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58 comments on On Low Quality Hydrocarbons (Part I)

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Glenn on September 21, 2005 - 4:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Or as Simmons always says - there is no silver bullet, but many, many small things that will have to come together for us to smooth out the depletion curve. Reducing wasteful consumption and increasing alternate production are the keys.
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TRE on September 21, 2005 - 4:40pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
And as I posted above, there will be demand destruction--or pain--along the way.  The pain of a guy who just purchased a hummer and can no longer afford to drive it.  The pain of someone who purchased a home 60 miles out who can no longer afford to commute.  In some of these cases, there will be no satisfactory answer--or a partial answer for this person--but a reality for them will be a loss of income, a loss of future income because they chose to purchase that hummer, or to buy that overpriced house in the desert east of LA that requires non-stop air-conditioning during the hot times of the month.

Some bad decisions have been made.  Undoing them will be painful.

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Glenn on September 21, 2005 - 4:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
That's definitely true TRE. The question is how will those people channel their frustration? That's the mega political question of the 2006 / 2008 election cycle.

BTW - great post Stuart. I'm a big fan of your analyses.

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Joao Carlos on September 21, 2005 - 5:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
That is simple: the Republicans will blame the democrats, Clinton and the liberals for the high gas prices. And they will say that the solution are more tax cuts.

They will win the elections again...

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Glenn on September 21, 2005 - 5:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
That's my nightmare. But really I hope someone points out that the republicans have controlled congress for over 10 years now and the White house for 5 years. They built up a huge deficit, lost a war in Iraq, missed 9/11, botched NOLA, pissed off most of the world and accomplished very little except accelerate sales of SUVs and suburban sprawl.
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Joao Carlos on September 21, 2005 - 5:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Bah....the Republicans can make worse. They can blame the democrats, Clinton, the liberals, the gays and teaching evolution at public schools as the reason there are high gas prices. And they will say that the solutions are cut taxes, social security reform, ammendment the Constitution for send gays to concentration camps and make sure no science (evolution, Hubert's Peak, Global Warming) be tauch at the public schools, you know, who need science?

And the american public will give the victory to these guys because, you know, they are macho and USA need fight "the terrorists"...

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Bubba on September 21, 2005 - 9:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
What saddens me most is that a Brazilian (or Portuguese) understands the US better than the majority of those who liver here.
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ericy on September 21, 2005 - 5:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

There was a story on public radio about Hummers in Paris.  With gas at 7$/gallon, it costs about $250 to fill the tank.  If you used this as a daily driver, and filled once a week, you are looking at $13,000/Yr.  There will always be people rich enough to do this, of course.  They claimed that sales were still strong - I guess that says something about the demographic that is buying the things.  Ultimately the demand for those things will have to collapse though.
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72myz on September 21, 2005 - 7:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Recession would certainly 'help'.
http://www.sustainableliving.info/fading_of_the_oil_economy_recession_overview.htm

But as in the above rather 'market forces' piece, Hubbert foresaw the implications -
"Our window of opportunity is slowly closing... at the same time, it probably requires a spiral of adversity. In   other words, things have to get worse before they can get better. The most important thing is to get a clear   picture of the situation we're in, and the outlook for the future - exhaustion of oil and gas, that kind of thing -  and an appraisal of where we are and what the time scale is. And the time scale is not centuries, it is decades."

Sadly, no-one listened, it is no longer decades.

The bottom line is that there is no alternative for cheap energy, and adapting to high cost eneergy will bring massive unemplyment and social dislocation. Highly unpalatable. Likely to be true. No escape.

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58 comments on On Low Quality Hydrocarbons (Part I)

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