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Tom Tomorrow: A Brief History of Gasoline Consumption in America
Posted by Prof. Goose on June 3, 2008 - 10:23pm
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.”
—Mark Twain
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Based on the news reports I'm reading, they're going to get a good deal on that Hummer...
Too bad it'll only be used as a planter in the front yard...
TT's implication seems to be that people respond to the price, not to idealistic visions or predictions of the future -- contrary to what everyone thought in the 1970's and on Earth Day. "All the idealists have sold out," complains one letter writer on Salon (approximate quotation).
Well, true enough. But people tend to do what is perceived and enforced as "normal". Societies can go through cataclysmic changes in a fairly short period of time, during which time what is "normal" may totally change. Before the American Civil War, slavery was normal in the South. Just in the past few decades, massive fossil fuel consumption has been normal in many places.
There is nothing about human nature that makes it necessary that high consumption be normal. Research seems to indicate declining marginal utility of consumption for adding to human happiness once basic needs are met.
Of course, at this point in "overshoot," it's not clear we can even meet basic needs of everyone even if we tried. But the good news is that if you get it (the comic strip seems funny / ironic), you see the problem, and if this is funny /ironic to a large enough group of people, we have a fighting chance to redefine "normal" when the prices get high enough.
Keith
Yes. Most often that cataclysmic change is violent, fiercely opposed and not voluntary. Sadly often taking a form of a war or a war-like state of emergency. No wonder most people want to try and continue their state of normality :)
I'm not sure. The excess availability of cheap surplus energy has always meant that all that surplus energy is used. I can't think of a civilization that has resisted the temptation to grow (size, rate, complexity, etc) using available surplus energy.
As long as a gross excessive energy surplus exists compared to the current baseline energy requirement (for existing size/rate/complexity), people will grow to use up that surplus. After that growth has been internalized and made 'normal', the surplus ceases to exist conceptually and the new consumption is now the baseline.
Many argue, that the only way to peel pack is non-voluntary powerdown: that is, energy scarcity that forces one to cut down in size/rate/complexity and settle to a new level of normality.
However, excluding outlier data point individuals, societies as whole rarely - if ever - cut energy usage in planned, synchronized and voluntary manner - at least not unless there is a war like state of emergency. Efficiency may rise (e.g. Japan), but the absolute consumption seems to always rise, until constrained.
I agree that such cataclysmic change can be violent. It's a problem. One also thinks, though, of the fall of the Soviet Union, which in the 1950's and 1960's we would only have imagined in the context of nuclear war or a global conventional war. So there is the very great danger of violence, but violence is not inevitable by any means.
I'm not sure either, but here's the case that growth is not inevitable. On human nature and consumption, check out "The High Price of Materialism" by Tim Kasser (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, 149 Pages). This is a straightforward, nontechnical book that provides basic evidence that human nature does not desire indefinite expansion of consumption and in fact may be negatively correlated with consumption. It is reviewed here: http://compassionatespirit.com/high-price-of-materialism.htm
The problem is at the systems level. The social system rewards domination and dependence drives growth. If the economic system rewards those who are driven to earn and consume more, despite the fact that it doesn't make them happy, then neurotic, unhappy people will become the captains of industry and the leaders of the country.
TOD's own Jeff Vail has posted on "rhizome." Check out this:
http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/rhizome
His theory is that dependency drives growth. He proposes that instead of a society with a hierarchical structure which demands growth, we should have a structure of interconnected networks which are each minimally self-sufficient. Eliminate dependency, you eliminate the necessity of growth.
Here are three off-the-cuff proposals aimed at making social domination more difficult and reducing social dependence. (1) A steep progressive income tax (like say 100% on incomes over $100,000 U. S., or pick your own figure). (2) Advertising should not be tax-deductible, in fact it should be taxed as a public nuisance. (3) A guaranteed annual income, or "negative income tax" as proposed by Milton Friedman is another thought. This is wild and crazy stuff and this proposal needs elaboration to make practical -- one immediately thinks concerning the guaranteed annual income, where's the incentive to work at all? But these sorts of proposals are the kinds of things I'd like to see addressed.
Keith
Have you ever heard of Edo Japan?
They changed when someone sailed up and started shelling them with modern explosive shells.
Commodore Perry. He demanded they trade and grow.
