Third verse, same as the first

[solarbird]

OPEC sees no need to raise production this summer, unlike usual, despite near-record prices. Similarly, a week ago, Saudi Arabia said they saw no need to raise production past 2009. A variety of sources have stated that Saudi Arabia will not be capable of raising its output past 12.5m bpd, political assurances to the contrary aside. There is also the secondary but non-dismissable problem of increasing Saudi domestic demand, subsidised, which naturally cuts into exports.

(Note that the last link refers to a 2006 set of graphs; the production numbers on those graphs have so far proven somewhat optimistic, and Saudi production did not reached the projected 2006 numbers, and is not on target to reach the projected 2007 numbers. Of course, that doesn't stop people from writing headlines like "Saudi production to hit 16m bpd" based on a UK oil consultancy company saying that Saudi Aramco could hit that by 2025.)

As I've made a bit of a habit of saying - though possibly not as much as I should have, being distracted by the fundamentalist movement and university work - I believe we have a rather sharply limited amount of time before this issue becomes rather critical, and I strongly urge that people work locally to affect zoning and development codes to end automobile-only developments. Most housing development in the United States has been, and continues to be, car-only; if you don't have a car, you can't get to any of the things you need. Things are a bit better up here in Cascadia, but not nearly as better as they could be. This situation is encouraged, not discouraged, by government, at this point mostly as a legacy of 60+ years of automobile-focused zoning and subsidies, most of which continue to exist. From a development standpoint, there appears to be little little time left (years, not decades) to make real adjustments to this model before disruptive problems arise.

On an individual level, of course, I mostly have to say what I've been saying for the last couple of years: if you are carbound, move. Go someplace you won't be. Be within walking distance of high-occurence, high-reliability, flexible transit, and within walking distance of many things you need and enjoy. I also recommend biking, it should be a nice summer for it - but only places where you can safely do so, of course, which limits many peoples' options.

Incidentally, the Deutsche Bank analyst projections of possible outright gasoline shortages in North America - as well as Matthew Simmons's comments to the same effect - are refinery-issue based more than crude-supply based, per sé. But they should be noted as a temporary (if significant) inconvenience.

Comments

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

I'd honestly love to move somewhere where transit were available, but in my own case that is probably going to involve moving to Chicago.

(Seriously, here in the "flyover states" public transportation *sucks* even in downtown areas. Major artery buses (light rail? HA! You jest with the whole light rail thing) typically run once an hour (once every half hour at best) and don't run before 5am or after 10pm. In most areas, you are *very fortunate* if you are on a line that runs weekends at *all*--here in Louisville, quite a lot of the connector bus lines between main lines do *not* in fact run on weekends or holidays at all.

(And no, it's not just Louisville--it's like this in goddamned near *every* major city in the Midwest smaller than Memphis or Chicago; Indianapolis, Cincinatti, Columbus et al have similar clusterfuckage with their bus systems (also, generally, lacking in light rail because the public transportation system in and of itself is run on such a shoestring that many routes are run by the paratransit contractors).)

And moving is, unfortunately, not an option because even *good* IT work here only pays around $50,000/yr; housing in Chicago (which literally *is* the closest city that has a functional public transportation network) is about four times as expensive as it is here, and the IT jobs are *not* paying all that much better than they are here. :P (Homes here cost on average $120,000 and up; in Chicago, they start at around $400,000)

Now, if you can convince the City of Louisville and the Kentucky authorities to actually properly fund TARC and actually *design a fuckin' functional public transportation system* (seriously, outside I-264 new routes have not been planned since 1978; since then, city and county have merged and we have a metro population of a million plus, and a bus system designed in fact to serve a population of maybe 125,000) then, for the love of God, help me to do this. I've only been banging my head against the fucking wall for the past ten or so years about this (I am dependent on public transportation anyways, having a gimp eye and one car means no driving for me and not being a quadriplegic heart-attack victim with a guide dog means no paratransit for me either). Dear gods, a mentally retarded chimpanzee on PCP could design a better public transit system :P. And the few times major changes have been proposed (like light rail) they always, always, always get put off or taken off the boards altogether because "we don't have funding". Taking some of the routes back from the paratransit contractors or adding weekend or holiday service is taken out because "we don't have funding". Funny, Memphis manages it with less people in the metro area; funny, Chicago manages it even with the city government and the Mafia taking their take and manages it damned well at that. >_<

