Say technology stagnates- at what level?

Great Debates
21

I’d like to address this statement because I hear it a lot and it always sounds dumb to me.

The reason we have “huge empty vehicles” is because
a) Public transportation does not work if you don’t live in a city that isn’t as densely populated as New York City. For just about every other city it is impractical, inconvienient and does not reach enough people and their destinations.

b) most families cannot afford a fleet of vehicles for multiple purposes

c) if you have to pick one or two vehicles, it will generally be a vehicle that can transport a whole family and some luggage. It should be protected from the elements and sturdy enough to survive a reasonable collision. In other words, about the size of a modern automobile.

22

The US current produces a fraction of the food it could…and uses only a fraction of the land available for agriculture that it could. Even assuming a drop in technology back to, say, late 19th century technology (which is unlikely in the extreme to happen) the US could easily put more land under cultivation, even if we got slightly less yield on the land. Even if oil become to expensive for use in cultivating food ( :dubious: ) there are alternatives we could use today. What it would mean is the price of food would simply go up, and some luxury foods we currently have access to may become a bit more inaccessible. That’s it though.

Logistics wise, I don’t see the problem. We still have a rail network for transport which is actually still in use. Ramping up to use it more heavily (instead of trucking logistics) shouldn’t be an insurmountable problem. As for refrigeration…well, we aren’t likely to forget how to do that. It’s not dependent on oil.

Why would we necessarily need electric trains? Plenty of coal out there. Lots of methane. But ok…we could go with electric trains also. Why not electric tractors? Or use that coal, methane, etc? Why not bio-diesel?

I don’t see why our current population, at least in the first world, isn’t sustainable. I don’t even see why the population levels in most 3rd world countries wouldn’t be sustainable…as long as they can afford to buy the food, or as today get the 1st world to give them the food. Relatively speaking food is cheap…so cheap that a lot of farmers in the US and Europe gave up on farming decades ago and went to do something else. If food came up in price then more people and companies would get into the business…which would probably lead to the price of food coming back down somewhat again.

And of course this all rides on the assumption that the oil is going somewhere, that we won’t be able to use it for growing food for the next few decades while technology continues to advance. Maybe in a decade they will be using really small pebble bed reactors in their huge farm tractors…or maybe solar will develop to the point where the very paint on a train is enough to drive it. Maybe hydrogen will become the king and pervasive, or maybe we’ll mine the oceans for methane to drive the next generation of vehicles. Or perhaps we’ll just suck it up, resign ourselves to higher prices for things and exploit the oil sands in Canada and Venezuela or the shale oils in the US for another half century or so while technology continues to develop.

Or, perhaps we’ll just stagnate and eventually go back to living in caves and wondering what all the fuss was about…

-XT

23

Let me guess… You’re young, single, and live in an apartment?

This ‘moving closer to where you work’ nonsense has got to stop. It’s not going to happen. For me, moving would mean uprooting my kid, taking her out of her school and away from her friends, selling my house (and paying the real estate commission on it), losing all the little renovations and customizations that make my house uniquely mine, etc.

And what if your move takes the family farther away from where your spouse works? What have you achieved? Or should we now ensure that both of us work in the same place?

It’s a ridiculous notion. It will never happen. Businesses need large pools of population to draw from to find the best workers. Workers specialize, and therefore aren’t always going to find the job they want or are good at close to home. That’s just reality.

I wish environmentalists would stop with the airy-fairy plans to restructure society, pack us all into cities, and force everyone into mass transit. It isn’t going to happen, and focusing on this stuff is a big waste of time and effort for everyone. It makes environmentalists look crazy, and it makes people fearful of them and less likely to listen to saner proposals. It’s kind of like hardcore libertarians - the ones who want to privatize the police forces and sell off all the roads. Their insistence on constantly bringing up these goofball ideas marginalizes the rest of them and ensures that they’ll never have much of a political voice.

Whatever solutions we come up with, they are going to have to be largely compatible with the way we’ve chosen to live. That’s the bottom line. We need to figure out how to allow people to keep their own personal transportation, live in suburbs, live in reasonably sized homes, and be able to maintain something close to their current lifestyles, albeit in a more efficient manner.

And you know what? This isn’t that hard. Plug-in hybrids will allow you to commute and get 200 mpg. They’re just around the corner. The electrical grid will support a hell of a lot of them, because they charge at night when utilization is down. Nuclear power can fill in the gaps. The next generation of solar cells will be cost effective given the price of energy, and in five years you’re going to see them dotting roofs all over the place. Geothermal heating and cooling is now cost-effective and you’re seeing more and more houses being built with that option.

