http://reddit.com/info/6ktgj/comments/

Thanks!

At that level of energy prices running a suburban home will be something only the truely rich can afford. How many kilowatts per squaremeter per year do you use ?. The energy costs of your home will force you into a flat. Never mind your travel expenses, or those of your visitors. Just imagine your plumber turning you down, because you can´t afford the travel expense.

No $100 gasoline -- rather, Happy Rationing!

In 2017, John made two trips to the Shell / BP / Chevron / Husky / Exxon station this morning, confident he would be able to fill the nearly empty tanks on his Ford 350 pickup and trailered lawn mower, and his classic 12-cylinder Ferrari.

Gasoline is available to meet his needs. During past months, this was not true, because the ancient, heavy-handed World War II gasoline rationing system (X number of gallons per citizen per period, depending on bureaucrat-assigned priorities A, B, C, etc.) that had been the default solution for over four years, had been so corrupted that gasoline availability at major outlets was chaotic nationwide. (However, ration stamps, already printed and stored by the millions in Ft. Knox, were dug out and put into service when the seemingly simple “money-rationing” system began to generate deadly violence at gasoline pumps, in dark back yards, motels and mall parking lots.

The new rationing system, implemented with the BTU Card (copyright), allows people to buy any thing on the basis of both its market-established monetary value, and its defined Net Energy content, and people are once again able to determine their own priorities when choosing to purchase either "necessities" or "luxuries." The Btu Card allows each citizen to continue his/her Pursuit of Happiness whether it be a Sunday drive, a warmer living room, or a new roof for the house.

Even imported goods, airline travel, auto racing, heating and air conditioning, that were stringently controlled luxuries from nearly the beginning of 21st century energy rationing, now can be purchased by committing all, or any portion, of one’s "energy ration" and monetary wealth.

Everyone receives a monthly “Energy Ration” on his or her BTU Card electronic account with the Department of Energy, along with whatever old-fashioned “money ration” their employers pay them, using the ancient method of checks, $20 bills or a small sack of tiny gold “b-b’s”. Note: Anyone’s “surplus” energy ration(s), for a limited period, can be sold on a public market, or accumulated for major energy purchases, such as a set of tires, or a new car.

A periodic Energy Ration is determined by incredibly-detailed, time-consuming, horribly-boring studies made by talented number-addicts such as engineers, scientists, accountants and other such government- and energy-industry geeks who research and then define a “net-energy content value” for everything traded in the marketplace -- worldwide. Of course, these values are constantly in contention, changing by evolution of production technology, knowledge, and government/industry strategies to best assure energy conservation and deliverability of reliable energy supplies of liquid, gaseous and solid fuels and electricity. Everyone’s periodic Energy Ration is defined (currently) three to six months in advance, on the basis of studies and projections created by essentially the same type of physicists, mathematicians and "risk analysts" responsible for early 21st-century infamous “creative” debt financing -- aided by petroleum geophysicists, geologists and engineers.

When John completed filling his tanks at Exxon, he used his single credit-debit / Btu Card to charge his “money account” in the currency of his choice, and his DOE “energy account” where the total new energy purchases were instantly subtracted from his residual allotment. John received a receipt for each type of purchase, to help assure he would not “buy” too much air conditioning, hot water, nor manufactured metal or polymer items in the near term, during his current allotment period. He is saving some of his energy allotment in a special sub-account that, hopefully, will enable him to purchase a new electric / hydrogen econo-pickup a few years from now.

(He must not go over his periodic allotment, because it will be temporarily charged to his allowable overdraft account, and if his legal limit is exceeded, he automatically is categorized as a “sub-prime energy borrower", and could not pay for his wintertime natural gas needs, nor the energy needed to buy a parka to wear around his home. Ultimately, he could be interred in Energy Debtors’ Prison where all of his survival energy needs during his sentence must be generated, “hamster style”, in his cell, on his assigned Wheel, with his output dumped on the area’s electric grid.)

Hopefully, more on John's other energy adventures, later.

There are even more potential impacts on the commercial and industrial sectors. At $100/gallon, shipping goods to most suburban retail locations becomes uneconomical. The commercial establishments that are close to rail terminals and freight docks will be able to manage their costs to receive shipments, while others will move or go out of business quickly. Cities that are lucky enough to have transit systems, especially streetcars, may be able to convert some of their rolling stock for delivery. Same will have to go for solid waste transport, or we'll be seeing a lot more neighborhood trash dumps.

Essential services like police, fire, ambulance, utility maintenance, road maintenance, mail delivery, trash pickup and school buses will be prohibitively expensive to provide to low density areas. There undoubtedly would be rationing to support many of those, but many localities are already strapped for cash and would not be able to afford even a basic level in low density areas. It's simply a matter of travel distances adding up on a daily basis.

Extractive industries like wood and mining may have to swap out their support vehicles for alternative fuel vehicles in order to stay in business. The agricultural sector would have similar pressures. Shipping of raw and manufactured goods would become uneconomical in many instances. Like retail, we would see manufacturing operations attempt to relocate at rail heads and near freight docks.

The price of oil-based feedstocks that go into certain goods would skyrocket. Many chemicals, some industrial gases, fertilizers and pesticides, synthetic fabrics, tires, asphalt, packaging, some medicines and medical supplies, and indeed most consumer items fall in that category.

In terms of physical infrastructure, our greatest needs to meet the coming challenges are 1) a renovated and expanded national electrical grid, 2) new or improved transit systems in all sizable urban areas, and 3) new or improved intercity rail and water transport routes.

Difficult to think of any justified activity at $100/gal gasoline. The closet would be fuel for a chain saw to collect fuel for other activities. Those damn things are incredibly efficient and effective, if you compare them to a cross cut saw or axe.

Robert,

It seems to me that excluding the economy as a whole seriously detracts from realistic answers but here goes anyway...

I'm in a somewhat unique position since I live in a rural area and only one of my four neighbors works full time so getting to work isn't really an issue.

Electricity
Between us we have 1-70kW, 1-40kW and 2-20kW diesel generators and 1-8kW, 2-5kW and 1-1kW gas generators. I also have a 3.6kW PV system. What we would do is convert one or more of the generators to wood gas. If we had the funds we would ask a friend who is big on steam engines (he has his own steam locomotive at his house) to weld up a steam boiler for one of the generator heads.

I also have an old, very small PV system (77watts) that I'd install on our rental. This would let them run the refrigerator and a light or two at night.

Cooking and Hot Water
We have a wood cook stove but we can also run it to a degree on our PV system. The others use propane.

We have an electric HWH (tied into a solar hot water system and a heat exchanger in our wood heater) that we currently run off the PV system. The others have propane.

We'd convert all the propane stuff to wood gas.

Getting Necessities
We'd pool our trips to the store and buy in bulk - although most of us buy and store large quantities of food now. We'd probably go once a month. We'd also greatly expand our gardens and add meat animals such as chickens and, maybe, ask to run a cow or two on a neighbor's rangeland.

We'd switch our mail from our PO boxes in town to a rural delivery route currently available.

We all heat with wood now and would just have to pay the price for chainsaw gas.

Transportation Options
We have a variety of vehicle options to convert to wood gas. The question is whether this would be legal for highway use in CA. We'd still probably do it for our large pick-up trucks for home use. My old 1990 one ton 4x4 pickup is a gas hog and would be a good candidate.

Entertainment
None of us eats out or goes to movies anyway so that's no big deal. Only two even get broadcast TV. As a group we have hundreds of tapes and DVD's that we could share. Same with music.

So, that's about it so far.

Todd

At those prices, not only will people be living differently, but the central importance of gasoline in so many discussions involving living arrangements as currently understood in the industrial world will no longer be seen as relevant.

In part, because such a thought experiment has an unspoken basis - the underlying assumption that gasoline is central to our life.

At $100 a gallon, it won't be.

An exercise in misdirection, actually. What would be more productive is to ask what people what they will be doing as the price rises in a way clearly demonstrating the finite amount of crude in the world.

After all, that change has most certainly not yet occurred - and even if the point of the experiment is to provoke some thought on the other side of that barrier, it still places gasoline at the center of life. Which it won't be.

Think of this experiment - in 1850, if you had asked what would happen if the upkeep of horses would cost the equivalent amount that it does today, while the horse population had been reduced from tens of millions to hundreds of thousands, the reactions you gathered would be fascinating, in part because of how thoroughly those reactions would be based on the centrality of horses at that time for agriculture and transport.

Unfortunately, at any energy price level, it may still be cheaper to ship tat from China in 'warehouses of the sea' than to produce and distribute goods locally.

Personally, I have enough bicycle spares and tools including frames and wheels to last until my retirement - even if I need to commute to a job. This makes me marketable post peak. Even people who do have bikes will find modern designs are unreliable and expensive to maintain.

If heating an old solid wall house becomes impossible, I will set up cosy 'bedouin' tents in rooms to cut convection until winter passes.
I can generate some electricity, but not sufficient for space heating

A friend who drives a Suburban recently told me that he doesn't care about gas prices...

I dunno how to handle this... I take this energy thing so seriously that I am no longer able to relate to friends who drive trucks and SUVs for recreational and commuting purposes (and say such foolish things). It's a problem, I know... but I tend to avoid them now. It's like they're in another social group. And it's one that I do not feel good about.

Hi RR,

This is a mind-game I've gone through quite a few times. For me it was diesel at 20€ per litre.

However I never thought about it in terms of absence of systemic consequences. A quick word about those : in such conditions our electric grid will either cost much more or will be down (think maintenance costs, transport of nuclear, coal or other substitutes of oil, infrastructure ...). Same for rail transport and so on.

But if things could hold together, some of my actual plans could still hold. I own a farm on 10 Ha. Since things hold together there will still be patients for my office or I could get a job as a neurologist in my local hospital. I live 5km from a train station. I could commute by train and go to the station by bicycle or by horse since there is a horse owner near the station who can care for my horse during my working hours. Don't laugh, we own 6 horses and are currently planning to train 2 of them for horse drawn carriage. There is no lack of horse-cars in our region, in a near-by village 2 men are acquiring the skill of making wheels and horse shoes with old skills since a lot of ancient infrastructure has been kept alive here . Most people around us own horses so there is a lot of community help with this. I would use my bicycle or my horses for shopping as well (for what still will be shoppable).

My garden will expand proportionnaly with the price of brent at first, I already use only home-made fertilizer. The real problem is mold for vegetables in our regions but a lot of organic farmers are trying methods for lessining or suppressing use of industrial solutions, like nettle-infusions and such. I learn a lot of tips from them currently.

I have a 8-meter deep water-well but I will have to experiment a bit before I get some drinking water. Heating of our home can be done only with wood chopped already in advance. I would really prefer to use gasoline for my tools rather than for my car.

I will probably implement some solar electricity for hand-held lamps and perhaps a few domestic devices but I see PV as very expensive, and I am still not comfortable with storage. I know for sure that batteries, whatever technology they are made of, do die, rather sooner than later to be comfortable.

But since problems will be more general than personal some ideas as well :

I hate to talk about it, but spreading poverty is a real problem especially as gasoline will be as expensive for the police as well. How to deal with these issues depends a lot on the communities involved as well as how everbody else will respond to the stresses created by anterior policies.

As for clothing, no problem, my wife can get dressed for the next 200 years, I will have to anticipate a bit more. Another real problem will be medicines. Most pharmacists in our region have lost the skills of herboristery. However a lot of things can be done without medicines and doctors will have to learn a lot of skills to overcome any shortage of medicines. I guess I will have to learn how to make acetylsalicylic acid from willows (and perhaps you have a clue ?).

Since neurolgy as the rest of specialities (perhaps except psychiatry) will disapear, I will work as a general practicioner in my surroudings. Probably one of my main tasks will be to help people cope with the situation and try to prevent aggressivity as much as possible. I don't think I will talk about PO that much when things have gone so far ...

We could go on for very long, thanks however for opening this thread. I am looking for everybodies else's input.

For me at least, I would have to bicycle everywhere, and quit driving totally. Living in the middle of Houston, everything is within 5 miles and I probably should start now (already bicycle to work), except my son is still small enough to need a car to move around. Not sure about whether the places I go to would survive. Trips to see family in San Antonio, Austin and the UK would also stop.
As for AC in Houston, I am addicted!

Random thoughts

As gas price hits the pain point, ride sharing and trip consolidation will likely cut traffic jams during commute time to near nothing and thus increase fuel mileage by not stop and go bumper to bumper for 15 miles in.

Solar water heating much more efficient than solar electric converted to heat the water.

Even with your new hot water heater, pre heat of the input water to 100 via solar will be a lot more efficient than dumping say 66 degree city water into the tank as you shower.

105 is hot but even large pvc (8 inch) buried in the soil and pushing air through it to recycle into the house is better than open windows. I have an old style house in Fl and it has an attic whole house fan with a grating you open in the ceiling and you just open the sash windows a bit at the bottom and the air pulls through the house making it comfortable but not as much as straight AC.