(Sorry, you just touched upon one of my major rants--in many parts of the US, we don't have the option to live close to public transportation that is actually functional. (Note my emphasis on functional here. Public transportation is next to fucking useless if it takes you two and a half hours to get across *half* the metro area because of multiple bus transfers, and if most of those lines don't run on a Saturday.) And I'm actually in a city that has a specific program that gives grant money for mortgages for folks who live within 1/8" of a bus line (and yes, you bet your ass I take advantage of this; one of my own personal requirements was that I lived within walking distance of one of the five or ten bus lines that actually offer weekend and holiday service), which should give you an idea just how much of a clusterfuck and/or afterthought public transportation is in *most* Midwestern cities.) People who live even in Baltimore or Washington or New York or Cascadia (where functional public transportation exists) have no fucking clue just how absolutely useless the public transportation networks are in much of the Midwestern US. (And this is assuming they exist at all for non-paratransit users.) I'd give my right *tit* if Louisville had a public transport system half as functional as Washington, DC's. Seriously.)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Why do you assume that the problem is "automobiles" rather than "dependence on fossil fuel power for the grid coupled with non-electric automobiles?" We could maintain a civilization based on nuclear power for the grid and electric cars indefinitely, without changing our basic habitational patterns or reducing our individual powers of mobility, just fine.

[solarbird]

We could maintain a civilization based on nuclear power for the grid and electric cars indefinitely
Mmmmmm... no. Unfortunately. I mean, if fusion turns into a new energy producer, then the answer changes to yes! But there's not enough uranium in the world, even if we all run breeder reactors.

But, assuming that were true, the infrastructure build-out for that - even given working hydrogen cars tomorrow, say - is a 20-year timeframe problem, which means we'd still be faced with a decade-and-a-half or two-decade crunch. I recommend you read the Hirsch Report for details on the timeframes involved in that sort of transition.

Similarly, the "Saudi Arabia of Coal" commentary you hear talked about every so often - with a 500-year coal supply - is only true if you assume no increases in coal production from 2005, which is just silly. Even taking historical coal consumption growth rates over the previous 15 years, that drops to 72 years. And if you try to factor in vast ramp-ups in coal extraction and production, the timeframe gets dramatically shorter, of course.

I've done some fairly rough (and very optimistic, quite frankly) estimates of the power need buildout of the electric grid to duplicate - roughly - our current car-only transportation system. It's equivalent in that it replaces the average fleet vehicle of today with the best theoretical electric vehicle with reasonable distance-per-charge numbers currently producible for under US$200,000. Doing that and assuming all infrastructure build-out is free and that all drawing-board promises are met (and in any rounding case, exceeded), we need to add 7.4 times our current electric grid capacity. In other words, we need to take our current electric grid and duplicate it 7.4 times. The first incarnation of this grid, of course, took several decades to build, so you can imagine the build-out time for this 7.4x project. And that assumes no energy demand growth, which is silly except for demand-destruction scenarios which are very bad for the economy, as you might guess.

I'm not actually anti-car. I think every family should have a car, and, as in Japan, I think they should drive them on special occasions, in emergencies, and so on. annathepiper and I own car and a truck. We both have driver's licenses; I am not calling for the destruction of all road systems. But we are not dependent upon them. I also independently think that the car-only development model is an extremely bad idea and, at best, extremely limiting to consumers. Those of us who do not want to be in a car-only environment find our options extremely limited at best, and a major factor in that is government structural subsidies for such development. On a non-market-interference platform alone, I would like those supports removed, or at least made market-neutral. However, in the current environment, I think the historical post-war structural subsidies have become extremely bad ideas.

[solarbird]

Oh, I'm aware of the issues, and it's not just the midwest; the South is at least as bad. I lived in Lexington, Kentucky during undergraduate; I know what it's like from experience. It sucked. I had a scooter, though, which helped, and later, an exceedingly crappy used car. (My scooter got stolen. ;_; )

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't know you were at UK in the past :D

And yeah, the one place in KY that makes Louisville's public transit actually look good is Lexington (aka "if you aren't a horse farmer, go fuck yourself"). :P

As it is, I'm definitely looking at vehicles that can be run on biodiesel or ethanol (when the gas crunch comes, at least Kentucky DOES have a very aggressive biodiesel and ethanol consortium who could at least cover some of the gap) when the time for a new vehicle hits (hubby's car is, alas, dying).

That was rather incoherently written, let me try again.

[solarbird]

Why do you assume that the problem is "automobiles"
Oh, and why I talk mostly about automobiles is that this is the first-line issue for most oil users, and the single largest share - by far - of oil consumption in this country. (In terms of most individuals and immediate impact to those reading this LJ, heating oil would be second. But at around 6% of total consumption, it's a trivial share, and far below that of things like plastics and industrial products usage, freight transport, and so on.)

Talking of freight, I also think we need a major freight rail buildout, as that uses about 1/10th the fuel of trucks per pound. Some of that is happening now, but much more will be needed.

