Browsing through Lippincott's Medical Physiology, 2nd ed:

"Moderately intense exercise by a healthy, but sedentary, young man may require a metabolic rate of 600 W (in contrast to about 80 W at rest), and intense activity by a trained athlete, 1,400 W or more.

During phosphorylation of ADP to form ATP, 58% of the energy released from the fuel is converted into heat, and only about 42% is captured in the ATP that is formed in the process. When a muscle contracts, some of the energy in the ATP that was hydrolyzed is converted into heat rather than mechanical work. The efficiency at this stage varies enormously; it is zero in isometric muscle contraction, in which a muscle’s length does not change while it develops tension, so that no work is done even though metabolic energy is required. Finally, some of the mechanical work produced is converted by friction into heat within the body.

At best, no more than 25% of the metabolic energy released during exercise is converted into mechanical work outside the body, and the other 75% or more is converted into heat within the body."

So for useful work* this comes down to: [600...1400]W *.25 ~

150W sustained for us mere mortals that do office work

350W+ sustained for an athlete, but probably not sustained for several days (that is several hours a day / several days in a row)

It is worth noting that at 1400+ watts the cooling becomes crucial in order to sustain that output (same reference).

_{*Not including machine/tool conversion losses.}

150 W/h * 8 h/d * 230 d/yr = 276 kWh/year = 994 MJ/year ~ 16% of a direct thermal energy content of a barrel of oil (NB! Apples to oranges comparison!)

How much useful work is in a barrel of oil? It depends on how we use it. Sometimes it c. 1% (modern US-made ICE car with a single 85kg passenger). Sometimes it can be several times that. However, more often than not, it's closer to the low figure.

We really are throwing oil away - spending it like it just didn't matter. And because we waste oil, the human labor equivalent of a barrel of oil is really high, much higher than it ought to be.

I think Matthew Simmons is absolutely correct when he claims that oil is cheap, even too cheap. We waste things that are cheap, regardless of their intrinsic or relative value.

Thus, I conclude that oil needs to rise in price by a multiple, before we start to appreciate it's energetic value (assuming no cheap/abundant/scaling substitutes).

When the value of oil rises manifold, what happens to the relative value of human (labor)?

Here's some numbers I did a while back when designing a controller for an e-bike.

human power production: http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~et181/hpv/hpv.html

+motor = 300w power output

The calculations are for shaft horsepower developed at the pedals. Power requirements were for an upright posture on a typical bicycle.

A 'normal' person is the typical, non couch potato entity while an athlete is, well, in great shape. I suspect that someone who is involved in manual labor may have a performance more at the athlete level.

In this back-of-the-envelope scenario, we are being slave drivers who are running the worker unit for a full eight hours until it is exhausted. All we care about is the amount of economic work that can be obtained from the unit and how much compensation must be given. Given that scenario, an athlete can produce 300 watts of power per hour or 8.64 mega joules (2.4 kilowatt-hours) in a typical man day of labor before the worker falls over and is incapable of doing any more work.

In the US, for the year 2009, we will be compensating a full time skill-less laborer for 2,080 hours a year at a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Benefits and other mandatory costs represent about 30% (BLS's Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Summary report) of total compensation. One can argue that, in the US, this compensation is sufficient for survival of the laborer and that it covers all externalities. Thus, the economic cost for a laborers productive work is about $10.36 per hour. However, the worker gets vacation, holidays, and down time for being sick, so it is only productively working for about 1,900 hours a year.

As stated in prior messages, a barrel of oil is the equivalent of 6.1 giga joules or about 1,6994 kilowatt-hours. Presuming that this value accounts for conversion losses (highly variable depending on type of work performed and the fraction of the oil used to perform the work - see Ayres and Warr, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2003.10.003), then a barrel of oil is about equal to 5,648 hours, or 3.45 economic man years of manual labor.

At current prices of $140 per barrel, and a $21,548.80 annual compensation, one gets a ratio of 530:1. Thus, as others have pointed out, oil is really cheap when compared to manual labor.