In the winter I use mini fans to push hot air from the attic down through dedicated louver vents to stretch the heating dwell time. The fans don't even kick on till the attic gets to 90 and then they are variable speed under control of my house computer to provide adjusted flow so they don't actually push temperatures above the heat pump kick off temp. On a sunny day in the winter, the attic still gets to 110. In summer my house is raised about 3 feet off the ground on pillars and between the pillars I have 2 inch thick Styrofoam. Think coffee cup. Under the house stays 72 year round.

Pull air up from there in the summer with the attic whole house fan and it really makes for better living. Even bare wood floor areas are comfortable to walk on barefoot, which in winter would have been like an ice cube before.

Add a temporary pvc frame and cover with plastic hardware cloth up against the house and open a couple windows into it when it warms up and use a floor fan to push the air to other sections of the house. My mother heated the entire house like that in the winter for years. Even used it as a temporary greenhouse to save some plants till next spring and an herb garden in the winter by adding a door to it.

She had a pot belly wood stove for night heat.

When using the heat pump I have small tubing that runs to a half dozen mist heads so fine you can barely see the spray that kick in on a two minute time delay after the compressor kicks in to cool the coils. Drops the temp real quick and makes the unit much more efficient on those 95 degree days just pulling air through the coils.

If it's in the direct sun shade the thing with a tarp or something. I have seen units idle you could almost fry and egg on in direct sunlight.

Mini blinds on all the windows tilted down just to a crack let you see out and get light in and you can adjust them to where your view really isn't obstructed that much but the solar heating or cooling in the winter is greatly reduced to the interior.

I am thinking of trying an experiment and building a Styrofoam enclosure around the compressor about three times its volume and pulling air from under the house and exhausting it via the compressor fan to outside air. Running 72 degree air over the cooling coils should help a lot in heat transfer.

Regarding the long expected arrival of the plug-in hybrids, I don't know what the expected mileage is, and a lot depends on the total miles driven, and of course this requires an energy input from an electrical source, hopefully wind and solar. But in any case, let's assume 6,000 miles per year at a 250 miles per gallon and $100 per gallon. Note that we are excluding the electrical input. The vehicles also require a lot of energy to build, and it takes a long time to replace the fleet.

6,000/250 = 24 gallons per year @$100/gallon = $2,400, or $200 per month fuel cost.

I personally don't think that this is necessarily a good thing. I think that Alan Drake has a better idea, but I expect that people will go to enormous lengths to try to maintain their auto centric way of life.

$100 a gallon? That's the return of draft animals. Horses, mules, donkeys, & oxen.
Advantage:you still could go where & when you please.
I would expect that road network would still have some designated lanes for buses at $100 per gal, but...
PHEVs, hybrids, rich people who can still afford to drive will have to share many roads with wagons, teams. Increased use of livestock will mean larger herds, herds will have to be moved, pastures rotated, so livestock on roads will be common sight.
$100 per gal is a different world, different occupations, different skills needed, it will lead to us becoming different people, the world would look very different, it would not take long.

For just getting around for local errands or even a longer than you would like short commute a possible solution would be electric bicycles which either power or pedal assist for hills and such.

http://www.electric-bikes.com/bikes/index.html

I have a large property and just to get around instead of a golf cart which I also have a lot of the time I just use a home brew converted battery operated moped. Still has the pedal option if I run out of juice away from the house.

My conditions are relatively similar to todd's, I would start brewing ethanol for motor use. My motorcycle gets 90 MPG and I have 40 acres. so that'd fuel the chainsaw and the bike.

Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together.
This was no disciplined march, it was a stampede.
Without order and without a goal.
6 million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong.
It was the beginning of the Rout of Civilisation,
of the Massacre of Mankind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7vfjJHcfeE&feature=related

( 6m 20s in ).

You're in the Netherlands, so you can take the train. Put your bike at the railway station and cycle the rest. After a while you get fed up so you relocate.

Our beloved gov't takes 6% sales tax when you sell your house, so that probably will have to go.

I wouldn't do much different @ 100 US$ (*) than today. We have a car that does 55 mpg (not a hybrid, just a small car). I would probably visit my parents by train, and my wife would either quit working or skype. I would just continue go to work by bike. I don't take fly-drive holidays, so that doesn't change.

I probably buy one of these, just for fun.

You can go 20 mph on one of these, if you really try.

(*) Also depends a bit one the euro-dollar exchange rate.

My business travel would not be sustainable at those rates. For the next 12 months, I am probably looking at 12 trips just to the Netherlands...

Your business travel is not only not sustainable, it's almost certainly impossible. Houston to Copenhagen is 5,200 miles; assuming the same price ratios as today, jet fuel would be $120/gal in your scenario; airlines with today's fleet average about 50 passenger miles per gallon [Wikipedia, "Fuel efficiency in transportation"]; the fuel costs, per passenger, to fly from Houston to Copenhagen would be about $12,480 (one way). A flight from LA to NYC works out to about $5,900 (one way). At those prices, the air travel industry will have collapsed.

I would argue that this whole thought experiment is badly flawed. The airline industry is not the only one that will have collapsed at those prices for petroleum products. It is not enlightening to ask "How would you respond to $100/gal gasoline in 2013?" without first making some assumptions about how that price changes other things. How many businesses and banks will have failed? What will the unemployment rate be? Which industries will have completely disappeared? Absent a much more complete scenario, my answers about my personal responses are probably pretty useless.

As an extreme example, Texas and Louisiana produce enough oil and natural gas to satisfy their internal demand at prices well below $100/gal. At some point, with a price well below $100/gal, those states will have blown up the pipelines and stopped exporting on any kind of scale. When I lived in Texas in the 1970s, the governor publicly threatened to blow up the natural gas pipelines and "let the damn yankees freeze in the dark". I live in another region that exports energy; I quite literally believe that before gas hits $100/gal, I'll be involved in a civil war.

It's an interesting thought experiment, if for nothing other than the embedded non-sequiturs (or perhaps comments like the Netflix one were meant as jokes?).

Anyway, I think bicycle transit will become all the more my preference (I do this about 70% anyway, but this'd push me to the 100% for sure). In fact, a couple of new bike designs allow for carrying rather large loads (see Kona "Ute", Yuba "Mundo", or Surly "Big Dummy"). Of course, I live much closer than 23.5 miles from everything I need. However, I suspect I'll be paying a lot more for food trucked in at that gas price.

I live in BC, where our electricity is 90% hydroelectric, so I don't expect the grids to go down here for another 100 years or more. However, $100 a gallon gas will mean quite a bit of inflation across the board, so I suspect my utility bills will rise proportionally (if for nothing else, because BC Hydro will find it more profitable to sell electicity at exhorbitant rates to wealthy US buyers). I live in the city, where it's unlikely that I can set up a windmill (although at $100 a gallon, I suspect many city bylaws preventing such to be ammended). However, solar (to the extent that I can afford it) would at least be my first foray into electricity savings. My preference would be to have a few acres and a wood-burning stove, but I'm certain we can't all have that.

Which brings me to the resultant social inequalities: I saw a post the other day on Yahoo! Questions where someone had asked a more general "what are you doing about peak oil" question. One respondent stated, "I'm stockpiling weapons". Perhaps this too was a joke, but I suspect for many this isn't that far from a serious consideration. Extreme social inequalities in the past have tended to ignite armed conflicts. Why shouldn't we expect the same result from bottlenecked demand for a commodity that we've made into the lifeblood of our industrial culture?

Great question! We gave it some real thought, and posted our answer on our web site:

Gas at $100/gal.

Thanks for asking this question Robert, and my gratitude for your clear understanding of the fossil fuel problem.

This is THE question for or future.

My original plan to continue sailing around the world would be modified. I am totally solar and produce excess energy for all needs, including radios, refer and watermaker. The diesel and dinghy would present a tougher problem. Certainly a sail dink is going to be on deck, but a small amount of diesel will be needed for emergency escape maneuvers. I had planned on refilling at always reliable Brunei, but the cost and danger will have made that impossible.
Cruising overseas will become extremely dangerous [ already difficult ] I will fall back on the Puget sound area which will allow me to sail to Canada for fuel supplies and will work both sides of the border for needed supplies.
THE problem in the future will be mobility. My boat will be able to transport two tons of cargo to trade for fuel or food from remote areas. When events turn perilous, I'll haul anchor and move to other more favorable areas where it's possible to survive and earn a modest living to feed the boat and diesel.
But i a lot of fun is going to disappear with the loss of a high speed inflatable. 20 knots takes approximately 3/4 gallon on gas per hour.

Dave on Meander

You say $100/gal gas, but also mention other ramifications (thermostat, etc.) I'll just address the former.

I work about 8 miles from my house, and I suppose my car gets around 25mpg in the city, so that's US$4/mile, or $64 per day commuting. My first thought would be to telecommute as many days per week as my employer would allow, which at that price would probably be two, I'm guessing.

My second thought would be to buy a high-mpg scooter or motorcycle (I still have a license from my college days), or bicycle. I don't ride one currently because I consider it too unsafe to ride with the local careless/clueless drivers. $100/gal gasoline would do a good job of ridding the roads of stupidity, so riding a motorcycle or bicycle would become reasonably pleasant. I would enjoy this.

Third (note!) option would be to rideshare. Like all good Americans, I abhor this idea, but at the right price I might start. $100/gal is probably not high enough if either of my above options pans out, but at $500/gal, it would probably be completely unavoidable.

Flying is not an issue for me, as my employer pays. If they don't want me to travel, it's okay with me (maybe even a plus).

As for personal travel, I think we'd start planning our trips to the store, etc. Our nearest grocer is about a mile away, and there are sidewalks, so we might well walk that.

So, summarizing, $100/gal wouldn't cause me much grief, and in a lot of ways I think it'd be an improvement. In the words of our adored leader, "Bring it on!"... :-)

Get an apartment across the street from your office. Or, hey, move.

Trips: Take longer ones less often.

Telecommuting isn't always an option. It is less efficient for many interactions. I do a lot of teleconferencing and it takes longer to come to mutual understandings that way.

I do not understand why you think electric power prices would go up so high.

Ok, let's ignore for the moment that the only way this could ever come to pass (considering the alternative energy sources that would become economical *long* before then) would be *massive* inflation, and that I'd probably be making >$1million/year and would jump for joy at the chance to pay off my mortgage with a couple month's paychecks...

I'd do what everyone else would be doing in that situation. Switch to a career developing alternative energy sources. Neo-luddites like to rail at technologists for thinking they have the answer to all of the world's problems. But in this case they surely do. There's a vast plentiful excess of energy out there for us. Oil's just the cheapest to get at right now. It'll suck to run out of it, but that's probably for the best anyway... the stuff's bad for the planet.

But let's say terrorists blew up all the oil fields and it was going to be a year before the world had any significant oil again (i.e. a *temporary* price spike to $100/gallon). And fine, let's ignore that we'd have a world-wide depression and massive die-offs in human population due to the outrageous price food would soar to if we didn't have petro-fertilizers. And let's ignore all the investment opportunities (like buying a parking lot and stocking it with all the (reasonably economic) cars that are utterly worthless right now but will be back to their original prices when oil comes back down).

Well, duh. I'd ride my bike to work and set up teleconferences to meet with my friends on the weekends instead of driving 40 miles up to see them in person.

I already combine trips to the grocery store, Home Depot and the pharmacy but would out of necessity probably increase this. The grocery store is 1 mile away and CostCo is 1/2 mile the other way.

Since I am disabled I have been struggling with mobility anyway. I cannot ride my upright bicycle any longer, or run, or even walk any more but I am able to pedal a recumbent trike due to the laid back seat. See Catrike. I do plan on adding an electric assist to help me get into and out of the neighborhood as I live in a canyon. Once I get out I am on level ground so the entry / exit is the issue. I am also working on designing an insulated trailer so I can make the run to the store for groceries without worrying about the heat of summer spoiling my milk. Also I would like to make the Home Depot runs with it as well, unless I need a sheet of plywood. A tandem may be in our future as the wife needs the exercise. :)

The electric assist is actually upgradeable to power the trike by itself in lieu of pedaling. I'm looking forward to that. It only does 20 MPH or so depending upon which unit I buy but as my spine deteriorates It may be necessary. An electric trike that plugs in and costs pennies per day to operate is a good alternative. 10 to 60 miles range depending upon the power demand.

At home I do not have a A/C unit as the only time it would be necessary would be during August when it gets really humid. During the winter I use a central gas / electric heater but only for a few weeks. It rarely gets cold enough for long enough to suffer much. I do use a small ceramic heater for my bedroom instead of the central unit but I could do without it if necessary.

Time to lie down. I cannot sit up any longer.

This thought experiment can be rephrased as:

"What would you do with 1 gallon/week?"
Since about $400/month is how much an average household can spend on gas.

So you would choose between

a) 1 visit to a grocery store (must be with 15 miles) in a week in a 30mpg car
b) commuting a short distance to work (under 10 miles) on a 100mpg scooter.
c) using it in some kerosene stove to cook food - probably enough for a hot dinner 7 days a week.
d) not buy OR sell your fuel allotment to a rich neighbor.

I think it's realistically a choice between C or D, since at that price fuel is too valuable to burn for individual transportation.

Other repercussions of $100/gallon gas:

- If you do decide to fill up the car with it, you won't be able to leave on the street or on an open parking lot, since the gas will be immediately stolen from the car.
- no new mass-produced gasoline cars, since there won't be enough demand for them, or infrastructure to produce.
- you will be buying a plastic bottle or a plastic bag at $5 a piece and keep it till it wears out.
- using public transit will be rare and expensive.