That’s the way the future is going to arrive. Incrementally. We’re not going to tear up the suburbs and rebuild our cities, but we may see more people telecommuting as that option has more influence in labor bargaining. We won’t see everyone taking mass transit, but we will see apartment buildings built within walking distance of a rail terminal go up in value, stimulating more construction of them.

Here in Edmonton, we’re seeing university students spreading out along the light-rail transit line. Real estate near campus was getting too expensive, and parking less and less available. So now there are huge apartment complexes going up near every LRT terminal, and they’re going to be increasingly populated by students.

You may see the same thing with some new, large businesses and factories. If you employ 5,000 people in a huge installation, with today’s energy costs it might be a comparative advantage to build near a light rail depot, so employees can easily commute to work.

None of this is going to stop technology. And in fact, the focus of new technological innovation is typically in areas that don’t require that much energy anyway - information technology, computers, HDTV, etc. With high enough resolution and enough bandwidth and cheap large screens, maybe we’re close to the day when you’ll walk into your home office and press a button, and your walls will change into video screens and you’ll be ‘at work’. Hell, maybe we’ll have little autonomous vehicles at the office that we can wheel around so we can ‘walk’ to the next cube to confer with someone - who looks like he’s there, but in fact he’s at home too and you’re talking to his little wheeled robot.

The free market is like an evolving organism. Change the environment, and it will evolve into something new. You can’t predict what that new thing will be, but you can predict that it will be something that works better in its new environment than the old one did. So none of us knows what the future is going to look like or what the winning technologies will be or exactly how we’ll adapt to petroleum shortages, but we most certainly will, and life will be even better than it is today. Because that’s how it works.

24

The Concorde is an example of technology that has stagnated. Now if you want to spread the word that CO2 is bad you have to travel in a subsonic private jet.

25

Exactly. And we might see an expansion in the publics willingness to invest in multi-billion dollar light rail or subway systems in the future. We are experimenting with them here in New Mexico on a small scale, though I can’t say they have been overly successful so far.

But all these folks who want to use environmental crisis to (again) attempt social engineering are basically…how did you put it?

It’s just the same old tired message…new and improved with Global Warming attached. I remember hearing many of the exact same arguments used long before Global Warming was discussed in the public forum…decades before my own awareness of Global Warming anyway.

This isn’t to say that C02 emissions aren’t a concern, or that the current prices for oil aren’t a concern…but all this hand wringing talk about how either our civilization is going to collapse or we all need to change our ways and go back to being packed in like sardines into the cities (using mass transit and not eating meat in a environmental utopia) is just a lot of BS.
Anyway, good post Sam…I don’t have anything substantial to add to that. You hit all the highlights there.

-XT

26

I think we can falsify this position fairly readily.

Changes in land use patterns will be part of the technical solution to higher prices on energy and CO2, as will better hybrids and expanded nuclear and wind power.

It’s a matter of having better public transportation in a higher share of US cities, and conventional market processes causing people to lower their commuting costs by choosing to live closer to their work. In Denmark and Great Britain, an individual is something like 7 times more likely to take public transit than in the US.

Ah, but the US has wide open spaces, right? Well so does Canada. In Canada, 10% of all trips are on public transit, while in the US it’s 2%: a factor of 5. So there’s a lot of room for land use shifts in the US. I’d be surprised if they didn’t occur in a measurable way over the next 50 years. Cite.

Then again, I see from the 2nd half of Sam’s post, that he doesn’t really disagree with me, re: incrementalism.

I dunno. If gas was $7/gal, it might make sense to buy a Honda Fit, and rent a pickup or Minivan at UHaul as the need arises. In fact, that might make sense at $4 per gallon.

27

Er, no, if one only counts the parts of the two countries that have climates large numbers of people are willing to live in.

28

Steve - Canada and the US have comparable rates of urbanization.

United Kingdom - 90%
Denmark - 85%
Germany - 88%
France - 76%

Canada - 79%
US - 77% ,
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_urb-people-urbanization

United Kingdom - 89%
Denmark - 85%
Germany - 88%
France - 76%

Canada - 80%
US - 80% ,
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_per_liv_in_urb_are-people-percentage-living-urban-areas

29

Via Brad DeLong, Professor Richard Green, professor of real estate, finance and economics at the George Washington University, does a very rough calculation.