He was American :)
High gas prices lead to surge in mass transit
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080603/ap_on_re_us/gas_prices_mass_transit;...
Ah, yes, but mass transit is not above the laws of economics. In Louisville KY, the local transit authority (TARC Transit Authority of River City) announced that they will raise their rates, and more importantly, begin cutting routes and reduce the number of buses running. Why at their moment of vindication would they do such a thing?
Diesel fuel: Diesel, once considered the cheap, simple, efficient fuel has now become the crème de la crème of motor fuels. Using a dirty source in sulfur ridden distillate elements of crude oil, and attempting to clean it up with a valuable and more prized than ever fuel in natural gas, Diesel now suffers the worst of all possible worlds, being a bi-fuel that is price linked to both crude oil and natural gas. Combine this with the lack of commitment on the part of the U.S. to carry at least a minimal share of the refining load, and Diesel becomes the new Champagne fuel of the crude oil inventory.
The majority of transit buses in the U.S. run on Diesel fuel. There have been discussions of converting some of them to natural gas, and some cities and transit authorities have done so, but that program was based on natural gas prices in the $3.00 to $4.00 per mm/BTU range, $5.00 topside. Ironically, Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD) was conceived using the same “plentiful and cheap” natural gas scenario.
So mass transit authorities face a conundrum: Unless the bus is absolutely full of passengers paying as much as can be extracted from them, the cost of the “clean” Diesel fuel they must consume cannot be justified.
This is yet another one of those scenarios that had someone described it to a normal thinking person 5 years ago they would have been met with derision and ridicule. We see once again the weakness of linear thinking.
RC
How about no thinking at all?
Evidently many posters at the TOD think that there is enough liquid fuel for transport that we can afford to shut down ethanol production to save a dollar or two on food bills.
Farmers have to pay the diesel prices the same as anyone else. What such posters are proposing is low food prices and high fuel prices.
A thinking person would say that would lead to lower food production. But who cares as long as evil ethanol is stopped?
And someone who can do arithmetic would know that X is not a mathematical variable in this context. If you stop using 20% of the corn for ethanol, and cut the total corn crop by 10%, there's 12% more corn available for food.
Unless every grain of corn that would have gone to ethanol is not planted, something which only a lobbyist, not even an economist, could believe, there will be more food available to eat.
And I am unpersuaded that a tradeoff of lower diesel demand for lower gasoline supply is a bad thing even if it's more than gallon per gallon.
duplicate post
I love your comments.
Ethanol July futures $2.32
Corn July futures $6.08
DDG's $173.5/Ton
Margin -9 cents/Gal
What will it be next year?
The price can be anything but the amount of OIP is going down all the time.
what? no one foresaw finiteness?
A lot of the folks I talk to - who have no clue whats going on - remember the 1970s.
IN the 1970s we had local problems, US oil peak, embargo etc... People talked about finite supply, and warned of the future. Then the price dropped.
Unfortunatly the average Joe got entirely the wrong message. Talk of finite supply + Warnings, then a price drop. Well I guess that means those folks talking about finite supply and telling us to conserve were all stupid huh? Lets go buy an SUV.
Now I talk to people and thats what they tell me:
"You said the same thing in the 70's and it turned out to be rubbish, why should I believe you now"
One guy who used that reply was a petroleum geologist who worked with the USGS in ANWR on the most recent estimates.
Price at the pump means 10x more than warnings about the future. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush as they say. Which is why the government failed us. We needed some taxes on fuel after the 1970s, the SUV boom should never have happened.
Presidential candidate Anderson proposed just that, a modest tax on gasoline to reduce consumption. He was booed off his soap box.
So much for democracy and an intelligent electorate.
Anderson got me to vote for him, and I've been saying for years that what America needs is $5/gallon gasoline.
We're going to get it, but the money is going to go to OPEC instead of staying in the USA. At least the SUV craze is in its death throes.
This is doubly funny since a prius may be much, much more expensive than it's non-hybrid alternatives, but isn't even in the top-5 qua efficiency. Here the prius is 30% less efficient than my ford monovolume, however the ford is 12k, the prius 28k euros to buy (both including VAT, so yes, they're less expensive for americans)
The prius' efficiency is like the titanic's unsinkability, or hirohito's godhood was : it were good systems, but nowhere near as good as general opinion about them, and that opinion, that trust, about them caused disaster.