Think India train

Food: We purchased 13 acres of black dirt and are growing a variety of vegetables for a 50-member CSA. It is 4 miles from my house and I would have a bike to go back and forth daily if gas were $100 a gallon. It's a pretty flat terrain and with not many vehicles on the road will be pretty safe.(Obviously, I wouldn't be doing a CSA at this point but using the food for us and for bartering). We use a small John Deere which is very good on diesel, a little Honda tiller, also good on gas, and thereafter, hand tools and hand weeding on knees. I've gotten pretty fast at weeding and can weed a 200-foot row in 20 minutes.

Barn: We have a barn next to our house which has it's own kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms and a large living room. A family could live there and help us work the farm. We live on three acres, have a large garden and could expand the garden greatly and add quite a few animals -- goats, a cow, chickens and even a few pigs.

Basement Apartment: We have a walk-out basement in whice we could put in a kitchen (already has a bathroom) and partition for a bedroom. Thus we could have another family live with us to share the cost of utilities and help with all vegetable production and animals.

Pellet Stoves: We already have installed a wood-burning stove (it also burns pellets)insert in our house and are surrounded by woods. We could also plant part of our acreage with reed canary grass and use the county's peletizer to make pellets for a stove that could be installed in the basement and in the barn.

Small Cabin: We also have a tiny cabin (10x12 prefab building) located on our 13 acres which has no electricity or septic, but one person could live there and use a compost toilet, the wood-burning stove. There is a well on the property and we are researching a windmill (it's in a Zone 4 for wind) to pump the well. A shower could be rigged up there. Right now we have a little honda pump that uses very little gas to pump the water.

Alternative Energy: We have a truck that can run on ethanol, a 1999 Ford Ranger. We also own a Toyota Camry and a Chevrolet pickup. My husband owns real estate about 36 miles away but only has to travel there two or three times a week and could condense it to just once a week if necessary and leave the truck there and use a small vehicle or motorcyle for commuting.
We have also researched solar panels, solar hot water and geothermal, all of which are possibilities but not yet economically feasible. But $100 per gallon would make it so.

Homeschool: We have been homeschooling our kids for the past 8 years (the oldest graduated high school at 16 and has been attending NYU as a part-time student). We own a condo in Hoboken which is within walking distance to mass tranportation to NYC. He lives most of the time and is able to take the train or bus home. Once a week, we make a trip to town (6 miles away) for music lessons, recycling, grocery store, library, and pharmacy. We are a family that is not into any organized sports; just skiing which will probably be short-lived.

Shopping: Once a month I make a trip to BJ's (25 miles away) for purchase of bulk items and could do that just once every three months. We have tons of room for storage and have built a root cellar in our basement. We also have two freezers which I use to freeze the summer vegetables: tomatoes, pesto, herbs, corn, green beans, squash, pumpkins, etc. I also can a year's worth of jam, relish, pickles, green beans, brushetta, etc. I also dry peppers, herbs, tomatoes, blueberries, zucchini, etc. and grow enough dried beans (pinto, black, kidney and adzuki) to last through the winter.

Debt: We have always been conservative, but since
learning about peak oil three years ago and ramped our effort to pay off all debt. We only owe a very little on the farm that we purchased last September and hope that have that balance reduced in half after this season's harvest. We pay cash for everything we can, pay off our credit card monthly, pay our for our son's classes as he goes along. This allows him the flexibility to choose a wide variety of courses available in New York City. He is not pursuing a "degree" per se which will probably be useless anyway, but already at 18 has a Certificate in Directing from NYU. (I think the field of entertainment will probably continue to do well in difficult times if the past depression is any indication).

Health Care: Since we pay for our coverage out-of-pocket, we only carry catastrophic insurance and must pay the first $10K out of pocket before any coverage kicks in. Thus, we have learned to become very healthy through diet, exercise and the use of alternative medicine. We do pay monthly for supplements which we feel are beneficial. We rarely go to the doctor. And if we do, we just pay the fee at the time of the visit. Once my son fell out of a tree and broke both arms. The cost was $5K which we paid with a check. And I take the kids to the dentist every four months for a checkup and cleaning which will hopefully cut down on dental bills in the long run.

And even $100 per gallon is still pretty cheap when you consider it is the same amount of energy as working 500 hours in a field. It's 20 cents per hour. How much would you be willing to pay someone for 500 hours of hard work? That's what a gallon is really worth.

We are already getting by on less than 10 gallons of gas a month, but I would get an electric plug in hybrid vehicle ASAP!

We are fortunate here in the Pacific Northwest to have a massive hydroelectric dam system that is quickly being supplemented with wind farms. When the wind blows they cut back water flow through the dams storing water- in effect a battery storage of the wind power. Then, when the wind stops they have extra water to meet base and peak load grid power. Studies have shown capacity exists for a massive use of plug-in hybrid cars and light trucks to be recharged at night. These dams also provide electricity for pumping water to irrigation projects for growing our food. We just joined a CSA = "Community Supported Agriculturre" group where a local farmer is growing fresh vegetables and we now get a box of fresh produce each week for us city dwellers.

The deserts of Eastern Washington and Oregon have massive potential to add solar electricity. Instead of the current plans to build more coal fired base load plants, I support adding more nuclear power to the one existing nuclear plant safely operating on the 600 square mile Hanford nuclear reservation ( A WW II Manhattan project site), as an interim measure so we can continue to export electricity to California while meeting expanding needs here.

The city council of Portland Oregon has already committed to a 50 percent reduction in oil and natural gas use over 25 years with a detailed plans available at:

http://www.portlandonline.com/osd/index.cfm?c=42894

I don't see $100 a gallon gas as doomsday, but rather forcing us to return to our roots of the "can do" people who came by the wagon trains on the Oregon Trail and settled the Northwest. Combining their hard work ethic, with a new application of modern technology, I see a different new world beginning right now around us. Rising gas prices are the wakeup call that is needed to convince people this is for real!

According to the CIA fact book the global GDP at official rates is about $US 145 billion per day.

If we are consuming 87 million barrels oil per day that would put a maximum price in inflation adjusted dollars of less than $1660 per barrel (the point at which the price of oil purchased = global GDP)

In reality, I can't see how spending more than say 25% of total global GDP on oil could be sustained for any significant length of time (obviously just a wild ass guess, feel free to suggest a better number) i.e. what would the global flow of goods and services within such an economy look like?, so that would bring us to about $400 per barrel oil.

This would imply, other things being equal, a maximum inflation adjusted US gasoline price of something like $US 12 - 14 a gallon (i.e. a little more than 3 X the current price) unless I'm missing something. In fact now that biofuel has linked food and fuel prices, and food production, the food price increase this suggests probably leads to global social failure from famine at a significantly lower fuel price than this, but maybe that's making the thought experiment too realistic .

Robert: What I take from this is that the "oil system" will fail quite some time before the absolute price of fuel will be insurmountable for folks in your class, and that its hard to have a meaningful discussion about $100 per gallon.

As has already been noted, the current worldwide industrial society would utterly collapse long, long before any scenario featuring $100/gallon for gas. Indeed, that valuation would never be reached because no currently recognizable system of assigning commodity costs would remain. And, most assuredly, such costs would not be measured by the dollar, which would have long since bit the dust.

It would be a Mad Max situation with the unlucky survivors, in severely reduced numbers, fighting to the death over food and water resources. After a period of epidemic violence, when the unfit would gradually be culled, mankind would settle into groups of heavily fortified, extremely xenophobic village communities.

Forget the rosy dreams of electronic vehicles and high-tech bicycles. The transitory and ultimately resulting society would be far too unorganized and chaotic to create such things.

to put it simply, pre-industrial life style for the poor. the rich might be able to maintain a life style similar to a average middle class at the low end, and a plantation owner but with modern equipment on the high end.

the united states as we know it now will cease, though what it will look like is anyone's guess. it could of fractured by this point or it could of gone into a hard fascism state rather then the soft one we have now.

Your hypothetical scenario is a good exercise. Considering the extremes of a subject matter provides a window into the wide range of possibilities that could arise. More importantly it illustrates a point I've been trying in vein to make for quite some time. That there must be a threshold of price for energy, past which our collective economy is no longer viable.

I'm sure that threshold is lower than 100 dollars a gallon, but exactly what that number is we cam only speculate. Yet it makes for interesting conjecture.

I've noticed a lot of people tend to figure what they personally could afford and then that somehow becomes the threshold they speculate is the limit. And if that person is super wealthy the threshold of course is quite high. However, we need to be cognizant of the fact that the economy is a collective experience. All of its parts must work hand in hand, so most people are occupied in a manner that meets their needs, and we all get the goods and services we need. As soon as the economy drops too far for 10-20% of the population, then the whole system becomes endangered by higher crime, increasing federal and state expenses, and at some threshold the system breaks down.

Hi Robert, that should be Kill-A-Watt, not Kill-O-Watt. The Amazon.com page has it wrong. I have the device sitting here right in front of me. (Well, actually, it's somewhere buried behind my refrigerator doing what it does best. :-)

i live in the north east. about 35 miles north west of NYC.
back in october of 07 i installed a 3kwh PV grid tied system.
what a mistake! i should have spend the $25k on high priced hookers like the ex gov-ner of new york did.
for the month april 19th to may 19th i produced 60 bucks worth of electricity. i can run a 1200 watt clothes dryer and a washing machine and heat (on demand only)water for free. that's it, clean clothes for one person per month. oh...in january and february it cost me $450 each month to heat the house. while wearing a jacket mind you. and taping plastic sheets over windows. very cold spring '08, march & april. what saved me 50% of electric was installing a wood burning stove in my fireplace.
recommend, dont get grid tied. get largest wattage panels and batteries you can afford.
right now i am studying a switch over from grid tied to stand alone.
the state of new jersey has given utilities a 15% rate increase, which effectively eats up all my PV generation. this is just the beginning.
$100/gal gasoline would multiply your electric bill 25 times. imagine paying $11,250 a month in the winter. if course my panels would produce $1500. I AM RICH! HOO-HOO!
i agree with others that $100/gal gas means mad max. although i live by a few state parks, i expect them to be denuded from wood burning
in less than a decade.can you say peak wood?

Buy a few goats for the lawn, get some chickens for eggs and white meat, learn to play Bridge, and get a crank-powered radio to keep up on what's going on. The lawn is already fenced for the goats (the garden will have to be blocked off), the van would make a great chicken coop, and playing Bridge would help me get to know the neighbors. The radio's is optional; in the event, ignorance might just be bliss.

"I don't want to make any assumptions on what would be happening in the economy as a whole"

In other words, assume everything else is business-as-usual but my energy costs went up by 25x. Obviously, sell the car and just take a taxi. They cost less than $5/mile around here (I think). Another option is that--with limitations--bicycles can be taken on the local commuter train and on some of the buses.

On another note, when does the price of energy go so high that a person would just give up even trying to use it. If I had an efficient gasoline motor strapped to a bicycle and could get 200 MPG at the normal pedaling speed of 15 MPH it would cost me $7.50 per hour of effortless transportation. If I were still making my current salary, that would be an affordable option. If I were only making a few dollars an hour, even the most efficient motorized bicycle wouldn't be worth it.

As an abstract exercise, obviously the question as phrased assumes everything else remains as is while the gasoline variable goes to $100/gal (or whatever outrageously high price). An obviously absurd scenario.

So, given the strictest parameters, I would just switch to diesel :-)
But, all these things are connected. Assuming one would have a job to 'go to' in this scenario is very dubious. Assuming gasoline (or diesel) would be available at all is dubious.

Altogether, IMO, not an exercise I would spend much time on, given that the variables we are actually dealing with are changing daily and routinely confounding the most prescient among us.

Well, we are retired and the house and car are paid for, so, as long as the gov't pays Social Security, we could probably make one run per month to town (2 gallon round trip) for food and other necessaries. Now we make one trip a week, but it could be done.

We heat with wood and would still be able to operate the chainsaw. We have a garden and chickens to help with food, but not enough to feed us without the store.

If the electricity fails we have a solar oven for sunny days, wood stove for cold days.

If society breaks down entirely, I don't imagine we would survive, but we are in our seventies and have lived in the most prosperous era this country has or will ever have, so that's OK. I worry about the young, but perhaps they are better able to cope.

I enjoy all your posts, Robert, and the mind behind them, so take the following meander in that vein on a morning after too-little sleep...

$100 gas couldn't evolve gradually with all else remaining the same any more than a 747 fuselage could be expected to fly next year with no wings attached. In the real complex evolving world, things are crucially dependent on other things. However, as you say, this is just a thought experiment.

The only non-evolving way for gas in the USA to get to $100 I can think of would be (a) a relatively fast $95/gal gas tax (I'm for it), or (b) simple relatively abrupt scarcity from XYZ calamities causing fuel to be sold like moonshine outside what we think of as 'normal' distribution channels, on a black market. In the case of (a) it'd be interesting watching the secession wars and there's no way I'd be seen using gas even if I had any.

