Possibly I wasn’t clear with the term “one-to-one.” I’m speaking of any potential fossil-fuel alternative or any combination of alternatives (not just “one” fuel); the ratio refers to the resource cost on the one hand and the useful energy obtained on the other. A “one-to-one” replacement for oil would be a fuel alternative (or any combination) that gave us as much (no less) useful energy than oil in exchange for as much (no greater) cost to produce. In other words, an energy source that, with some adjustment to our technology, would allow us to keep on living the way we have been with no worries. That’s what I am unwilling to take on faith.
Have you been to Cleveland? No self-respecting Goth, Visigoth, Vandal or Hun would look at it twice. It’s what all those tribes were attacking people to get away from.
You live in a paranoiac world. You do know that don’t you?
Who is throwing up their hands.?
I am saying most all modern life depends on cheap, easy energy. Without it, IMO you are going to have something quite different, and thats only if we transition to that state peacefully. If world wide economic collapse occurs, it will get really ugly IMO.
As for alternatives, we already have them. Many people could make do with electric cars. As for liquid fuels, you can make them synthetically. It will obviously cost more, but is it going to be absurdly expensive once it becomes the norm? I don’t think so.
The alternatives are pretty much already known technology. The only real question is HOW much more expensive would they be? I am sure experts have some decent idea of that as well, its just you don’t know exactly what its going to cost till you do it on a large scale.
As for this “change” thing, while the burbs MAY be using more than “thier” share of the resources, the burbs are FAR from the only thing that is making this boat sink so to speak. The burbs could magically dissappear tommorow and IMO all that would buy you is a few years.
Do a search on suburbs in GD. The absolute glee some people have in believing they’re going to disappear is absolutely baffling. And the reasons people give for why they’re evil and why they’re going to disappear will leave you scratching your head.
I believe that is an exception rather than the rule though I would love for it to be true. It also probably depends on where you live. The majority of suburbs I am familiar with in Houston and DFW, you are lucky if there is a grocery store that you can easily access by foot or bike. Even in my parents fairly new subdivision, built within the last 10 years, the nearest shopping area is a couple of miles down the road and is surrounded by very busy streets.
No, I live in the real world. You seem to live in Egypt, or at least close to denial…
-XT
Does anybody really think the suburbs will go away if gas goes up to $10 a gallon? There is an equilibrium that exists that balances the cost of commuting vs. the cost of intown living. They rise and fall in tandem.
The suburbs aren’t ever going away. Why should they? People need them. What we should really be hoping for is a transformation of the suburban communities from bedroom communities to living/working communities. This business of driving 100 miles one-way to a city for work is the proximate cause of all the problems of both cities and suburbs. Fix that, and the other problems start to fall into place.
But why do you insist that any substitute for petroleum powered internal combustion cars MUST cost less than a gasoline car? Of course they won’t cost less, they’ll cost more, becuase if they cost less we’d be using them already.
But as gasoline prices increase, that’s when the alternatives get cheaper. Not cheaper than cheap gas, but cheaper than expensive gas. If gas is $20, then complaints that an electric car has a 100 mile range suddenly ring hollow. People will adjust to the notion that their electric car is good enough to commute to work and go to the grocery store, and they’ll just have to get used to the idea that they can’t drive to the Grand Canyon on a whim.
We could switch over to an all-electric fleet, conventional electric like we have today, and 95% of people’s driving wouldn’t change. You just couldn’t do inter-city driving, you’d have to take the train or fly, or rent an IC vehicle.
But as we switch to electric vehicles that means the demand for gasoline goes down, which means upward price pressure on gasoline goes down, which means gasoline doesn’t increase as fast as you’d expect. If gas reaches $10 and looks to stay at least that high for years, then suddenly the dozens of alternatives we have today become cheaper than gasoline.
And of course, many of the problems of the suburbs–that they are all residences, with no shops and businesses–are caused because it’s against the law to open a shop in a residential neighborhood. It’s zoning. People would rather drive 5 miles to the grocery store than have to live next to a grocery store. And so allowing grocery stores and small businesses to operate in “residential” areas is a pretty simple change, and suddenly people don’t have to drive 20 miles to get anywhere.
And while we’ve gotten rid of buses and streetcars and trains, it’s not like it’s impossible to build more.
We may head for a time when suburban people don’t have three gas-guzzling SUV’s in the driveway, and to a time when they have a light-rail line, a light electric commuter car, and a high-mileage IC car. That ain’t the end of the suburbs.
People also seem to be assuming that everybody who lives in the suburbs works in the city and commutes. Not so. I live and work in the same suburb – a nice short drive, no tolls, no traffic hassles. There’s lots of jobs out here, actually.
And I can (and often do) walk about five minutes from my house to a 16-screen movie theater and a number of good restaurants. I could walk to the grocery store, but would rather not haul everything back without my car. If I really want to get my drink on without driving, theres a nice Irish Pub about a mile down the road, and I’ve hoofed it there once or twice.
For anything further away than that, it really isn’t a big hassle to jump in my car and drive for a few minutes to the mall or post office. Remember, we have garages and big parking lots, so there are no issues with limited street parking, meters, and so forth. Not a big deal at all.
I do travel to Chicago proper about every couple of months or so (virtually always taking the train when I do). It’s a great city and I enjoy taking advantage of what it has to offer… But I like my life out here in the boonies.
