices double or triple or quadruple or octuple, it’s still cheaper to drive a motorcycle to work with octuple fuel prices than it is to drive an H2 to work at today’s fuel prices. So why don’t people drive ultra fuel-efficient vehicles today? Because other things are more important than fuel efficiency!
We don’t need any new technology. The technology to deal with radically increased crude oil prices already exists. Of course these already existing technologies have drawbacks compared to $2-3/gallon gasoline, that’s why we’re not really using them today. But so what? High fuel prices in the future don’t mean the end of civilization, and anyone who argues otherwise has some other agenda they’re peddling.
My point was there ARE alternative energy sources out there that are untapped (such as the sun). As long as this is the case I think that if there is a need and a demand that there will be ways found to exploit the energy available. If the sun goes out…well, we’re fucked then unless we are ready to move on. It’s moot to me though since I’ll be long gone by that point.