In the case of (b), use of gasoline for anything but urgent necessities would be very conspicuous; running a generator or a chain saw when there is silence otherwise is a rather clarion call for attention. That attention would be from many people who CAN'T afford $100 gas. The models for "use of hideously expensive gas on the black market" can be seen in Iraq and elsewhere: you use it only in "safe" places where people can't "get" you or take it from you, unless you're protected by the warlord. But there's no warlord in this thought experiment... though there likely soon would be. Indeed, that's who'd be selling the gas.

If gas were $100/gal, most people couldn't afford any. The average savings in the USA is vastly negative last time I looked, and with property values going inexorably down, most will be in debt. These debtors will also have a feeling of entitlement - why would they lose it? - we haven't posited universal love and understanding for this thought experiment. Thus, I think one would either need to travel by car fairly well-armed (ie, the person riding shotgun actually HAVING a shotgun) OR be prepared to offer free rides to everyone you pass. The 'free rides' deal would not be "until all 5 seats are full", it'd be everyone you pass. I think a "trick or treat" social dynamic would rapily evolve whereby those walking would heave stones or shoot bullets at anyone driving, unless (a) you stop to pick them up or (b) there are already enough riders that if you throw a stone the 15 people already on the car would shoot back or get off and beat you up. Sort of the mad max version of a HOV lane.

I would also expect impromptu "tollgates" to be laid across most roads as you see emergent in most places with scarce resources, such as Somalia, etc. Local militias, warlords, and anyone who can get away with it (including corrupt government officials with a veneer of authority) will put chokepoints across roads and demand something to get by them. They will have good positions to shoot from and your being armed will not even that out. If they hope to be sustainable (ha) maybe they'll just take half of whatever you have in each direction.

This dynamic being what it is, one would presumably not wish to drive a lot, because a lot of people will be pissed that you can even if they don't need to GO anywhere. ( I once read that one of the major expenses of the goodyear blimp each year is patching all the bullet holes from flying over the US. Large numbers of people shoot it NOW, presumably after running some sort of shoot/no shoot/consequences heuristic in their inbred minds.)

On a related note, other than Mormons, few USA residents store food, fuel, or anything useful, but something like half have guns and ammo. Thus, starting up your chainsaw will cause a number of pissed-off people with guns to spontaneously ask themselves "some creep has a chainsaw! do I want a chainsaw?" and "wonder what else the chainsaw creep has I might want?" and "ooo... he paid $100/gallon for that gas. He's rich and undeserving. Lock and load."

So I'm thinking that gasoline use in that case would be for armed emergency medical runs - most people will continue to honor a siren, and it would also be a signal that the occupants are on a life and death trip and are more likely to shoot you if you impede their progress - or for well-armed trips to get supplies, where well-armed means automatic rifles visible. Other than that, I wouldn't use any.

Solar panels and storage batteries will be useful, but if you aren't in a walled compound you'd need to exercise some stealth to keep anyone from knowing you have them. And again, it's highly unlikely that solar panels would get CHEAPER in such a world due to receding horizons effects. All else remaining the same, the increased demand would make them commensurately more expensive. They may now be as cheap as they ever will be, even if new designs are developed, since the demand will presumably far outpace supply.

At $100/gallon, I think molotov cocktails would be one of the primary uses, so YMMV when firing up the SUV.

So I'd probably sit at home, wait for the secession/succession wars and warlord skirmishes to pass, and keep a very low profile. Because when gas is $100 in the USA, using it will in most cases be a bad idea.

My guess is that life would be like living in a country 25x less wealthy than our own.

Well first of all Robert this is a silly exercise because gas will never go over 8$ of gallon in the US, why, because we have corn.

I don't think you guys at the oil drum but check out these new industry numbers, the efficiency's are amazing...

Ridiculous Ethanol Mill Efficiency's

This is going to make things A LOT easier on all of us.

If ya need to I'll go over the numbers..

take a 1 reindeer hoof 18,000 btu's
take 4 lbs pixy dust 32,000 btu's
get a nose hair from Cher 7,800 btu's

now the average US corn harvest is approximately 755 bushels per square foot, and you can get a yield of 6 barrels per bushel of high quality super ethanol. (energy density is 4 times that of weapons grade uranium)

So you add all your inputs 18,000 + 32,000 + 7,800 and do a Eroi calculation

I'm going to estimate since rounding is real hard,

anyway that's around 9000:1 EROI input, the USDA studies are flawed and oil companies are big a mean and scary and are out to get ya

lol, ummm actually, On a more serious note

I wouldn't work anywhere where I couldn't bike or walk to work. I might actually invest in a sailboat instead of a house, and work on the coast, the wind is cheaper than gas I'm assuming. Also I would try to buy a lot of coastal land to grow some food near my boat, maybe coastal land prices will go down considerable with sea level rises and an economic severe recession. I wouldn't need to much else I guess, I would try to completely eliminate energy cost from my life, although that's easier for me since I'm a young single guy.. If I still lived in Oklahoma, I'd try to get a cheaper flat close to work and get a motorcycle or a bike for transportation, I might get another part time job that is related to food just for the connections and maybe discounts. I would definitely cut back on hardly any heating in the winter, just wear more clothes inside, and I would try to keep the air conditioner on as little as I could stand, I honestly don't like heat so much, so maybe a move northward is in order. I would pursue less energy intensive entertainment, for instance I would go fishing, rock climbing or urban climbing over going to the movies. I actually learned a bit from a guy who supposedly lived in Argentina during the Argentine hyper-inflationary crash back in 1999. A lot of things are useful from this and a few things are counter-intuitive. I would get some good LED head lamps, rechargeable batteries and a crank charger for power outages, also I would make sure I had my computer and dvd player and lots of movies ect. Many people in Argentina relied on video games and movies for entertainment because crime rates had climbed exponentially, police were corrupt and often searching for bribes, and it wasn't to safe to be going out places. I'm not sure if it's legit or not, It seems like it, but you should read it , it's really eye-opening and includes so many things you wouldn't think about. The whole goal for my later life, I wouldn't have any children unless I was happy with the state of the world, but maybe a wife and a dog, would be getting a decent plot of good land where I could garden and raise horses and do metal-working (plenty of excess metal's floating around I bet). I encourage you to read it Robert, when you have some time.

http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/portal/index.php?option=com_content&task=v...

At $100 a gallon the drop off in automobile/truck use will be so great and our highways and streets so little used that we can justify mining those millions of miles of roadway for their oil. Asphalt has gotta have better payback than oil sands and shale and has the benefit of returning millions of square mileage to agriculture use and wild spaces. I don't know if I'm serious or not.

Hot water seems pretty optional. I can see living without it. A lot of people might turn off their hot water heaters. The biggest problem that poses is with body cleaning. How about boiling some water to use with a sponge bath?

Also, use clothes lines rather than clothes dryers.

Getting to know people on-site: Sure, you can do that now. But what happens with people who take jobs after the huge price increase? A lot of the banked up face-to-face time is like a depleting asset. People leave jobs. New people come in. How to get to know them?

I see this a lot in big corps with their musical chairs of moving managers around every few years. How can the new guy visit the regional offices and research facilities?

Last weekend we consumed the first car fuel this year, 35 litres of Diesel in a rented car. I will probably rent a car again, one or two times this year. I ride 5,000 - 6,000 km a year on my bicycle, and so does my wife. We don't own a car.

But that doesn't mean much; we (a family of 2 adults, 4 kids) are an exception in Germany. If gas was selling for $100 we would have had to pay 600 Euros only for gas the last weekend - no way.
My parents in law simply would have had to celebrate without us - or choose a less remote place.

I wouldn't care much about gas at $100. Life would be a little more uncomfortable, yes. Put that way - we are living a life today that may be the life of many in the future. (Not a bad life, though. But, of course everything would become way more expensive at $100/gallon. So everyone would be affected, whether he drives or not.)

I love thought games! They are really useful. Thanks for posting this, RR.

Starting point:

- $100 a gallon gasoline (prices increase to $100 over next 5 years)
- other fossil fuel sources (coal, gas, etc.) follow suit
- alternative (non-fossil fuel) energy sources would follow this trend

Assuming no collapse and a semi-functioning society...

1. I'd drive nowhere, not even via mass transit (incl. rail). I just couldn't afford any of those, unless they were extremely heavily subsidized. I'd walk/bike where I could and just not go to other places.

2. Obviously, no flying for me.

3. I'd buy local 2nd hand, because I couldn't afford the imported stuff at those logistics prices, unless boats went back to sails (which would still raise the prices substantially)

4. I'd use about 1/5th or less of the electricity I use now, because due to primary fuel price/shortages and surging compensative electricity use, the price of electricity would be too high. Sure, I've tried hedging against electricity price hikes by buying alternative electricity bill with a guaranteed fixed price, but each such contract is only good for two years after which I could not get a decent price anymore.

5. I'd buy seasonal local produce, eat even less, and be near 100% vegetarian in my diet with some added local fish thrown in occasionally. Absolutely no beef/pork. Couldn't afford it at those price levels (remember, all primary fuels have increased remarkably).

6. All in all, I'd share a lot, re-use and recycle everything, throw away very little, barter with whatever I didn't need and would probably be still employed in the energy sector thinking furiously of opportunities and any new added risks.

Other than that, it's really hard to imagine.

I'm sure that if things ever turn out near $100 USD gasoline, my above thinking would probably turn out to be completely wrong :D

"What If Gas Cost $100 a Gallon?"

So oil would be $3,000+/bbl in today's dollars?

In that case it would stay in the ground.

Robert,

In 2005 I became aware that peak oil was for all intents and purposes imminent. So I began to move to higher energy efficiency. I chose to go for efficiency gains in descending order of magnitude in order to be as best prepared as possible should events move faster than I anticipated.

First was to give up my 13mpg off road pickup and buy a hybrid. I bought the Insight as soon as I found out Honda was discontinuing them.

Your thought experiment is similar to one I was doing just yesterday. I compared the cost of fuel/commuting for my old truck to the cost of the Insight and realized that gas would have to be $10 per gallon in order for me to be paying the same as I would be with the truck. Frankly I could still commute to work in the Insight at $100 per gallon (I burn .2 gallons each way). But I doubt that I would drive anyway..I would probably ride my bicycle, it's only 13 miles anyway.

Shopping I can already accomplish with my bicycle cargo trailer. I use it already on weekends for the 1 mile trip to the supermarket, and sometimes to the hardware store too.

I have already installed the solar water heater. I suggest you go for it. What I did was installed one that stores the water in the heating tubes (40 gallons). The solar heater is in series with my gas water heater (also 40 gallons). On sunny days the gas water heater does not fire up. I always have the gas back-up in case of large demand or cloudy weather.

I have installed solar forced air heating as a boost to my gas space heating. Two panels on my roof contain a solar powered fans that come on when the sun shines. I live in Los Angeles, so a great deal of heat is not really needed. The two panels keep my small (thoroughly insulated, double pane windowed) house warm enough to cut my gas heating in half.

This summer I get my grid-tie PV system (3kw). Contracts signed, just awaiting plan check.

Finally, I have a solar oven. It's a sunny day in Los Angeles so I'm using it right now to cook a small chicken with rice, onions and mushrooms (sage and cilantro seasoning...yum!).

cheers
grillzilla

Hm. The greatest worry would be food prices. I live in a rented apartment and I would not be able to produce but a minuscule proportion of what I consume. Arable land prices near densely populated areas would skyrocket, so renting a patch of land wouldn't be a cheap solution either. I would probably have to move into a smaller apartment or sublet a room, since heating costs would translate into a huge rise in rent. (We have district heating, but the heat is mostly fossil fuel generated.)

I would have gotten rid of my car way before fuel prices got to those levels (I'm considering letting go of it already). I live within a walking distance from my workplace (and I am pretty sure I could keep my work even at those extreme conditions). I own a summer cabin by the sea and a small motorboat; I would probably mothball the outboard motor and row the boat. Hm, I might be able to produce some food in the land surrounding my summer house; irrigation would be the greatest issue.

I would be way more active in gathering mushrooms and other wild-growing foodstuffs, but then, I think, so would everyone else. (In Finland we have a curious legal concept of "everyman's rights" which includes the right to gather wild berries and mushrooms everywhere outside populated areas, regardless of who owns the land.) The fishery situation is alarming already at the moment, but some less highly appreciated, but still edible fishes, such as roach, are still numerous, and probably will be.

Relatively, I think I would be rather well off. I live in a small city surrounded by farmland, my risk of losing my employment is very close to zero, I am in good health, and I am fairly resourceful, although not to the extent some of the TOD readers are.

People seem to forget how wind rich this country is. In western NC we've estimated we could supply up to 30% of local electricity needs with a couple of dozen turbines on mountain tops. If you expand to large coastal and and mountain top construction of wind farms, and assuming a continued development of the technology, wind could meet as much of 30% of the NC's energy needs.

Now if we were to go full industrial scale we could almost become a net exporter of energy.

Every coastal, mountain, or plains state has similar resources to one degree or another. And the desert states have massive solar potential. Not to mention half a dozen other alternative energy sources including tidal and nuclear which have massive potential.

Why would $100 a gallon gas be a problem, provided it didn't arrive overnight?