Ages ago, circa medical school days, I learned that a human was roughly equivalent to a 100 watt bulb. That seemed reasonable. Is a horse worth a horsepower?

Rather than ask the question about equivalence I prefer to think of external energies, all types, as augmenting human activity, essentially as a human amplification system. Different energies allow different and new kinds of activities. Picture a human being as a core and various energies, channeled through different kinds of tools, allowing that human to perform tasks that would not have been possible at physiological potentials. So around the core we might picture concentric layers of energies and appropriate tools (including embodied energy appropriately amortized). The simplest might be a dwelling in which a wood stove provides augmented heat. A more advanced form is the automobile and gasoline allowing a human to go further, faster than any previous technology.

So I don't really see it as a question of how much work a human can do compared to a machine. Rather I see it as a synergy of human brains being amplified, first through muscles, then through whatever combination of technology and energy source can be brought to bear.

The real question for me is what kind of work this combination ought to be doing to live in balance with nature and not trample on the rest of nature. Also, I think the number of people being amplified is a limiting factor. The more there are, the less we can afford to amplify each without breaking the constraint of not harming the rest of nature. Oh! But that is what is happening now, huh?

Question Everything
George

I thought there was going to be an item on the Maximum Power Principle, my take on which is that humans are happiest when squandering the most energy. In other words a Hummer driving meat eater is happier than a cycling vegetarian. I think perhaps the big question is acceptable levels of powerdown. Taking the bus and growing backyard vegies are somewhat cool nowadays because we can still afford to drive and shop if we want to. Will we miserable when those choices are no longer possible? That's why I think happy times may not be around the corner. Energy savings within our comfort zone makes us feel good, but beyond that is resentment. Riding out that transition period is going to be the biggest test. The cycling vegetarian may wish powerdown on the Hummer driving meat eater and we may end up with a compromise. However I don't think it will be enough to dispense with coal and nukes whatever posters here may wish.

Here is something that is not politically correct but perhaps worth discussing. Everyone knows that drugs such as steroids and human growth hormone give competitive athletes quite an advantage. It also works on amateur athletes as well, as Stuart Stevens documented in a classic Outside Magazine article http://outside.away.com/outside/bodywork/200311/200311_drug_test_1.html (Stevens used himself as a test specimen). So my point is, given the taboo nature of steroids, will there ever be any consideration given to figuring out how to use these drugs to improve everyday performance? At Stevens noted for endurance cycling, the drugs don't work as well as improving performance as in improving recovery after a hard ride. This gets more difficult as you get older. So not only can we potentially improve efficiency in vehicles, we could improve efficiency in ourselves.

I do know that there are some bad side effects with using drugs such as moodiness, anger, and of course heart problems later on, but I've got to wonder if there are lower levels that might help. But the problem is the taboo aspects that these drugs have after being condemned by the guardians to the "purity" of competitive sports (that's a laugh).

I don't think I would ever take these myself, as I am even spooked by corrective laser eye surgery.

In other words there is a s--tload of energy in oil, and as we enter peak oil, there needs to be an awful lot of alternative sources to substitute for its depletion. Without sufficiant substitution, simple tasks will become more human labor intensive. Ok, how much for the ox?

This topic brings a few thoughts to my mind.

One, when we look at the Energy Value specifically of Human Labor, it would seem important to remember that to a human body, doing physical work is an essential component of a healthy life, so that within a healthy 'wattage' range, if you will, this work is also earning that person a valuable and even essential gain apart from the calories contributed to the accomplished tasks. Since all of our energy discussions are ultimately premised around our ability to live and be healthy and complete, I don't think that adding this academic layer to an already academic discussion is out of place, while it surely muddies up a nice calculation with a lot of subjective variables.