Why does it have to be this way in order to work? Initially whale oil was cheaper than petroleum based fuels because the infrastructure for exploiting, refining and distributing whale oil was in place, while there hadn’t been a lot of development or capital investment in refinement or distribution petroleum based fuels. So, people used whale oil until whales started to get scarce and the price of whale oil went up. At a certain point, the price of whale oil was high enough to make petroleum exploitation and the capital investment worth while…and we switched over to oil based fuels and products.
Even if the cost of energy for whatever replaces oil is initially higher (or even if it always remains higher), and the energy density less, that doesn’t mean it won’t be a viable alternative, or that people are going to suddenly abandon personal transport and flee back towards the cities. The cost of fuel is only one factor in the cost of having a vehicle, after all, and as is seen by our Euro buddies, we haven’t even come close in the US to a price that is going to seriously hamper people buying cars. If they can pay over $10/gallon for gas, then I’d say we could pay the same price in an equivalent new fuel source or system.
Personally I don’t believe that gas needs to get anywhere near $10/gallon before viable alternatives start to seriously penetrate the market. We are ALREADY seeing high end EV’s and hybrids making inroads, several manufactures plan to release hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the near future (I think Toyota is planning to release on either this year or next, in fact), bio-fuels are already being sold on a limited basis…and all this is happening when gas is still under $3/gallon here in the US. If the price of gas gets to be something like $6/gallon (stable) then you will see a whole host of new products that will become viable…and, of course, at those prices we’ll also see currently untapped or under exploited oil reserves being developed, since the initial capital investment will have a reasonable ROI timeline (hell, a reasonable expectation to GET a return, unlike today).
I guess I don’t get why you think this is such a stretch. There are already products out there that could essentially replace oil based fuels with hardly a ripple, at least from the perspective of the end user. Hydrogen fills up and works almost exactly like gas in that you drive up to a pump, stick in a nozzle and filler-er-up. Granted, there are some issues with it today (the fact that it has to be produced and the fact that there is currently no distribution infrastructure being two of them), but then we aren’t talking about having to have it implemented today…or tomorrow, next year or in the next decade. If hydrogen wins the fuel wars it will slowly build up over time, as people make the switch and as companies get into the hydrogen production and distribution game. Bio-fuels also work exactly like what people are used to today. You drive up and fill up. This has the added benefit that we already have a distribution infrastructure for it. EV’s, of course, work a bit differently, but there is nothing to say that a fast charging battery that acts like a capacitor couldn’t be (or isn’t being) developed, or that some method for a quick swap out of batteries couldn’t be used.
Initially this stuff does cost more (which is why these are niche products today), but once people start making the switch in large enough numbers the prices will inevitably come down. They might not come down to the levels of cheap petroleum, but they don’t have to.
No faith required, just an unbiased and open eyed assessment of the current state of development coupled with the kinds of time frames we are talking about before it becomes an issue. Heck, with all the GW awareness, it might actually happen sooner, as public perceptions shift and impact on the market.
-XT
I agree. I love the suburbs, wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, great place to raise a family, beautiful (trees, flowers, grass, etc.) and quiet (minimal car noise from freeways or busy streets).
On a slightly different note: the neighborhoods within the city of Seattle are generally just as car dependent as the suburbs, they just happen to be in “the city”. Is the anti-suburb crowd really proposing nobody should live in a house, everyone should live in apartment/condo buildings?
Interesting fact, the last time we did a “suburbs suck!” thread in GD, one of the main arguments against them was how lily-white they supposedly are.
But as you can see, the reasons why suburbs suck now is entirely different from the reason they sucked a year ago.
That’s not necessarily the case – it’s possible that they would cost less once mass production got ramped up sufficiently, but that the hump to be climed to reach that point makes them cost more in the short run.
That quibble aside, the rest of the analysis makes sense.
I would expect that as new oil reserves get harder to find and gas more expensive, the disinclination to commute long distances will be in part accomodated by an increased ability to work from home via continued advances in IT hardware and infrastructure. My house, like many others in ‘the burbs’ has a spacious library/office already. I’d be perfectly fine performing all my work related issues right there. The seamlesness of that capibility should only increase in the future.
This isn’t the same sort of thread, and if you read both, you will see that people brought up many of the same issues in both threads. The whiteness issue was never stated as anyone’s main objection. Nice misdirection attempt, though.
Are you joking? You’re the one that actually called suburban dwellers racist for preferring to live in the suburbs! Or did you forget?
Here, allow me to refresh your memory:
It will happen. I have a video made about Levittown Pennsylvania, the very definition of suburb. It was made in the early 1950s. I was interested because an aunt lived there for a while, so I’ve visited. But it emphasized the local stores.
Sure at the moment lots of people don’t live within walking distance of stores, but as density increases and we get more shopping centers, the average distances are decreasing.
I said I wish some people were more honest about why they prefer to live in the suburbs (which some people then very directly stated that yes, they do prefer the whiteness, but I notice your selective quoting didn’t make it down that far). That doesn’t equate to saying the suburbs suck because white people live there, as much as you might wish that it did.
Maybe YOU didnt say it in that other thread, but it certainly WAS a common reason folks gave for why the burbs suck. And I recall plenty of burb livers saying that the fact it so white was NOT the reason they lived there, and more importantly, that the burbs they lived in were NOT Leave it to Beaver vills.
Or in other words, you said in the other thread “all white burbs suck” wasnt a common theme. And someone called you on your shit.