We may see $100 a gallon gas in the next 20 years, but if we have time to adapt and can see it coming then there is no reason for a mad max scenario. Gas would simply become a hyper expensive commodity for the wealthy to play with in their antique cars. Everything would go electric in one fashion or another. Towns would consolidate, trains would come back into vogue, and the suburbs would disappear.

But, providing if a development of fast charging electric vehicles and reliable and efficient renewable power generation and distribution takes place we may see very little overall shift.

No doubt I would have to fall upon the ceteris paribus assumption of the $100 a gallon, because if not everything would be barking mad and suicidal. Well, O.K. Maybe not, but still, that assumption keeps things nice and clean. I think that was RR's aim, anyways.

I am a student in Dallas and currently live on-campus. I own a vehicle (40mpg japanese) and drive it maybe twice a week to get groceries and work my financial errands (all in a probably 5 mile radius). As far as my driving habits, I would easily bike mostly anywhere (given the adaptations for hauling around more stuffs in the bike). The university has a bus route that connects to the DART system, but given the high price I don't know how affordable that would be. Supposing the DART isn't too expensive in itself, one can bike/rail all the way downtown without great difficulty. Alas, the problem starts where the DART ends. Another problem would be rent, though. Maintenance and A/C costs would be exuberantly expensive, forcing me to room with perhaps, say another 7 blokes in a nearby apartment to cope with rising costs. Other than that and extreme camaraderie, I wouldn't foresee that many changes in my lifestyle. Then again, low/no income students aren't very greedy energy consumers.
cheers
mx

Upon reflection:

Move to an apartment across the street from my employer.

But first choose a job in a port city or a river city near a rail line.

Those first two steps are aimed at reducing my need for transportation fuel to move myself and also to move goods to where I can buy them. That's got to be the first priority. Live somewhere that requires minimal energy to power my life.

Another thought: Live somewhere that has less extreme weather in order to reduce heating and cooling costs.

I've followed this site for about 2 years now, but this is my first post.

Anyway, it's impossible to hold $100/gal gas in isolation. At that price diesel is, by your rules, probably around $110, meaning its around $15 a pound. I've done this sort of thought experiment before, and came up with the rule that plant oils (soybean, palm, canola, whatever) must also be at least $15 a pound, since besides being easily converted to a fuel it can be used as food, cosmetics (though this demand will likely fall), and many other things. Its some law of economics that if a commodity has multiple uses, it'll be valued higher than if it has a single use. Think of it another way, at $110 per gallon of diesel, if you can convert soybean oil to diesel profitably, you'll go all out till you push up the price to parity (cost of producing biodiesel = cost of diesel), and people at this point would probably value food over oil. At $15 a lb of plant oil, a bushel of soybeans has a value of no less than $300, minus crushing costs.

Likewise, ethanol on an energy content basis would be around $60, meaning a bushel of corn is at least worth around $180 minus refining costs (which will be significant, but historically farmers look for the price of corn to be about 2/5 that of soybeans), compared to $5-6 now. A single pound of beef would need $42 (or $28 at 2/5 the price of the above soybean figure) in corn alone to be grown to market size.

At $180 a bushel of corn, or $300 a bushel of soybeans, do you think that the acreage, and therefore supply, of wheat, rice, or other staple crops that don't convert as easily into fuel will be maintained? Bottom line, food prices skyrocket.

Anyway, that's Eric's Theory of Peak Oil-Induced Starvation, that rising oil prices will increase food costs and reduce supply due to conversion, regardless of subsidy schemes. (I've seen this issue danced around a lot, but never explicitly laid out, and often saying the food price problem would be fixed with removal of subsidies, so I took the liberty of naming it.) We won't need Western subsidies of biofuels to starve the world. Peak oil will eventually provide plenty of economic incentives on its own.

I'm interested in thoughts, critiques, and comments on this too.

Let's first compare how gas was used when it was $0.90/gallon in US and as it now is $9.0/gallon in Europe.

US $0.90/gallon: huge trucks are being used by most of the people to commute over long distances, one car per family member.

Europe $9.0/gallon: most of the people use public transportation and those who don't, they drive short distances to work on efficient cars and plan their driving carefully. Families live very close to places where most family members work or go to school.

Portion of income a family uses for gas is still fairly small in both cases. And there was some inflation happening between those price points. So what I think will happen when it hits $100/gallon:

$100/gallon: accounting for inflation, this would be closer to $70/gallon in 2008 money. Totally just a guess. If that future family would allow gas to take 15% of income instead of 5%, it means they can still afford almost 1/3 of their gas usage. That is very little, as we started from current European gas (or more generically, energy) usage. But maybe that is within the limits of our imagination.

I just visited US. What a shock it was to see all those cars flowing on freeways. I did not remember it was that bad. There is definitely a lot to improve there.

Well, assuming there is a meaningful formal economy, both my husband and I could work entirely from home, assuming we could afford enough electric for the laptop and could keep an internet connection. For my husband this would probably involve making less money, but his university already has a large number of commuter students and online courses, and one of his projects is adapting his larger courses to web-only projects. So assuming that there's a state budget and state universities, he'd probably still have a job. Assuming anyone has any disposable income to spend on books, teaching people how to grow food and live a low energy life might be a growth industry ;-). With farming, I think the odds are we'd be better placed than most people - we hope.

But if neither of those is true, we'd probably make our income from the farm. Much of it is hilly, and well suited to seasonal meat and milk production, but we've already run a CSA, and are familiar with the work involved. Given that most of our family and friends are much more economically vulnerable than we are, we'd expect to fill every bedroom in our six bedroom (old farmhouse) home pretty quickly, and be able to expand the CSA with existing labor.

So assuming could still buy enough gas to make staple runs to Albany once every few months, I don't honestly see a huge problem for us personally - although there'd be a lot of suffering for people we care about, a lot of it psychic.

We can heat entirely with wood, and have enough land to take wood off of sustainably. Cooling isn't a problem. Our region is rural, with lots and lots of underused land - and about half the population is likely to leave as gas prices rise, so housing costs probably won't be high. I suspect almost all local services will crap out at that level - between the decline in the property tax base and the fact that most of the town costs cover plowing, road maintenence, and school transport and heating. So I would expect the regional rural schools to close.

This is the one real and serious hardship for us - my oldest son is autistic and gets a lot of very valuable services from his school. But with more family in the house and with the ability to trade resources, I suspect we could trade housing and food for someone with special education skills to help us. And that opens up another potential source of income for us - since both of us have been teachers for years, we could operate a school out of our home. There are lots of homeschoolers out here too, so it wouldn't take much to get the neighborhood educational apparatus up and running.

We have a manual pump for our well - the only one in our neighborhood. This would be a problem - most of my neighbors would only have water if they could afford the electricity for it, and our well won't support everyone in the area. But we could get rainwater collection set up - there are a bunch of old cisterns around, and I think this issue can be finessed in our high-rain environment. We don't usually need to irrigate at all here.

We have bicycles for ourselves and our kids that would easily permit us to visit nearby towns, but longer distances would require a major investment. I suspect our incentives to do so would be much, much lower, however. We could probably put enough of our homegrown into bicycle trailers and bike them the 20 miles or so to a population center, although I would not enjoy it until I got in better shape. It won't kill me though, and I suspect more likely we'd be able to afford to fill the trunk of our Taurus once in a while.

Food wouldn't be a problem - we already grow an awful lot of what we eat, and I suspect our trading position would be better than average. We'd grow more staples, but we already grow quite a lot of potatoes and some small grains.

By the end of the year we'll have our own and be able to sell lamb, goat, milk (not until the regs settle down, but I'm assuming that's probably true at $100 barrel), maple sugar, vegetables, fruit, eggs, chicken and turkey. The varieties of animals we have emphasize small ones, so we'll probably also sell breeding stock to suburban and urbanites wanting to raise their own - meat rabbits, dwarf goats, etc... Although for that purpose, I do hope we can afford some gas, since I don't much fancy biking with goats in the trailer ;-).

For goods, I think long before $100 a gallon, many people will have sold off their valuables, and there probably won't be many used goods around. We'll have to rely on stockpiles and what we can make, and hope that our food trades well in areas with more to sell off.

I think there's a fair chance we won't have any electricity, but we won't die from it. We've got a few solar powered lanterns, battery chargers and the like, and can make candles if we have to. We've got lots of warm blankets and sweaters, and I can make things likely to wear out quickly, like socks - and we've got the sheepy raw materials.

Security/Community - my neighborhood is quite cohesive, and has a lot of both know-how and people who will do what is necessary to feed their families. There are enough of us to have a patrolling system if needed for security, and most of us are armed, if it comes to that. The transition, if it happened quickly, would be tough on food reserves (although several of us store), but if there's any time at all to ramp up gardens, all the houses have way more land than most people can garden. We'll see people taking in family and probably strangers, in order to get enough hands to help work the land.

The thing is, it really wouldn't be that big a deal for us - the consequences would be much greater for the larger society.

Sharon

I see a lot of people saying they would go to the store less often. Well, why go to the store at all? Why not order from the store (e.g. via a web site) and have a single vehicle from the store pass thru your neighborhood once or twice a month doing drop-offs?

Unless you get sick and need a drug from the drug store that you do not ordinarily take why the need for personal trips on short notice to go to stores?

Seems to me people could live within a mile of their employer. Then either walk to the store, take a bicycle, or get deliveries. There's little absolute need for personal gasoline-powered transportation.

Is some one of The Oil Drummers undertaking to capture and categorize all the suggestions here on this topic. I realize that there's a fair amount of chin music, but attempting to harvest the ideas out of all the postings might produce a good list.
Perhaps you could develop a format for listing an idea and then let the posters put their idea in that format so it can be entered into a database and possibly analyzed and re-discussed by all the brainy types who post at TOD.

Great question, Robert! In my case, the answer is, probably not much different. Given my circumstances in life, plus my ecological beliefs, I've decided that Peak Oil for Hans Noeldner has already occurred and the faster I get down the downslope, the better. Below is a snippet from a letter to the editor of the Madison Capital Times which was printed recently. For those of us who believe in the necessity of (as Kunstler would say) "Other Arrangements", the imperative is clear: To establish a public conversation of REAL citizenship.

-------------------
Excerpt from letter
-------------------

Citizens will not see gasoline as cheap no matter what the pump register “says”. Why? Because we will see the costs written in blood on gasoline pump handles, the costs written on the sky with global warming, the costs written on the landscape with Earth-suffocating pavement, and the costs written on humanity with isolation and obesity and the destruction of healthy, purposeful self-locomotion. Citizens will not need dollars and cents to communicate these “externalities” to us.

Citizens will avoid touching gasoline pump handles as much as possible – it is one thing we can do personally. We will also point out the costs in blood and greenhouse gasses and suchlike to our families and friends, neighbors and business associates, co-workers and fellow congregants. True, right now most people are reluctant to acknowledge direct connections to their own behaviors. They say that the "little bit" they use here and there doesn't matter. They say that if they burn less oil, someone else will just burn more. And they insist on “rights” to consume and emit as much as they can personally afford.
Citizens will keep on standing for connections and responsibilities. And the people will join us.

Let's not forget that 70% of our economy is based upon consumer goods. Way before gas costs $100/gallon this part of the economy would collapse, and the corresponding poverty, starvation, crime and other nastiness associated with massive unemployment would rise exponentially in this country. This along with other factors means that we cannot conceive of a normally functioning world when fuel costs are that high since the world would be turned upside down.

If gas was even $20/gallon, I wonder what a gallon of milk would cost? ...$20?

Let's see, if gas were $100 a gallon, then oil would be $3,000+ a barrel.

But these aren't isolated or independent from the rest of the system, so what I might or might not do would depend on how other portions of the world would react to:
* massive layoffs
* massive bankruptcies
* massive product shortages
* governmental defaults
* trucking company failures
* food riots from empty shelves
* looting
* breakdown of law and order
* breakouts of disease, parasites, and disease vectors

Oh great, some of you say, just another doomer post. Well, when we're talking about gas becoming radically expensive, what we are really talking about energy becoming radically hard to get for every single person, organization, business, and government everywhere, at the same time.

So what would I most likely do if gas were $100 a gallon?

Hide.

These things don't happen in a vacuum.

Great thread robert!

At $100 a gal provided i still had a job, i would attempt to get either the train or tram, or ride a bicycle. I would imagine trains/trams to be so outrageously packed that may be easier said than done. I would have to ditch my car completely at that price but would consider a small engine motorcycle or scooter if i was still earning enough to justify the cost of fuel.

Heating i can live without, thanks to the magic of thermal underwear. (Although as they are woven from plastics made from oil new pairs would be completely unnafordable so id have to take good care of existing pairs). Aircon i can also live without provided its not 50C then i might have to build an underground bunker!

I can envisage food costs to be astronomical at those prices of oil so id do my best to grow as many vegies and herbs as my small suburban backyard will allow, or even attempting to grow plants on my roof.

If all else failed, if i lost my job or food was too expensive etc. im lucky enough to have many relatives with farms and I would probably go and live a subsistence lifestyle with them. It would be interesting to see how they faired with such extremely high prices of oil as they live in extremely different regions, i have 3 examples.