Two, in terms of 'Quality of Energy', I was reminded today on a bike ride of a somewhat counterintuitive effect of Human Power that has crossed my desk before. I took my 5-year old daughter out for some errands, she on a 'Tagalong' bike trailer behind me, a single wheel addition with pedals and a handlebar, so the child can actually help with the propulsion (if they choose). She enjoys helping me on the hills, and also pedaling when I'm not, and she asks me, 'Can you feel me pedaling, Daddy?' Usually it's just barely perceivable, but when we came to 'the big hill', I chose to push on with it instead of walking her up, and she was pushing too, and I was then acutely aware of her contribution, making the ascent much more possible than if I were simply biking Solo, even without her weight behind me. She doesn't have that many watts in those little legs, just yet, but my guess is that her efforts were most noticable when I was in the weakest parts of my legs' cycle, and by thus filling in the 'troughs' of my work, made it easier. Add to that the 'Smart Energy', of her pedalling when it was most needed, and a couple values of Human Energy and low-level inputs are quickly apparent.

The other time I noticed this might be more applicable than the above, in fact. In the Snowy NorthEast, I've had many opportunities to help push cars out of trouble on slick and messy roads, and I've been impressed at the effectiveness of adding even one good pair of Boots and Legs to four wheels, in terms of getting out of a tough spot. Surely the Amperage of the effort isn't the only benefit, nor JUST the added traction of the boot treads, or the peak momentary power of the Leg Muscles, or the timing required to push after the car has rocked back in it's icy little wheel-troughs, or the ability to finesse the angles at which one pushes.. but it works, and I've run along with vehicles for a few hundred feet, just to 'keep 'em honest' until the car had cleared the bad spots..

It's not even enough to say that what we bring to the table is 'smart energy', but to really point out the number of ways that we can automatically and intuitively use our modest available energies to best effect, applying just as much or little as we gauge necessary by the moment to steer other, existing forces in the directions we deem appropriate. It brings to mind Tesla's little mischievous metronome oscillators, with which he would ascertain the resonant frequencies of objects such as suspension bridges, and (claimed he could?) place a little 'ticker' on a support which would eventually tear the whole structure apart, as it gradually added a vibration to the object over time.. or as Ghandi said, 'In a Gentle Way, you can shake the World'

Bob

I worked in the forestry industry 60 years ago before the era of the gasoline powered chain saw. A two man crew working with axes and cross cut saw could produce 200 logs per day from the spruce forests in the area. When chain saws appeared and became reliable a single logger could produce 600 logs per day. To do this would require about 3 gallons of gasoline. One man day plus 3 gallons of gasoline would be equivalent to 6 man days of work. So 3 gallons of gas is equivalent to 5 man days of hard labour. There are 42 gallons in a barrel so a barrel is equivalent to 70 man days of hard labour. We would spend the winter working in these camps, with only Sunday off. Our average diet was at least 5000 calories per day. Oil at $140 per barrel is equivalent to $2 per day of hard labour!! Oil is still very cheap when compared to human work.

There is a huge glaring error in all these analysis..

Why are we looking at the cost of the energy value of a human life in dollar terms in a world run by fossil fuels...

Of course human labor is practically worthless when fossil fuels are so abundant, remember, supply and demand, when energy is abundant to cost of it is cheap, when fossil fuels are scarce and human energy is abundant human in energy is worth more.

Cheap fossil fuels distort the value of human energy.. I don't get why you would analyze it this way..

we live in a world where fossil fuel energy is cheap, so by comparison human energy is ultra cheap, in a world without ample fossil fuels, fossil fuels would be very precious and the value of human energy would rise.

That's an interesting take. We constantly hear our less energy savvy friends tell about the technofix that will descend from heaven in a golden chariot and take us all to the land of SUVs & big macs once more. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't create energy out of the void. I view technology twofold: it can allow us access to 'new' energy sources, and it acts as a multiplier on the efficient use of energy in our current economic endeavors. However, as I believe Nate Hagens has pointed out (correct me if I'm wrong) the maximum power principle as well as other evolutionary deterrents to energy efficiency, have essentially driven us to squander resources quickly rather than planning carefully.