[solarbird]

I'm sure we will be seeing fair amounts of ethanol and biodiesel in the future. However, they will not support our current transport system in its current form, without some rather significant level of breakthrough. Biodiesel comes much closer than ethanol, currently, so I imagine we'll be seeing a lot of that.

The problem lies, really, in thermodynamics. Specifically, you can't create energy. You can convert it from one form to another, you can convert matter to energy, but you can't create it. Earth, as a whole, has a net positive energy input because it is powered by the sun. Oil and coal - and oil is a great fuel, by the way, compared to most other alternatives; clean as such things go, incredibly energy dense, usable in many forms, convenient, it's great stuff looked at from an engineering standpoint - are both forms of stored solar energy, stored over millions of years. As a result of their high energy density, you can release that stored energy fairly easily, using very little energy to do so. Oil, for example - even given all the increasingly sophisticated (and more energy-costly) extraction systems and global shipping and all that - averages about 10:1 energy return on investment (EROI), which is to say, for every unit of energy you spend transporting and processing it, you get 10 back. That's brill.

There are all kinds of ways to release energy. Fusion is one of them; you convert matter to energy and produce a lovely result. In the case of the sun, that's an overwhelming huge positive EROI, of course. But on earth, where we don't have a massive crushing gravity well to do the work for us, fusion is so far a negative producer; for every X units you put into a fusion reaction, you get less than that back out. So while you can run a fusion energy generator right now, it's not worth your while to do so, because it takes more energy to run than it produces.

Hopefully this will change via technological and/or scientific breakthrough.

Ethanol and biodiesel are both dealing with source materials of much, much lower energy density than coal and oil. They both also require energy to process. Only recently, in fact, has ethanol become a net energy producer - and that's only if you ignore the energy costs of building the equipment necessary to actually perform the processes. With the best cellular ethanol processing data I've seen, you get a net EROI of about 1.8:1 - in other words, for every unit of energy you put in, you get 1.8 back out. Biodisesel is better at about 3:1, which is really very good, given the amount of solar input. But they're both going to be more expensive and lower-production than we're used to; ethanol in particular has only about 70% the energy-density of gasoline.

So at that point, let's take the infrastructure as given (which isn't valid in the real world, but we'll assume all that power comes from other sources which will not go away before completion); the question then becomes, how much cropland do we need for this? It turns out that to duplicate our current oil energy usage with ethanol, we, um, can't. There's just not enough farmland. Convert every arable acre in the country to switchgrass for ethanol and you still lose. Plus: oh look, no farms, which means no food. Biodiesel is better, but, again: there's going to be less of it than there is gasoline+diesel now, when we're used to every year there being more of it, instead.

So. Don't get me wrong. I think biodiesel in particular has a good future. In colder climates, ethanol will be needed instead. (Biodiesel gells at cold temperatures; ethanol doesn't.) But... it's not a panacea, however much I might wish it might be.

Re: That was rather incoherently written, let me try again.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

It is utterly astonishing to me that nobody from either of our two (supposedly) different party structures has figured out that perhaps granting every immigrant worker US citizenship in exchange for a couple of years work on building out our currently (essentially non-existent) rail transport infrastructure would be a major win-win deal, and that objecting auto/oil industry lobbyists shoul be told to F.O.A.D.

Re: That was rather incoherently written, let me try again.

[solarbird]

I do not believe we can expect leadership from either the Cowardly Party or the Torture and Religious Authoritarianism Party on this matter.

However, it would be very nice to be surprised.

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Well, then again, with humanity in general a lot of the problem is that we are three times over our carrying capacity *now*, so no matter *what* happens there's gonna be a crash sooner or later. (People quite frankly breed too much and eat too much and use too much energy *now* for what the world can support; perhaps if we got the population down to one or two billion people, we'd have more breathing room. Unfortunately, short of bird flu or the mass reintroduction of smallpox or dropping a large rock on the planet or a supervolcano going off, there's not a hell of a lot of stuff out there (save for maybe establishing space colonies or something) that would *get* enough people off the planet to get things back down to carrying capacity.)

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Ever hear the joke about the Fayette Area Rapid Transit?

[cow.livejournal.com]

I assume you've heard about the Seattle Great City Initiative (http://www.greatcity.org/)? Very cool stuff. The guy is working to organize people to, basically, demand exactly what you're suggesting from politicians; he was instrumental in the Complete Streets ordinance, for example.

A+, and I wish there were more of him in other cities, too.

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

LOL :D

Re: That was rather incoherently written, let me try again.

[wrog]

is labor really the bottleneck here?

I would think property is the bigger issue -- all of those rail/transit right-of-ways that were abandoned to property developers, sold off for a pittance, or never existed in the first place that we now have to somehow cobble together in places where real-estate is now extraordinarily expensive.