Most my family live in the grain belt of Australia which the land in a good year can provide many thousands of tons of cereals currently, but at $100 gal. the crop yield would very much depend on whether it could earn more than the huge fertilizer/ fuel bills for the large machinery which might still be possible if homegrown biofuels are used. In a drought year you can survive personally but no food would be provided for sale to the masses.

Other relatives live in the very green area of Tasmania, which can very dependably grow many different crops every year.(currently growing legal opiates/morphine poppies for drug companies but thats another story) However this is the kind of very productive land people leaving the cities will flock to and unfortunately there may not be enough to go round for most people to have their small patch for subsistence farming.

And last of all my 2nd cousin who owns and runs a cattle station of few million (yes million) acres in outback Australia. People will one day look back at the absurdity of his operation and wonder how it was ever possible let alone with $100 gal oil. They honestly let the cattle loose over an area so large i cant even imagine and muster the cattle with small single seat helicopters because, "its easier that way" once they roughly attain the % of cattle sought after they call it quits and leave the rest till the next muster. They often have to truck in water as well as every single other commodity hundreds of kilometers to the station. At oil prices that high outback australia will certainly be abandoned.

I think how commercial farming regions cope with oil prices that high will be paramount to the extent of lifestyle changes that I personally will have to make. They could be small and manageble to a complete shift in lifestyle, and nobody can say for certain how it will all turn out. (and if you can id like to know this weeks lotto numbers please :)

If diesel is $100 per gallon, it would be better for the farmers to burn wheat instead of using diesel

Proof:

Part A.
Calculation of wheat price at $100 per gallon diesel:

a) http://www.extension.iastate.edu/AgDM/articles/duffy/DuffyMar00.htm (2000)
b) www.bae.uky.edu/Ext/Grain_Storage/Calculators/Control_Seed_Costs_to_Mana... (seed costs)
c) http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/financial/farm2005/cac40s02.html (fertilizer costs 2005)
d) www.extension.umn.edu/newsletters/ageconomist/components/ag237-693b.html
Minnesota is the number three wheat producing state in the U.S. In 1995, 2.25 million acres were planted, resulting in a crop worth $331 million. Farm-level fuel use averaged 7.2 gallons of diesel per acre, 0.9 gallon of gasoline, 0.8 gallon of LP gas, and 30 kWh of electricity.

I'll seperate out figures:

Current Costs:

Machinery: 60.00 @ 2000 prices. From (a), subtracting out fuel costs
Fuel: 9 @ $1/gallon. (d)
Seed: 12.00 @ 2005 Prices. (b)
Fertilizer: 33.41 @ 2005 prices (c)
Chemicals: 31.00 @ 2005 prices (c)
Labor: 22.09 @ 2000 prices (a)
Land: 120.00 @ 2000 prices. (a)

Total per acre: 286.4
At 40 bushels per acre (low estimate): 7.16 per bushel

$100/gallon Costs:

e) http://www.umass.edu/agcenter/census/Input-Price-Indeces.htm

Machinery: 60.00 x 1 = 60
Assuming abandoned cars/suvs keep price down
Fuel: 9 x 100 = 900.00 Direct input
Seed: 12 x 16 = 192 Using proportions (e)
Fertilizer: 33.41 x 13 = 434.33 Using proportions (e)
Chemicals: 31.00 x 13 = 403 Using proportions (e)
Labor: 22.09 x 1 = 22.09
Assuming Farming is the new dream job so labor costs don't change
Land: 120.00 x 1 = 120.00
Assuming Real estate crash so land remains the same price

Total cost per acre: 2131.09
At 40 bushels per acre (low estimate): 53.28 per bushel

Proportions:

Fuel prices paid by farmers rose by nearly 850 percent between 1970 and 2005.
During the same period, seed prices increased by 520 percent and fertilizer prices increased by 368 percent.

So if fuel goes up to 100/gallon then that's an increase of 2400 %
Let's say chemicals/seed goes up the same amount. 2400% in fuel would be about 1200% in chemicals/fertiliser cost. 2400% in fuel would be 1500% in seed costs

Energy:

http://www.ftexploring.com/energy/power_1.html
A typical gallon of diesel fuel stores about 130,000 Btu's (137150000) of chemical energy.
= 137150 Kj
A calorie is 4,186 Joules.
= 32764 Calories.

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/yf/foods/fn560w.htm
A bushel of wheat translates into 42 one-and-a-half pound loaves of bread

A loaf of bread has 220 calories per 100g. A loaf of bread is 675 grams. So a loaf of bread has 1485 calories.

42.5 x 1485 = 63112.5 Calories per bushel

In conclusion:

1 gallon of diesel costs about 2 bushels of wheat at $100 / gallon diesel.

1 gallon of diesel has 32764 calories
2 bushels of wheat have 126225 calories

Appendex I: Current figures

$4 per gallon of diesel vs $9 a bushel of wheat:

2.25 gallons of diesel to 1 bushel of wheat

73719 calories to 63112.5 calories.

Robert: You're posts on the oildrum have always been outstanding, but you have gone off the deep end.

I think you need to rework your thought experiment.

It is not a question of what a globe trotting chemist will do to cope, the real question needs to be how does this affect the people who deliver groceries to your local store cope. Walking to the grocery store is pointless if it is an empty shell long since abandoned.

At what price does it become unprofitable to even go to work?
Especially for the poor. Minimum wage in the United States is $5.85 per hour. When gas reaches $5.85/gallon what happens?

Once more, it is all about the economics, isn't it? It is almost impossible to create a scenario for myself individually without knowing what the situation will be in the larger society. How much per week will I be making at my job? Am I assumng that gasoline prices have gone up by a 1500 times while my pay remainded exactly the same? Am I to assume that gasoline has gone up that much and no one in the marketplace has attempted to create an alternative transportation or vehicle system. Did I have any capital in the bank to begin making changes as I saw this situation developing?

It is much easier to me to play the game this way: Complete shortage for the individual (me), that is, completely cut off from being able to buy gasoline or Diesel, propane. NO PRICE ISSUES, fossul fuel simply cannot be gotten. This by the way, is actually a more likely scenario than than $100 gasoline price and could be brought on by terrorist attack in the Middle East, the clsing of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, or a regional war in the Middle East involving the major oil producing regions and the collapse of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. ZERO EXPORTS. NO GAS AVAILABLE. But for the sake of this argument, let's assume I have a little time available, say the 4 year interval which would put us out to 2012, and then out, no liquid fossil fuel available. Then what would I do?

First, I have to choose: Will my job still be there are will there be other jobs available close to where I work now? If so, relocate. I can get an apartment across the street from where I work, or buy a home right across the block BUT...I have to know that jobs will be available in the area. I live next to a military base, so there will probably always be something available, but it may not be much.

On heating the home, we live in a coal state. Electric will probably be available. I have used air conditioning only about 5 days in the last two years, so that is not a problem, and I can run heating very, very little (I have used my electric oven as a heater while I am cooking as much as anything else in the last 2 winters. After that, it will be pretty much walk anywhere I go, or the prospect of a little electric car or scooter, for anything that is further than a couple of miles. The whole thing centers on transportation and liquid fuel. I have to work where I live or live near where I work, one or the other. That's about all I can do.

RC

Nobody thinks we are going to have to deal with gasoline at $100 a gallon.

Wrong! I do. Indeed, where else can it go? Where will it stabilize? What peaker can think it won't go to $100?

What would I do if gas was $100 per gallon?

1. I'm good as far as transport is concerned. Already, I barely drive my car ever. I think I fill the tank about once a month. I cycle to work and the local buses all run on biodiesel, so I can get to the store and carry a lot of groceries if I need to. Not that there would be anything on the shelves, but that is another matter I'll deal with later. Certainly, I'm not going to be planning any road trips. Simply out of the question.

2. What worries me are utility costs. So, let's do a quick guestimate: if gas is multiplied by a factor of 25, we should assume that natural gas and electricity are also going to increase by a factor of 25 in price. I currently spent roughly $100 per month on natural gas and electricity (this is an average over the year). So that would go up to $2500 per month. Basically my entire take home salary down the tubes. I need to scale back my home energy usage by a factor of 10. The way we tackle the problem is from the biggest culprit and work our way down.

2.a Space Conditioning: First, I already don't use an air conditioner. If you can't survive an ambient indoor night time temperature of 90F I don't have any sympathy for you. The vast majority of this planet's inhabitants manage just fine. So first point of order: just scrap the air conditioner, open the god-damned windows and use a box fan. Next is winter heating. A reasonable indoor temperature has to be maintained, otherwise the pipes freeze. Let's say 50F - 60F is bearable. It's darned cold, but bearable. I have a couple of trees I've been wanting to fell in my back yard. I'd buy an efficient wood stove with external air hookup and chop those trees down. They should give me enough wood for a few years. I'd chop the trees anyway because they would give me more space to grow vegetables (see "food" below). Savings: 95% - 100%.
2.b Water heating: Do without, or get by with very little. I'd say, turn off the water heater altogether in summer and set it to a luke-warm temperature in winter to make showering bearable. The washing machine has its own heater, and I would heat water on the stove for washing dishes. I could buy a passive solar water heating system, but I spent the money on the nice wood stove. So the solar option is out of the question. Savings: 80% - 90%
2.c Lighting: I already have CFLs installed, but there would have to be a strict policy about keeping unused lights off. Savings: 40% - 50%.
2.d Refrigerator: The other reason I don't want to buy the solar water heater is the refrigerator. Although the refrigerator is only the fourth-worst energy hog in the average house, this device may be all the difference between eating and not eating. My plan: Throw out my current refrigerator and buy a smaller dual compartment refrigerator and a large (efficient) chest freezer that would sit in the garage (the coldest part of the house). The majority of the refrigerator energy consumption comes from opening and closing the door. Solution: place a printed map of the fridge contents on the door of the fridge. All family members have to mentally rehearse what they need and where it is before they open the door. Savings: 50% - 80%.
2.e The rest: After that, we're playing a losing game with small percentages. I guess there will be less TV watched. (YES!!!) Less surfing the internet, posting silly comments on TOD (oops...). Earlier bed-time, rise with the sun (I like that). Winter cooking will be done on top of that wood stove. Summer will have a lot of cold dishes from the garden.

In summary, if I can kill the space conditioning and water heating problems, I think I can make that 90% cut. Life would not be super-comfortable, but I'm okay with that.

3. Food: My guess is at $100 per gallon gas, there is not going to be much food on the shelves, and if there is, it's going to be at least 10 times as expensive. I want to live, not starve, so here's the plan:

3.a I already have a 900 sq ft vegetable garden. I would remove the trees, and turn the rest of the lawn into a vegetable garden.
3.b I would encourage (and help with manual labor) all my neighbors to do the same (make their entire properties into vegetable gardens). There is strength in numbers and one person's surplus can balance out another's deficit.
3.c My house has a crawl space. I would brace the foundations and dig it deeper into a cellar. A root cellar is needed to store food in the winter.
3.d Find the local farmers (done some of this already) and make friends with them. Try and purchase things like grains directly from them.
3.e Buy a milling machine, a hand-cranked pasta maker, a canning machine and a few other odds and ends like that. Could mean the difference between going a little hungry and starving to death.
3.f Buy an air gun or something (reasonably non-lethal to humans) that I could use to kill rabbits and squirrels (and eat them too).

In summary, I think we could survive $100 gas and I could still hold down my job. (Assuming it was still there of course.) I think every spare minute of my day outside of work would be devoted in some way to my survival and that of my family, but it would be fun. Life would be very different from how it is now, that's for sure.

Very good thought experiment! I think you have probably hit most of the considerations right on.

I did a similar thought experiment 3 years ago. At that time I was burning 30-40,000 gallons of fuel a year (primarily heating oil for my apartments here in Fairbanks, Alaska). I was convinced as long ago as 1999 that the price of fuel would go to $10 a gallon by 2010 (still am), and so I urgently needed to get my fuel use down. I concluded coal would be the best interim fuel source (I expect it too will go sky high, just not as soon). So I have been pouring money (more than I can afford, really) into converting my buildings to burn coal. Since this runs $40,000+ per building, it has been a major undertaking. I've now got 4 buildings on coal and a 5th using waste vegetable oil. I'm converting 2 more this summer to coal, and selling the final two so I am hoping by the end of the year to be entirely off heating oil for heat.

My personal use of heating oil used to be 1,200 gallons a year to heat my home. The last time I filled the 500 gallon tank was 3 years ago, when my wife and I decided to use firewood as our primary heat. Last winter we only burned around 180 gallons of heating oil, or an 85% reduction in use. This was primarily as a convenience; if fuel was a lot higher we could have burned just wood or coal. (eg my wife was out of town for 3 weeks during cold weather so I used the majority of the fuel then.)

We do an enormous amount of driving to keep up with our far-flung rentals (55,000 miles last year!!!). 3 years ago we began attacking our high fuel use: we bought a diesel truck, which we make our own biodiesel for during the summer (still need to make that heated tank so the biodiesel won't jell when it cools off outside). We also bought a scooter that gets 100 mpg, so if fuel is ever $100 a gallon we can still drive around at $1 per mile. It'll hurt (a lot) but it would be economically feasible for us to drive our 55,000 miles a year. (I realize this sounds outrageously high, but 90% of this driving is related to the rental business; the only non-business trip involved a drive of 5,000 miles for vacation.)