The value of a human being is better measured by the intelligence ap plied to their work (their 'tech') than to caloric value of their labor. Certainly high energy prices will spurn more intelligent consumption of our higher quality fuels. Let's hope the twin social institutions of government and corporation don't hold back that change with their outdated regulations and laws. It's up to us to ultimately petition and change zoning laws, eliminate wasteful corporate practices (five vs four day work week, AC set for full-business-atire-in-the-dead-of-summer), install public transit, reduce packaging, get off the road etc. Without a use, without direction the energy in fossil fuels is simply useless.

The most glaring misnomer in the post that started this discussion had to be this sentence:

"This is a very interesting question." In the context in which the statement was made, it caused me to burst out laughing.

"Interesting" to whom? This post and the string of comments that follow it have actually helped me to focus and achieve a bit of an intellectual breakthrough.

I had thought that I was fascinated by anything related to energy. I am a compulsively curious person, and thought that just about anything interested me to some extent.

I was wrong. The subject discussed here holds absoluely no interest whatsoever and I can see no usefulness to the whole discussion. Sorry, I do not intend this personally in any way, but if I were looking for a topic which would be intentionally designed to bore even the most theoretical and esoterically oriented mind to tears, this discussion would have to rank way up toward the top of the vote getters.

It reminds me of one of those discussions the geeks on the American TV show "The Big Bang Theory" often have, something like "if you went into a time machine and were to go three months into the future carrying a container of cottage cheese, would the cottage cheese turn sour?" On the show, these type of discussions are played for laughs. Was the intent of the post and the following comments here intended to be satire?

If so, I take back what I have written, and will reread the article to enjoy the laugh.

RC

Comparing human effort to oil is to compare a machine for doing work (the human body) to an energy source (the oil). They are not the same thing. To compare you should be looking at the food compared to the oil, or the internal combustion engine compared to the body.

In any case, its mainly a question of energy density and power. The chief benefit of oil is the safe and high energy density. That's something we don't find lying around anywhere else.

After all, you can have as many humans as you like, they are never going to get a jet aircraft off the ground.

My neighbour has a rotovator that he uses to dig his veg plot.
I don't have a rotovator so use a no digging system.
My veg plot produces more food.

These numbers being tossed about are nothing more
then computational mathmatical gymnastics.
An exercise comparable to syncronised swimming...only
using numbers.
Very complicated to watch and even somewhat
entertaining.
But the swim cap and nose plug equivalent that ruins
my intrest in the body of the swimmer.

Machines all need manufactured by humans, maintained
by humans, serviced and reparied by humans.
Maybe not the simple lever and fulcrum need oil...but
everything else does I agree.
My point being is, most machines are junk (not even
quantifying the engineered purposeful obsolescence)

Sure sure sure I understand where this was supposed to
go.
How beneficial oil and the machines it allows mankind to produce.

The thought of the professor on Gilligans island making a nuclear reactor out of coconuts and yet couldnt make a dinghy and sail to the mainland is hilarious.

Now humanity is marooned on a desert isle and are all
waiting for a ship on the horizon.
The nightmare is when the ship doesnt show up or
when it does.......it says "TITANIC" on her bow.

Arranging deck chairs isnt gonna be a high priority.
The great unwashed masses wont need a tutorial on how
many calories a barrel of oil contains.

Eating bread with the sweat of ones brow has a way
of driving all points home just like a whip does on
the bended back.

I like you brainy mugs...really I do.
I admire how you throw your gray matter to the task
at hand.
But lets approach this problem as if it were a women.
Thats right....a WOMEN!
Theres a problem you thought man couldnt solve and
has an endless argument about.

You see gentleman, A man desires a women.
But a women wants a mans desire.

You really intellectual men probably just missed the
holygrail..so re-read the above two sentences.

What mankind fears is change and what humans hate is
change.
But humans already lived without oil.
So its really just changing back.
The world is gonna change like a womens mind.
You still get the world (or the women) but have to
accept it (her) for what she is.

Wrap your mind around community and compassion.
Think Gilligans island.
Think Mary Ann and Ginger.
I liked Mary Ann myself...she looked like she was a
farm girl and knew how to roll in the hay.

Fellow Travelers,

Lets get past the whining of whether apples are different from oranges.

