I believe several air lines are profitable…South West airlines for instance is still pretty profitable. I seriously doubt any airlines would still be around if they were all running in the red all the time.
-XT
Last time I checked, the sun was pumping out solar energy by the gigawatt, for nothing.
Our entire power technology is based around solar power, life itself is dependent on solar…why ‘for nothing’?
-XT
Yeah, because thinking ahead and planning, that’s for idiots. Only fools do that sort of thing. :rolleyes: I mean, c’mon, when an individual is poor, what’s the first thing a conservative says about them? that they didn’t think ahead, that they didn’t plan well enough. Why should it be any different for societies?
Generally, laissez faire economics serves the wealthy really, really well and the poor … well … poorly, or not at all. As a person who has been poor I am arrogant enough not to want that. (NAFTA anyone? What a boon that has been to us middle class folks, not to mention the poor. Outsourcing: God’s gift to our well-trained IT folks. :dubious: )
My fear is that it’ll figure out that it’s perfectly all right if the middle class becomes a permanent economic underclass.
How much did the sun charge you for sunshine last month?
And our power technology is based mostly on coal, oil and hydro.
Suppose we were stuck with copper alloys (bronze, brass), would we ever have been able to construct railroads, tall buildings, etc.? Could we have enetered the electronics age without passing through the steel age?
Ah…I see what you were saying. True, no one charges us for the sun AFAIK. 
All of which are dependent on or simply stored solar energy.
-XT
Apparently you haven’t heard that the US air travel system is on the verge of insolvency and collapse, nor the rash of bankruptcies over the past few years. I think this wikipedia article is somewhat incomplete, but here you can see a list of airlines that filed for chapter 11 since 2002 (I know there were many before 2002). Southwest is actually a well-known exception and may be soon running into trouble.
You’re wrong. Actually airlines go in and out of bankruptcy all the time, and many fail to emerge from bankruptcy. From the link above, you can see that in September 2005, 4 of the 7 major US carriers were in Chapter 11 and many smaller carriers went out of business.
Given the nature of the industry and the economic climate, and that there has been no serious effort into prototyping alternative-fuel engines for commercial air transport… it’s seriously looking pretty dire.
Some advanced technology is “advanced” precisely because it provides a way to get something done with less energy consumption, either by doing the same thing, e.g. transistors and integrated circuits instead of tubes and mechanical switches, or by providing an alternative strategy, for example meeting with people online instead of traveling or commuting to meet them IRL.
So while some types of technology would become less prevalent, and restricted to the rich, I would expect other types of advanced tech to become more widespread.
Yeah, the sun is pumping out energy for free, but catching that energy isn’t free. It doesn’t do much good if it’s raining free soup if it costs $1000 to buy a bucket to catch it in. That “free soup” could end up much more expensive than soup from the store.
And this is the situation we are in now. Sure, you can get solar panels for your house and get free electricity. Except solar panels aren’t free, they cost a lot of money.
As for the contention that air travel will become so incredibly expensive that only the super-rich will be able to afford it–really? Let’s imagine for a moment that the cost of air travel is dictated 100% by the cost of fuel. So if the cost of fuel doubles, the cost of air travel doubles. Of course, there are other costs associated with airline travel, but we’ll pretend for a moment that all those other costs will increase linearly with fuel costs as well. So how expensive does a ticket to France become? If a ticket to France costs $1000 today, what do fuel prices have to be for a ticket to France to equal four month’s salary? If a ticket to France costs $10,000, then fuel prices must have gone up tenfold from today’s prices, right?
Do you honestly expect to see $40.00/gallon gasoline within a generation?
Yes, there’s a finite amount of crude oil in the world. But the problem with $40.00/gallon gasoline is that we can synthesize liquid fuels from coal for much less than this. We don’t have to imagine electric planes, because even if every drop of fossil crude oil vanished tomorrow, we’d still use similar engines, just powered from synthesized fuel, or biofuel. And of course such fuel is going to be more expensive than gasoline at even $4.00/gallon, but it’s not going to cost $40.00/gallon.
In just the past 10 years, the price of light sweet crude has gone up about 700% (cite). Taking a generation to be 20-ish years, do I expect to see $40.00/gallon gas in a generation? Yes, you bet your sweet arse I do. Very briefly, on the way to $50.00/gallon and higher.
If conventional wisdom is correct, the current $4.00/gallon spike doesn’t even have anything to do with the scarcity of oil, it’s all about the demand. Demand from the developing countries is only expected to skyrocket. Yes, you can synthesize some fuel out of coal, but good luck synthesizing decreased demand from the developing world. It isn’t going to happen.
Well, you know what synthesizes lower demand? Higher prices.
And lots and lots of people have lost lots and lots of money by looking at a price spike for a commodity, and imagining that the current price increases will continue indefinately.
There is no way in hell we’re going to see $40/gallon gasoline, for the simple reason that at that as we approach that price we’ll see tremendous demand destruction. As the price gets higher, fewer people want to buy, which means reduced demand, which means reduced price. And as the price gets higher, more and more people want to cash in and sell at that high price, and so they start producing more. And note that fossil crude oil isn’t the only possible source of fuel on planet earth, it just happens to be a pretty cheap source of fuel and we have a lot of sunk infrastructure supporting it.
People can’t change their gasoline consumption habits in the short term, which means that short term demand is highly inelastic. But they certainly can change their consumption habits over several years…sell that SUV and get an electric car, move, get a different job, get a motorcycle, telecommute, carpool, vote for more buses and public transportation, and so on and so on.
Linear extrapolation is for suckers.
Maybe, maybe not, but in any case the above statement ties neatly back into my main argument that fuel-dependent technologies like air travel are going to get crushed by the combination of rising demand with decreasing supply.
Yeah, but suppose gas has reached $10/gallon. Where is that going to depress demand most: in the first world, with a vast gasoline infrastructure already in place and lots of disposable cash, or in the third world?
You somehow imagine that demand will be insatiable for $40/gallon gas. But anyone can see that when gas is expensive, people around the world use less. That’s demand destruction. If gasoline were $40/gallon just about nobody is going to be able to afford driving gasoline burning cars anymore, right? Which means the demand for gasoline at $40/gallon is only fraction of what it is today, right? Which means that it ain’t going to reach that price in the first place.
And all this is assuming that no different technology exists!