Richard's Real Estate and Urban Economics Blog: $4 per gallon gasoline and the urban land market

30

No argument from me. Of course markets react this way. They reacted to cheap gasoline with SUVs and 400 HP sports cars. They react to tiny European roads with small cars and public transit. Change the conditions, and the market will restructure.

The thing I’m against is any attempt to plan the structure, thinking that you can scientifically know the right way for people to live and impose it on them, as so many of these budding social engineers want to do. Sure, we may wind up with more expensive real-estate near rail terminals and less expensive real estate in the far suburbs. But then we might also find that business models change, with ‘micro offices’ of a handful of people scattered closer to where they live rather than having everyone come to one place. Or we’ll develop better personal transportation. Or some other adaptation I can’t even imagine may arise.

It’s sheer arrogance to think that anyone today knows the optimum structure of society and which technologies and modes of transportation and living arrangements are best for us. Give the people the information they need and the freedom to make decisions, and they’ll figure it out on their own.

I mean, just look at the flurry of activity going on in alternative energy and exploration right now. Investment in research in alternative energy is way up. Billions of dollars are flowing into the Alberta oil sands. There have already been recent advances in solar cells, fuel cells, and batteries. Wind power is growing by leaps and bounds.

It looks to me like the market is doing exactly what it should. And if we leave it alone (other than correcting for externalities - perhaps including a carbon tax), it’ll figure it out.

31

Right. But building public transit requires planning, as does zoning or anything else involving groups of people. Outside of North Korea and a few other places, governmental command and control structures tend to be pretty weak: citizens don’t need special permits to move within their country. So city planners tend to be familiar with both market incentives and public negotiation among mutually suspicious parties.

I’m not sure why social engineering is a such a epithet. To my way of thinking, ad-men, marketers and lobbyists are a lot more insidious and a lot less transparent.

But yes, I suspect that the final process will be varied and incremental.

32

Close but no cigar. Mid 30’s, single and about to build a house across the road from work.

I’ve got to say, I feel a bit put upon here. I think you’ve all read too much of your own agendas into what I’ve said. I never suggested forcing anyone to do anything. It amazes me that you can defend the poor planning that allows residential development which leaves people completely car dependant and a long way from jobs and services.

Nah, fuck it. You got me. I’m obviously some kind snivelling, communist, free market questioning idiot for thinking it’s a bad idea to car dependant and a long way from your job. So sorry.

:smack:

33

The concern is not that any knowledge would be lost or forgotten. The concern is that industrial civilization might prove to be a lot more brittle than most people appreciate. Every system depends on some other system functioning well. A localized disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or the recent/current Midwest flooding can always be repaired using resources from other areas, but a disaster or stress that affects a whole country at once might be irreparable. The knowledge is still there, but only so much can be done with it. The aqueducts of the Western Roman Empire decayed and collapsed, not because the knowledge of how to build and repair and maintain them was lost, but because the sociopolitical organization necessary for such projects had broken down (and then the knowledge was, eventually, lost).

34

I have trouble imagining whether, without oil, air travel could continue to exist at its current massive scale. I know electric airplanes have been design and flown, but it doesn’t appear that they could reach the efficiency of scale of even a private jet (I mean putting 20 people aboard and travelling across a continent). And we’re running out of helium as well, so dirigibles won’t really be an option either. Trains could make a huge comeback with their phenomenal gas efficiency. Surface ships would be limited as well, though solar and good old fashioned wind power might provide some of the long-haul power. Either way, summer vacation in France will likely become a thing of the past for all average families.

35

Sure, it could happen. But Rome didn’t collapse due to a single disaster but due to a myriad of them…and that collapse was pretty clearly happening even to the people of the time.

Yes, a major disaster COULD hit the US and cause such a massive dislocation that there is such a general collapse (say if Yellow Stone decides to blow it’s top again, or if we get hit by a really big rock from space…something along those lines). But simply because the price of oil is going up? No, I’m not buying that unless other, unforseen disasters strike at the same time…and then it won’t be the oil that is the problem but whatever the disaster is, so it really won’t make a difference if we are huddling in our cities using mass transit or still in our suburbs using personal transport…we’ll be screwed either way.

If flying is still desirable I really don’t see why it’s so hard to envision flight after oil. We still have lots of coal, tons of methane, electricity for hydrogen…and, you know, lots of oil in the forms of shale and tar sands. It may COST more, and this may mean a decline in air travel (though I doubt it)…but being gone completely? I rather doubt it.