For just a few minutes think about the History as we know it. Think for a second in terms of the financial and human cost and the amount of Human Joules which must have been put into the Great Wall of China.

A few Excavators, trucks, and cranes, and a few bags of cement and we could do it real quick. But to wall off Mexico we may have to go back to the old Chinese ways.

The Pyramids would have been a snap, we would not even have to double shift the crews and we could still make the 2012 Olympics.

I suspect Luis's Big-picture is the incredibly complex, profligate and technological society we have been able to evolve with Free oil.

Even with all our 6 billion people, each putting out their 150 Watts, none of this would have happened.

The Genius, Management, and Planning part of such endevours
is not a factor because our brain capacity has apparently had this same potential for 70,000 years.

If ever there was a stark example of Olduvai Theory, the Math and Physics conversions from Oil energy to Human energy, proves it.

Forget the minutiae, rather look at how we "Got Here, from There, and more importantly how we are now going to get "There from Here", with no oil.

Graham

I believe that the London based journalist Jonathan Ossoff is looking for a simple, easy for a layman to grasp, comparison.

Pick a task and show what 1 barrel of oil will accomplish.

Then show how long it would take for an average human to accomplish.

"Worth"

As slippery words go, that one's a real doozie. In a contest it's gotta be a contender for first place.

And as for philosophical questions it's right up there with angelic pin-head dancing and trees falling in empty forests.

I'll have to go with Forrest Gump's answer (at least I think he's the one who said it): "Worthy is as worthy does."

I do get the purpose and point of the discussion. And I think it's a 'worthy' (grin) subject. I also agree that there could be valuable data revealed by examining the issue from that perspective. NEVERTHELESS, I find it very disappointing that no one in the discussion(so far at least) has called you on just what is meant by that tricky word 'worth.'

I say this because even in terms strictly limited to physical energy equivalents it's a tricky little devil.

For example, one watt is worth a gigawatt if applied in the right place, at the right time with the right purpose. That's the point of the mythological little dutch boy saving the lowlands by using his finger to plug the leak in the dike. His action (that required negligible force) held back cubic miles of water, accomplished the same work as the entire dike itself, and was 'worth' the incalculable labor that went into building both the dike and everything it protected.

Hopefully the discussion will start to track a little bit in that sort of direction because I think you're on to something big and that a really 'energetic' discussion might blast away some unexamined premises, such as the assumption that using up a lot of energy in utterly unnecessary activities is worth something.

Anaerobic exercise is not characterized by shutting off air intake. Rather it is when the rate of metabolism gets ahead of your current rate of respiration.

It seems to me that all of this discussion is culturally conditioned. There have been, and are, many hunter-gathering societies who worked less hours with less effort than our "modern" society. My guess is that they would say, "Why do you want to do that stuff when you could just sit around?" Maybe they didn't live as long without modern technology but I find it hard to believe that they would trade laying in a hammock in the afternoon for a long drive to "work".

Todd

Luis,

Mind if I rephrase that to:

What is energy worth (in terms of humans satisfaction).

A pistol is much more powerful than a bow and arrow but not very satisfying when I point it at my head. It's hardly possible to make the same mistake with the bow and arrow.

I've been living closer to the earth these past few years, that is, 'green feeding' from my garden. Very low total energy use (I'm naturally lazy ) external energy two gallons (or inequivalent) of gasoline per year and dropping as I find that it is more work and less productive and sustainable to use mechanized devices like the rototiller on a small holding.

I think in this discussion that the benefit/loss of energy should be considered. So far using external energy we seem to be well on our way to destroying our agricultural base as well as the oceans, the forests. As well have used externally sourced energy to produce a population that has reached a now unsustainable level.

------------------------

Hey Nate! What is this:

However, we aren't robots - we need to eat, sleep, breathe (we exhale energy), maintain, etc.

Sorry to be critical, but that all sounds pretty robotic to me; could you add something like, 'play the guitar badly', or, 'yodel off key' (oxymoron?) just to put in a bit of human fallibility in that mix?