My expectation is the limit of what people will be able to afford for fuel will be an average of $1 per mile (even with lots of car pooling, public transport, etc). So with our current vehicle fleet we will be looking at $20-$25 per gallon as a top price. Then as fuel economy rises, the price may rise beyond that, though I think alternatives may become cheap enough they will compete and even pull the price of fuel down.

Our first iteration on getting away from the high cost of fuel is almost done. We have nearly finished converting our buildings to coal or vegetable oil heat; for single-person driving we have the scooter, for family driving we have a hybrid (50 mpg if we are careful), and for hauling coal and firewood we have a biodiesel vehicle. I'm not sure what the next iteration will be; that will depend on what technology brings along. I'd really like to get an ultra-high mpg diesel vehicle and then grow our own biodiesel, but that is probably not very realistic.

As the crisis builds I expect very high mpg vehicles will become available (eg the Volkswagen 1-litre car--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_1-litre_car or the Aptera--http://www.aptera.com/) which get over 200 mpg. Using vegetable oil as a fuel source, such vehicles will need less than an acre to provide enough fuel for an entire year of driving for the typical 12,000 miles/year driver (eg using rape-seed oil--about 100 gallons per acre--you'd need about half an acre; oil palms at 2,000 gallons per acre are a lot more efficient, and algae oil the best yet at over 8,000 gallons per acre).

I think there are going to be several iterations of infrastructure change to deal with the energy crisis. For example I have moved from heating oil to coal in my rentals, and I expect as coal becomes more expensive other alternatives will become viable (geothermal? biofuel?) As long as the depletion rate is low enough there will be time to do these changes. If there isn't, we'll all be in trouble.

First, $100 a gallon is absurd. Supply and demand would kick in. No one would be able to pay that. However I think you mean this to be an absurd question. Think of $100 gasoline like a mathematician thinks of infinity. It's a really big number well outside of the range of numbers being considered.

What changes would I make? I simply wouldn't drive. But I have that luxury. I'm within 5 miles of everything I need, including where I work, and I already often ride my bicycle. We'd have to shut off the air conditioner and heater. Our winters wouldn't be bad, but Texas summers would be brutal.

However I might not even have to make these choices. Society would devolve into chaos long before we hit $100 gallon. Anyone found driving would have an armed, angry mob surrounding the car. Sure, people who can afford $2,000 visits to the gas station could afford armed guards, but even a car full of Navy SEALs would be no match for hungry, angry mob. I'm certain my company would shut down as would most others. Supermarkets wouldn't be able to stay open. They couldn't afford the diesel for their trucks and they too would have the armed mob problem. We would quite literally be partying like it was 1699.

What I would like is to hear how you would cope with $100 a gallon gasoline.

Depends.

Is the low-end job working at the co-op slinging hash $180 an hour? If so, my answer is raise prices.

If the wage is still $7.50 an hour - I'll be dodging bullets, moved out 'cuz my home will have been burned in the riots, or already dead because the rioting would be well underway. The lack of food will have many people upset.

I'd hope that my local Woolworths (Australian supermarket chain) had invested in a flywheel or battery-power delivery truck or two. I think that's a pretty safe bet. Instead of going to the shops, I'd do my grocery shopping through their website, which I sometimes do anyway when I'm busy. I'm not expecting any major problems for Woolworths to stock their shelves because (a) they'd have their short-distance delivery trucks, and their warehouse is in range, and (b) the national warehouse is on a train-line near a port. So no problems there. There are a lot of old people in the area who use the home-delivery service, which would probably evolve into being some teenagers ridding freight rickshaws around the suburbs.

I wouldn't drive my daughter to the station for her to get to school, she'd have to walk. But that's only 900 metres, and let's assume she's at least late primary school by the time this is an issue. So no problems there -- the train system is all-electric. My (just-past toddler) son would have to walk a similar distance to get to his school (it's near the station), but he's pretty strong so I think he'd manage.

There transport options to the church we go to aren't real good, since they're all bus-based. I think we'd change churches, or maybe as a church we might decide to splinter into a large bunch of small home groups. Perhaps we might iChat/Skype a church service to a bunch of disparate sites. We'd be only spread out over a couple of Unwired cells, so it could be done pretty cheaply.

Karen would catch the train to work as per usual. Maybe she'd move into insolvency rather than compliance, since there would be a lot more jobs in that. ;-)

I suppose I'd keep going with my existing clients. Most of them don't seem very oil-dependant, and I'm usually working remotely. The toll road owners in Melbourne might not be able to afford my services any more, or maybe tolls would become so expensive that my fees would become chump change. Obviously, I couldn't fly there, but there's an overnight train (leaves Strathfield at 8:51pm... at the moment I catch a plane at about 8:00pm and stay overnight when I need to go face-to-face), so that's no biggie. Motor insurance (another client) would be irrelevant, but other kinds of insurance would still go on. Dentistry would still happen regardless of the oil price; as would teaching, so those clients aren't going to go out of business.

I'd buy my sister an electric golf cart so that she can get to the station (same suburb as us, but further from the station). I wouldn't see my mother as often as we do now since the only public transport to her place is a bus, or an hour's walk from a station.

Power could be a small problem because so much of NSW's power comes from coal at the moment. We'll probably be putting solar panels up on the house anyway in the medium-term future because the roof needs replacing. I'll have to talk to the neighbours about whether they'd mind a wind-turbine.

So... what does $1000/barrel oil mean to me? A little bit more exercise for the children, a few extra nights on sleeper trains for me, a lateral career change for my wife. Funnily enough, the most significant direct impact would be on social activities -- visiting family and where I worship. Which would probably be the most jarring change -- the thing that would stand out as being "and this is how the world got worse after $1000/barrel oil... we don't get to spend time with the ZZZs any more or see their children grow up".

This seems hard for me to believe -- that I can't point to much in the way of day-to-day activities I do which are necessarily and directly oil-dependant. I know it's different for other people. What am I missing?

(P.S. If I'd had to have answered this question while I was in Silicon Valley... I honestly don't know how we would have coped if petrol had been $300-$400 per gallon. We barely coped with just one car. On the other hand, I can only remember taking one fossil-fuel powered journey in all the time I was in Zurich -- and that was only because my host insisted -- I was happy to take the train home after midnight.)

Thinking about the thought experiment, perhaps it could be re-phrased "at what price point will gas become unaffordable?"

Well, gasoline is a commodity that the majority pumpers must sell if they are to keep their populace 'happy'.

So producers are victims of the market.

The market is you and me. If the largest numbers of potential buyers - lets say the west (ignoring subsidised state producers) - can't afford your product, you are in deep trouble.

The price can only become infinitely high (exag) if the largest part of the pool of buyers has an infinitely high income.

In the west, the pool of 'very rich' is also 'very small'.

The middle income people have an upper bound on spending. The well known hierachy is food and warmth first.

So, depending on median incomes in a given western country, depending on the proportions of people renting vs mortgaged vs freehold, there is a variable bottom line 'drop off' point were there is insufficient residual income after food and warmth to pay for gasoline to get to work.

Of course, some bus/walk/cycle - and these proportions will increase. The relative proportions vary from country to country.

All the while, jobs are disappearing. As most western economies have a huge 'service' component,as discretionary spending shrinks, a large proportion of the job market shrinks. This feeds back on itself. Less work, less discretionary, more layoffs, less discretionary from a shrunken workforce etc.

In the face of this, the oil sellers must still sell oil. What will they do?

Counterintuitively, they will match price to 'demand'. As demand drops off, price drops off.

So, in the end, it is a race between geological shortage and job shortage.

Faced with this stressful situation, what will people do? This question is really what will most people in the west do? The obvious.

Economise. Localise. Worry. Panic. Feel angry. And in the end, organise.

There is no solution, but there are salves. Drugs, alcohol, and religion.

Lorenzo

Robert,

I've been lurking for about six months having had an epiphany via a search for "peak oil" on google and you tube. I find the whole peak oil thing overwhelming sometimes, when I think of my tiny island nation and the enormous challenges we face. Jamaica is a place most foreigners think of as some sort of paradise. A summary of the facts is available at http://www.jamaicans.com/childsguide/facts.shtml

Key points area: 4,411 square miles (Slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut), with a population 2.6 million, GDP per capita: US3,350, minimum wage: US170 per month. We are hugely dependent on fossil fuels, mainly petroleum and natural gas, to generate our electricity. I am not aware of any alternative fuels for transport apart from the golf carts (NG and electric) and a handful of Priuses. A pre-independence railway line between the capital city in the south and two port towns on the north coast has has been allowed to languish with the only remaining lines being,maintained by the bauxite mining companies to move caustic soda to the alumina plants and alumina back to the ports.

During the oil shocks of the 70s, we had a "democratic socialist" government that tried to protect the poor using the usual leftist methods of price controls and subsidies, the funding for the subsidies coming from the proceeds of a levy imposed on the North American aluminium companies who were mining bauxite at the time. One other export industry the sugar industry was nationalized with the result that 35 years later, Jamaica has what must be the most inefficient sugar industry in the world with a 30c per pound cost vs a world market price of 9c. Also nationalized was the local electric utility with the result that a lot of our plant is now decades past it's retirement date, ancient and inefficient. For a look at the official government energy policy see

http://www.cabinet.gov.jm/docs/pdf/The%20Jamaica%20Energy%20Policy%20Ana...

Ever since our experiment with socialism in the 70s we have had negative economic growth, broken by a few years in the 80s under a different, less leftist administration. One of our best performing sectors has been tourism which might be the only sector that has bucked the trend and is a major employer and hard currency earner. I cannot remember the country having had a budget surplus with the deficits being financed by loans including some from the World Bank and the IMF. The end result is that some 70% of the national budget goes to debt servicing. Sorry I cant continue this, it's getting too depressing. At $100 per gallon I think my best options would be to head for the hills, high in the mountains to my dads birthplace, or prepare to do a job on myself before the marauding bands of inner city ghetto dwellers do it for me!

On the other hand, if we had time and money, we could probably do tons of mitigation. We are blessed with a tropical island climate so no winter heating is necessary. We've got loads of under utilized land some of which has suffered from poor agronomic practices (industrial agriculture and peasant farmers). We could probably benefit from sugarcane ethanol, algal biodiesel, palm oil or jatropha. We've been growing sugar cane for centuries. We could probably make do with electric cars for most people and we use electric buses and make some investments in rail . We could use, solar thermal, photovoltaic, wind and wave power to fill most of our electricity needs. We could eat more of what we grow and grow more if we had to. I don't think we're going to be able to finance this. Does anybody here think we've got the time?

Alan (from the islands)

Paying business clients for corporate employers would dry up. Incomes would dry up. Banks would foreclose.
All domestic prep [rainbarrels/solar panels/hoarding] will have been for naught; become hobo.

Got camping gear? Got wilderness survival skills? Got defense against crime?

Dang. Got kids.

-----

Hmmm...Therefore would first need the whole neighborhood organized to help fight off the banks and the [other] criminals....

I'm sure someone has already mentioned it, but $100 a gallon is entirely realistic. When? I don't know. But the amount of energy in one gallon of gasoline is something like 28,000 Calories. Instead of paying $100 for a gallon of fuel, would it be cheaper to hire manual labor to do the same work? If it is farm work, no, if you paid people real living wages, then the fuel is cheaper. In fact, $100 per gallon for plowing the field would be a bargain.

With wages between $1-$10/day in much of East Africa, and travel at approx. $1 per hour or more, you get the following estimates:

for low African wage earners:
1 hr trip = 1 days' wages.

for average Western people:
1 hr trip = 60 km = $12 = 30 min. wages.

Thus poor Africans pay 16 times more for low-quality travel, which equates to about $80/gal fuel in the West.

So, how do these Africans travel, you may ask?
It is by minibus for most trips from 30 min. to 1-2 days. In a minibus there will be a maximum of 19 - 23 people. Often the minibus will not leave the main station until it is full, or nearly full. On short trips there is one driver and one fee collector. On longer trips, there is only the driver. The minibuses are often in poor shape. The seats are hard, and none of the comforts of buses in the West.
Travel can also be atop delivery trucks, or in dump trucks, or in Semi-trailer truck cabs. Hitch-hiking in normal, and about 20% of drivers will stop to pick people up -- for a fee. At times there will be 25-50 hitch hikers on the side of the road waiting for traffic to come down the road. All vehicles leaving the main cities are packed solid with bodies. If you are hitch hiking between the cities, tough luck. Nobody is going to pick you up. You can wait all day, in the shade of a tree.

ken.

"at $100/gallon people would be living in my garage."

A few weeks ago a sign went up on the main street in my neighborhood: "Double garage wanted to live in". I'd never seen a sign like that here in Melbourne (Australia) before. Unfortunately, I don't expect it will be the last one.

I am constantly being told that we can switch to other sources of energy, and my reply is that the time taken to replace fossil fuel electricity generation is far too great. Besides the time scale, there is another aspect that does not seem to have received much attention: how many barrels of oil needs to be used to build an average nuclear power station (say 1GW) and an average wind turbine (say 1 MW)? We may reach the stage where there is simply not enough fossil fuel available to build the infrastructure of alternative energy generation. Does anyone anybody have any figures?