BTW, even if flight became priced to high for the average person to vacation in France (lol…I doubt the average person in the US vacations in France in any case), there is nothing that would stop ships from making a large comeback for such trips…which is how ‘the average’ person in the US USED to vacation in Europe in days gone by.

-XT

36

But are electric airplanes even remotely economical as a form of mass transit? Electricity requires heavy batteries. Yes, they’ve made a couple of toy prototypes suitably for carrying 2 people, but an electric 747 isn’t remotely feasible. I don’t know that an electric Lear-jet capacity craft is even feasible.

I didn’t say gone completely or anything like it, I specifically said nonexistent in its current massive scale. Scale is at the heart of what I’m getting at. If you watch the airfaires, you can visit Grandma on the opposite coast for $200, you can commute from your home on the beach to your job in the city for $100, you can get to France for $800. As cheap oil disappears, these kinds of trips will vanish as well. Yes, you’ll probably still be able to take a fossil-powered 747 to France, but this will become a once-in-a-lifetime (if ever) sort of trip.

Again, scale and accessibility. I don’t think you fully grasp how affordable and accessible (and in some cases necessary) air travel has become for modern Americans, even those at lower-middle-class income levels. Most everyone can and does fly when they need to. You’re familiar with the term “jet set?” It used to be a synonym for affluence, because most people couldn’t afford to fly. It’s lost some relevance now that air travel is within reach of even the most modest means. I predict that phrase will eventually regain and maybe even exceed its original relevance.

37

None of the things I mentioned need to use electricity. All of them can be used in a jet engine with the proper refinement. The only reason we would abandon air travel is if it becomes economically unfeasible…not that we’d run out of fuel for the jets. And air travel is simply to convenient…I’m sure it’s not going to disappear.

My point was that there are alternatives (I didn’t even mention all of them) to the currently used jet fuel that could be used.

Do you think people would want to travel to France…i.e. is there a market for air travel? Is there economic incentive to companies to provide an air travel service? If the answers to those are yes then we won’t see air travel devolve into a once in a life time trip sort of thing.

And I don’t think you fully grasp A) the number of alternatives available, or B) the fact that if there is a market for it and if companies can make money at it how this will impact it’s availability.

I predict that air travel will continue to be accessible to pretty much everyone it is today for the rest of my life time at a minimum…and probably for several centuries at a minimum (who knows, maybe I’ll live that long myself :)). I also predict that the dire predictions of those in this thread who think we will stagnate in technology, run out of oil and have to flee back to densely packed cities and revert to mass transport or be stuck where we live are pretty much wrong…that within my lifetime things will pretty much be exactly the same wrt personal transport, air travel, etc…at least here in the US. The TECHNOLOGY will probably be different, but the way it works wrt our culture and society will be unchanged…maybe even enhanced (automation for instance may make it so you can put in your destination and then go to sleep, surf the web, etc).

-XT

38

This is a nonsense statement, since the cost of fuel is mostly what dictates the economic feasibility of air travel. And I’m tired of repeating that I’m not talking about abandoning air travel altogether, so please register this distinction.

When a cross-country ticket costs 4 months wages to purchase, all the convenience in the world isn’t going to make a difference. Air travel will return to being the luxury that it was in the early 1960’s.

39

sigh Of COURSE the cost of fuel dictates the economic feasibility of air travel. As does it’s relative worth to the traveler. And yeah…I got your weighty distinction already…I DISAGREE with your assessment, aye? Perhaps you’d like to address that aspect of the debate and explain why you think that despite a economic stake in keeping air travel wide spread and affordable and the myriad OTHER things we could use besides oil (or, you know, oil itself) to keep air travel going, it will become only affordable to the very rich?

Well, leaving aside how you figure air travel will cost ‘4 months wages’ (4 months of who’s wages exactly?), why do you think this will happen? That’s kind of what I’m getting at myself though you seem to be focusing on this aspect of my responses for some reason. WHY do you think air travel will cost ‘4 months wages’ in the future? Why wouldn’t air transport companies continue to trend of making more efficient engines for instance? Or look at alternative fuel sources? Why would they simply continue on the same path if that will lead to air travel going from being accessible by nearly everyone to being only accessible to a rich few?

-XT

40

Perhaps I’ve misheard this on the radio but I thought the airlines haven’t made a profit in a number of years. The industry as a whole has been losing money since deregulation which occurred before the price increase in oil. Is this the case or am I wrong?

Marc