BTW Nate, I think I said something, in the TOD backpages, about a couple of tablespoons of olive oil being all the energy I would need to cycle the same distance as I could drive on a gallon of gas . It wasn't all that rigorous a treatment so, off the top of your bean, how close to reality do you figure those figures would be? I didn't consider at all the cost of manufacturing these vehicles as I felt that, to be fair, the time difference in execution of the act sort of compensated. I think Thoreau made a similar comparison about work, being that by the time someone had saved enough by working to take a train to (Pokeepsie?) he would have beat that person by walking there.

What is a human being worth?
It is priceless -- as the commercial suggests, because it contains the mind which fosters our evolving souls. Thus it is beyond priceless.
While nature is always incredibly and brutally hyper-efficient, we humans are not. What irony.
We too often trade real efficiency for social acceptance.
One case in point is my own personal transportation device, the lowly moped.
It is not an 'acceptable' vehicle. A recent car commercial talking-head said, "What do you want me to do, drive to work on a MOPED?"
Ooo, ick!
The stigma is that you're not a real adult unless you are controlling at least 200 horses under your hood.
Screw being socially acceptable.
6 years ago I sold 'the car' and bought a 100mpg moped, out the door at $2K, and have in the interim saved probably $40K in not having to feed that iron horse. Here in Nevada one does not need insurance, tags, or all that crap. Parking is a snap, never have to get into a hot car, and in winter I drive slower and put my feet out when it snows. When I fall down (rarely) I get back on the horse and keep going. It takes half a quart to change the oil, and maintanence costs over 6 years have been less than $100. It saves enough money so that I can get by working only 4 days a week instead of 5, and still keep my toasty 'American' lifestyle. This of course frees up extra time to work on alternatives.
At $5 a gallon, it will cost about a nickel a mile to putt down the road.
Of course, an electric bicycle retrofit kit is much more EIEO efficient, but for fat lazy old folks like me, the 'ped is much more luxurious.
Yes, Virginia, there is a 100mpg vehicle, and it is available right now at a location near you.
And when I finally read that mopeds are scarce because of exploding sales, and that we are starting to manufacture them en-masse, then I will have hope that we may yet gain a few years on staving off our mutual collapse.
Until then I will tolerate the decreasingly common snickers (inversely proportional to the price of gas) at the stop light, and will snicker right back. I snicker all the way to the bank.
Our national attitude seems to be that "You'll take away my SUV when you pry my cold dead toes from around the accelerator."
Let me suggest that you may not be able to drive that Hummer through the Pearly Gates. It won't fit.
A moped, however, might....
How many years reprieve might we gain if 10% of us drove 'peds?

I hope this is an appropriate place to post this, and that it is 'socially acceptable'.
If not, give me a heads up.
BTW, I just love this site and all these wonderful conversations and brilliant minds.
Thank you all so much.

Craig Bergland

Wow. All this great discussion and nothing about my favorite reason for contemplating this fascinating subject: farming, food production, and how the world is able to sustain a population of more than 6 billion humans. After the peak supply of fossil fuels, are we going to have to contemplate global peak food supply? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this aspect of this very interesting question connecting energy from fossil fuels and energy from human labor.

One way to look at this problem is to look back at how energy has been used in history, and how much it cost when expressed in today's money.

Vaclav Smil's book 'Energy in World History'
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/westview/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0813319021

is a wonderful description of how things were done before the age of fossil fuels, with a lot on the development and use of human physical power and horse power.

The cost side of it is in a brand new(alhough rather expensive)book:Heat Light and Power, by Roger Fouquet

http://www.nhbs.com/title.php?bkfno=172071&ad_id=359

This is an expansion of a wonderful paper 'Seven Centuries of Energy Services: The Price and
Use of Light in the United Kingdom (1300-2000)'
http://www.pressestelle.tu-berlin.de/fileadmin/a70100710/Medieninformati...

This points out that what we want is not energy but lumens. There are lots of different fuels, but our current use of electricity with fluorescent lamps or LEDs is amazingly efficient and cheap compared to burning candles.