Statement 1: Gasoline price can never exceed $32 per gallon. Here is why:

World's GDP: $48 trillion
Oil Share in World's GDP: 40% of World's GDP = $19.6 trillion
World's Oil Consumption: 31 billion barrels

GDP per barrel of oil consumed: $19,600/$31 = $632 (or roughly $640)

Therefore at $160/barrel oil itself would be 25% of what gdp it produce, a ROI of 1:4 at which point many structures break and many pillars of world's economy fell. At $320/barrel when ROI is 1:2 the economic system stop to function and we have to return to agriculture. Certainly no oil usage in economy after $320 when its left only for non-economic usages such as leisure, military etc.

Assuming the historic 100% profit rate of refineries in future and 42 gallons per barrel, gasoline prices are estimated as:

Price of Crude Oil per barrel Price of Gasoline per gallon

$20 $0.95
$40 $1.90
$80 $3.80
$160 $7.60
$320 $15.20
$640 $31.40

At 25% profit rate for refineries which I this is the lowest on which they can operate:

$20 $0.60
$40 $1.20
$80 $2.40
$160 $4.80
$320 $9.60
$640 $19.20

I'm that low-income person. $6/hour, 25hours a week. Theoretically I could walk/bike to work (3 miles, and about 1500ft of total elevation change). However, my job wouldn't exist. And my time would definitely not be worth spending there. 15-30 extended family members would end up relocating to the mother-in-law's farm. Only 40ish acres, but its really rural. Probably one house in town would become the boarding-house for people who retained town jobs.

I'd be spending my time engineering a windmill, a steam-engine, etc. Since I can't buy any of those things, I'll have to build my own low-efficiency version of them. Many other things are much easier, like solar hot water, rigging more cisterns to save load on the well, etc.

Long ways to a big city, so any crime should be of the local variety, which means small. Everyone has guns and there is a big proportion of veterans, so I expect the criminals wouldn't make it long.

Not seeing my own family (local is all inlaws) would be the big impact. 2500 miles is already in the "once every couple years" category. Hopefully the internet stays up enough for voice, if not theres always shortwave.

If the extended family wasn't there, my wife and I would be looking for one of you guys to be your basement boarders.

Interesting idea. Firstly I'd guess that gasoline won't ever get to $100 a gallon because long before then we'll have a big recession/depression and we will either fight a war and blow us all back to the olduvai gorge or else we will get a whole lot poorer till the kinks are worked out of the economy and we end up with an electric transport powered economy.
Looking at current prices of electricity and electric cars I note that equivalent electric vehicles built by boutique suppliers cost around $40-$50K for a vehicle that can go 100 miles and otherwise behave like a "normal" vehicle.
Likewise electricity produced from solar is 2-3 times the cost of electricty produced from fossil fuels.

Taking these two sets of prices as a base we can figure that if oil prices rise to somewhere around $300 a barrel then we are on par with the cost of "fuel" derived from solar to power your electric vehicles.

In an ideal world we will get a slow decline and a fast take up from the marketplace and we will simply switch over (not without a recession in the meantime however).

There are signs this is already happening.
In the UK for example, TNT bought 200 7.5 ton electric trucks with a 100 mile range. Sainsburys (a large supermarket) put in a similar sized order.

100 mile range is enough to support our current infrastructure.
So what if the 7.5 ton trucks can take only one third of the volumetric weight of an 18 wheel semi and so what if the truck has to take a break every 100 miles.
We can live with it.

If you are really asking what will happen if we get a sudden disconnect and shortage of fuel then that's not really a question I want to think about but I guess the answer is probably to look at cuba or pakistan.

Back to the original subject.

As I said on another thread a couple of days ago, If diesel was $100 a gallon...I'd top off my tank before it went to $105 next week! Then park it and chain a doberman to the car.

There's a certain satisfaction that comes from having $2000 in your tank for a rainy day! :-(

Robert:

After an overnight sleep on your $100 motor fuel question, I have some additional thoughts.

First, to get to $100 in five years implies an average rate of increase of 124 percent per year. That seems high; on the other hand, given how fast oil is moving up, I suppose it is not totally out of the realm of possibility.

This raises a question in my mind, though: Do we assume that motor fuels start to level off once they reach $100/gal, or is that just a milestone on a long uphill climb? It does make a difference. If people know that it is going to pause at around $100 for a while, they might make one set of adaptations, but if they have good reason to believe that it is going to continue increasing at that rapid rate, then some different adaptations might be in order.

The trouble is, prices of anything seldom move in such a straight line. Usually, there is more of a sawtooth pattern. The overall trend might be up by 124% per year, but we might see 200% one year and 50% the next. This makes the problem worse, because it is difficult to really get a good handle on what the actual long term trend is with just a few years of data.

Which leads to my next observation: The difficulty of adapting due to uncertain & rapid price increases. It is one thing to speculate on how one would adapt to $100 gas in five years, knowing or assuming that it will happen five years in advance. It is quite another to thing to adapt without such advance notice.

Given a hypothetical 124% annual rate of increase, what we have here is a little bit of a variant of the classic doubling problem. Most people cannot imagine what one grain or one penny on the first chessboard square, two on the 2nd, etc. will add up to by the 64th square. Similarly, people tend not to grasp that by the time the pond is half full of plants, they only have one day left before it is full. Thus, if gas is around $9/gal next year compared to around $4 now, few will really believe that it could be over $20 in 2010. Nor will people in 2010 believe that in 2011 they would have to pay as much as $45. Even after that track record, people in 2011 will find it inconceivable that by 2012 they will have to pay over $100/gal.

Then, too, there will be the problem of people thinking that each increase is only temporary, and that prices will soon drop back down. Because this is what they will be wishing for and wanting to believe, they will undoubtedly be encouraged in that belief through misinformation from politicians, governments, corporations, and the mass media.

Thus, it becomes very doubtful that people WILL make the adaptations in advance that they COULD have made. The likely outcome is that people will have to struggle a lot more to adapt than they would have needed to, IF they had anticipated the price increases in advance and taken timely action beforehand. (For example, relocate closer to work, replace cars with NEVs or electric bikes, etc.)

Thus, to adapt a quote from a certain notorious former SecDef, for the vast majority of people “when $100/gal motor fuel hits, you won’t cope with the gear you would like to have, you will cope with the gear you actually do have.”

Of course, TOD readers are not the average person. We have a much higher degree of awareness; most of us are already anticipating that energy will be getting more expensive and are doing something about it. Nevertheless, I submit that a really honest answer to your question would limit itself only to whatever things one has already done, or are already well in the planning stages for the next five years. “Maybe I’d like to have it if I can get around to it someday” doesn’t count.

One other thought: $100/gal is twenty-five times higher than the present price of around $4/gal. Hardly anyone is going to be able to afford to spend twenty-five times what they are spending now for motor fuel. However, most people very possibly could afford to spend somewhat more. Looking just at what they have to spend in motor fuel for their commutes: Could they afford to spend as much as five times what they do now, if the alternative is to lose their jobs? In many cases, I am guessing that they might. People would cut almost all the other driving out and walk or use bicycles for shopping and other local errands rather than lose their jobs.

Now consider this: Instead of five people each driving their own cars to work, they carpool, and each person covers one day’s fuel per week. Or, a person leaves for work Monday morning, stays overnight at someplace cheap close to work (maybe an RV or Airstream parked on the employer’s parking lot), and drives home Friday evening, thus cutting down from five trips per week to one.

Thus, by spending five times as much, and only paying for one-fifth of the trips they are now, it might be just possible for those suburbanites and exurbanites without access to mass transit to still make it in to work – assuming that motor fuel prices don’t continue rising far above $100/gal.

Thanks for the thought-provoking thought experiment. Since I live 2 miles from work (~1 mile if one follows a straight line), biking to work is very feasible, and it's what I will start doing next month. My wife and I have started talking about this; as a result, we will log every car trip for the next week or two, and see if we can consolidate them.

I agree about the unrealistic comments, but this is a good mental exercise, so here goes.

First,my source of income will be long gone, since I am an oil producer, and my leases will certainly have been confiscated by then, so I won't have to go to work. I already own 80 +/- acres of surface, and have a garden, which I will work for most of my food. I'll have to revisit skills I learned when my grandmother "made" me help with the canning, and oddity for a boy, but I will be able to appreciate that when this comes to pass. I already have a pedal powered Rhoades Car, a four seater which will have the rear seats removed to make room for the cargo it will have to carry. I am sure that even my CNG pickup will have bit the dust by then, since natural gas will also be unaffordable to a then unemployed individual.

Heat will be from the blackjack oaks and the hickory on the acreage. I will be glad that I planted the 250 or so black walnut trees, and hope that they will be bearing by the time of $100 gasoline. They were cheap (bought them looking like sticks, from the State of Oklahoma forestry organization) and took a lot of time to get started, and they will be the last things I cut for firewood, but they will likely have to be used.

Water, in this rural area, will probably be unavailable by the time this comes to pass, but with a spring on the property, I should have fresh water most of the time. I may have to have another water well drilled while I still have the income, and I better put that on my to-do list.

I have a small solar powered system, far less than what I had before my recent divorce (in current time, not this imaginary future), where I also had a water well which was equipped with a solar powered pump. The solar will provide for the minimal lighting and refrigeration I will need. My present abode already has a small refrigerator, and I will expand the PV system to cover the needs for that. I am looking at possible wind, but the inverter I am looking at for the combined system is expensive - like $6700 for an inverter to handle the whole system.

All this time, I will be PO'ed, and that doesn't stand for Peak Oil in this instance, that everyone sees oil production as something which can be confiscated whether through some scheme like "windfall profits taxes" or the outright literal taking of my property. Other mining operations will not be impacted, since oil is a "necessity" and gold, for instance, is not. As I have said before, while nobody offered to assist me when oil was $8.00 a BARREL, I am confident that my rights will be disregarded when oil and the products made from it are as expensive as this experiment postulates. Not that the meager amount of oil which the leases I now own produce will be worthwhile for anyone else. That will not be a factor in an eventual decision to confiscate them, I am sure. But just because I can make money producing them does not assure that anyone else will be able to do so. They will most likely be plugged and abandoned, and if these events do happen, I hope that the price of gas will then go to $125 a gallon, since my little leases are not unique.

I am sure that I will appreciate my learning to have done without as I did when oil was below what it cost me to produce. I walked out my leases at that time, and made my own repairs as best I could since the surface owners saw my production as a mere nusiance. And lest anyone here thinks I am a paranoid old coot, let me remind you that as recently as 1998, for one load I had to sell because I had to produce a lease continuously and both my tanks were full on that lease, the price I was actually paid for oil (the "posted price" plus a bonus I had negotiated) was $13.19 a barrel (paid October, 1998 by Teppco).

I do feel confident that at some point the rule of law will become immaterial. And, anarchy will not be a pretty thing, and therefore can understand the reports that Richard Rainwater, et al, are reportedly already firmly entrenched in enclaves which are very well protected. I would as well, but am not among the rich.

In order for gas to rise to $100 a gallon in 5 years, it would need to increase by about 5 cents a day, each and every day.

I predict civilization would collapse within 3 months. Those with no money to prepare, and those in big cities, would basically end up forming gangs and killing each other. Those with any real wealth would get raided by the gangs, unless they were armed well enough to defend against hundreds. Some gangs would be bought off and used as mercs. Most would be killed by better equipped gangs (ie, the military.)

Once the cities are sacked, the countryside would be ravaged next. This would be done by loosely organized paramilitary gangs. The whole land would be scanned for heat signatures, smoke, solar panels, windmills, and hydro power. Any property with such sources of power would be raided and fully looted. Few people seem to be able to understand how inevitable and all-encompassing this type of tyranny will be, once they finish torching the constitution. Whether gas really goes to $100 or not, this type of cancerous despotism is a near certainty in any future scenario of energy scarcity. Basically, whatever sick and twisted thing you can imagine, would become a reality in the New Amerika. And it would probably all be done in the name of fighting Al Qaeda.

If you lived in a self contained bunker, stocked up with years of supplies, you might be able to wait out the storm. By then most of the gangs would have died off. Once about 80% of the industrialized world has died off, the remaining people would find themselves with abundant resources. How much freedom they would have to exploit those resources to rebuild some kind of civilization.... who knows.

I am stunned by the Mad Maxian fantasies of people on this site.

Man you said it.

We use bikes for 95% + of our trips. You would be amazed at how much one can carry on a bike...in my case, it's the same load we used the carry in the car, which weighs far more than both bikes and riders do.

Also, many of you may be aware of the legions of studies which show bicycle travel to be quicker than car travel in major cities. Factor other cars, snarls, and traffic lights into that equation. Plus, sitting in a car does nothing for your health.

phz

Whether the air travel math is correct is immaterial to me. If gas is $100/gal, I park my car. If I want to eat - and can afford to - I must walk 3 miles to the grocery and the same 3 miles back, carrying my purchases. That trip will have to be made frequently because I am an arthritic 70 year old and cannot carry much at a time.
If you call that scenario coping with pump prices, then you have mine.