Roger Fouquet is an economic historian and the new book deals with the price of energy (inflation corrected, of course) back to 1300, i.e. what it cost to hire a man or a horse for a day's labour, or to transport goods or people a certain distance.

It is full of rather dry looking charts, but what it does is compares the cost of human power, animal power, wind power, steam power etc, across seven centuries. It shows the effect of the Industrial Revolution, but also that there was a lot of human life before the steam engine.

It makes the point that horse power is cheaper than people power, but only comes in horse sized increments. Steam engines only come in even bigger sizes. People power is only really appropriate for doing small fiddly things or where horses or steam engines can't be used. Since the early 20th century it has been possible to 'subdivide' steam power by using small electric motors.

I have been wondering where the 'Road to the Olduvai Gorge' will take us. If we have to go back to the Stone Age, will we be going back through the 19th century?

This book looks at various critical transitions, such as that from sailing ships to steam ships from an economic perspective. And pithy questions like 'what are the relative economics of sailing ships versus rowed galleys?'

Life would seem to be possible with only limited fossil fuels (the UK in the first half of the 19th century was heavily reliant on horse power, water power and wind power). Maybe it wouldn't have the same GDP/capita, but it could probably manage a good Human Development Index (life expectancy, literacy rate, etc.).

BobE

Fun discussion, and it rather underscores why it may be a mistake to offer any specific equivalence factor to the general public: any specific factor can be contested. I think "a sh*tload", as Cslater8 suggests, may be technically correct. Like buying a new yacht, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.

When you couple this with the fact that most of what humans do doesn't need to be done at all, and that the satisfaction could be supplied by a tiny fraction of a watt stimulating the proper region in a human brain, it becomes sillier still. The fallacy of the Krell.

Human use of oil is joules before swine. Its utility and consequence are not directly comparable to any human meme save magic.

It's more analagous to the fables about people who happen upon a magic lamp, kiss an enchanted frog, sign a pact with satan, or capture a leprechaun (details vary) and receive a finite number of impossible wishes granted. Typically, at the end of the line, the person uses up the last wish and realizes that they're totally f*cked, worse off than they were before they started wishing.

We have gone to the moon, flown across oceans through the stratosphere while drinking champagne, enabled ourselves to breathe underwater, smote our enemies, killed all the scary-looking other species with most of the rest thrown in for good measure, and emptied the seas. We're getting down to our last few wishes, and are starting to realize they won't be near enough.

So perhaps it's better to argue the qualitative than the quantitative, and "keep it simple".

Weight is not always a very important factor in fuel consumption. A lot depends on the type of vehicle we are talking about so beware of some of the simple generalisations you see floating about sometimes.

Drag of a vehicle has a linear and quadratic term; the quadratic term rises quickly and dominates entirely at reasonable speeds. If drag is the major source of discipative work then your fuel efficiency will be inversely proportional to the square of velocity; at double the speed you get a quarter of the fuel efficiency. Drag is linear in cross sectional area and drag coefficient, which means that the most fuel efficient vehicles look something like a shrunken bobsleigh(flattened bobsleigh in the case of solar car competitions). Even small protrusions like mirrors can have a severe impact on the drag coefficient.

Rolling friction on the other hand is proportional to vehicle weight and speed does not come into play to any important extent. The coefficient of rolling friction can be as much as 100 times larger for rubber tyres on asphalt than for high quality steel wheels against steel tracks. When rolling friction is the major source of discipative work milage is about the same at any speed for which this is true.

The engine itself is also an important player. Most ICE's have poor efficiency at low power output, building to a maximum somewhere under their peak output.

For a standard car the fuel efficiency curve tends to start poorly and then build up to a plateu where engine performance is good and rolling friction is dominating; this plateau is somewhere around 40-60 mph. At higher speeds you get into the drag limited region and performance starts dropping off rather quickly.

I'd love to see what kind of fuel mileage you could get with aerodynamic coffins on rail traveling at slow speeds. Monstrously efficient I pressume, but definetly monstrously uncomfortable.

All the discussions about "no more comunal employment" and "chainlink fencing the kitchen garden" seem to me more fantasy than reality.

Though I presently make my living in the business computer programming world, I have not always lived as now in a nice four-berdoom house in the suburbs of Toronto. I grew up on a near-subsistence farm in northern Ontario, Canada, (we could walk 80 miles south from home without ever encountering evidence of civilization except a few abandoned mines or logging roads) and am old enough to recall "life before oil" on many levels. I still clearly recall when dad bought his first tractor (teams of draught horses before that). I was in grade four when our farm got grid electricity, grade 6 when I made first use of a telephone, grade nine when we got our first television. We heated and cooked with wood, did homework by gas-light or candles (often made ourselves), grew all our own food and bought the few external inputs required (bank payments, breeding quality livestock, seed grains) by selling surplus livestock and vegetables, and selling wood to the local paper mill, all manually cut with swede saws and axes, manually loaded onto a small hired truck for delivery, perhaps 300 T / yr (250 "cords). The hired threshing machine came around once / year and we used pitchforks and horses to deliver the grain from the field to the machine. We always hunted and fished for recreation (and food). We were in good condition. From various employments in my youth I'm a journeyman electrician, HV lineman, HP welder, heavy equipment operator. I've built several houses from scratch alone, contracted basements. Can do plumbing, HVAC, carpentry etc.

Believe me when I tell you, peak oil, shortages, etc. whatever. As much as many of you apparently would love to see it, we WILL NOT revert to those conditions for everyone. Nature provides sufficient energy (solar, wind, falling water, bio-fueled electrical CHP) to easily compensate for the receding supplies of oil over the next 20+ years. I hobby now in my garage with my son, a tool and die maker, on an externally heated (solar-concentrating, bio-fuels) stirling engine-generator CHP unit which is easy and cheap to fabricate, will last many years with zero maintenance. All that's needed for systems such as these to become comonplace is a market, and the absence of cheap fossil fuels. Our unit is designed to provide, from either two 10' tracking dishes or an equivalent amount of roof area, sufficient electricity to replace an average home's usual requirement plus sufficient heat to replace use of fossil fuel heating. Includes thermal storage so will generate through the night. Thermal storage can be auxiliary heated with any fuel you have, from wood pellets / gassifier to waste cooking oil etc.

I can design for you right now the means to do low-till agriculture with electric systems of an tractor and two motorized mast-movers which would move an overhead conductor across a field in a pattern so the tractor's catenary could maintain contact. From there, it's simply a matter of designing the appropriate attachments (seeders, weeders, harvesters etc). Potash mining is readily susceptible to electrification, as are the railways required for transport. Nitrogen supplement fertilizers are a natural byproduct of both hydrogen generation and heavy water nuclear power generation processes (a technology which is not going away). Absence of chemical pest management may cut yields of wheat and corn significantly, but even 75 bu / acre of corn is worth doing on a large scale.

Believe me, the differences in materials knowledge and power electronics which we have today means the ballgame now is NOTHING like what it was in the 1950's, or before. I still recall the invention of the chain saw for logging, and it's competition with and ultimate defeat of the Wright technology reciprocating blade system. Today I carry around a canvass sack with ten battery-operated tools any one of which would be considered nearly magical in the 1950's.

We may need to crush up and smelt a few (hundred million) surplus gasoline autos to get the materials resources, but otherwise, the genie (of knowledge) is no longer in the bottle. Large city cores may likely disintegrate into disordered chaos and lawlessness, (I hope not), but provided we can maintain some semblance of rule of law there's no reason for such unhealthy pessimism as often displayed here.

As an aside...

Several websites are logging the current power meter readings from the Tour de France. Wiggins' 500 watts, is I think, sustained in fairly short track pursuit races. A quick survey of power meter data from cyclists this year shows around 300 watts being a huge effort for multiple hours. The best tech of racing bikes, quality of athlete, and all round enviroment of the Tour should give the best result one could hope for in wattage.

Danny Pate's exploit the other day:

http://www.saris.com/athletes/PermaLink,guid,30675c37-259f-4ed7-95b5-7cf...

Guess we will have to find a replacement for all that oil.