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59 comments on Natural Gas concerns continued

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pedex on June 25, 2006 - 11:59pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Problem is they might not have the chance, thats the rub. Natural gas goes up in price for 2 years straight at 40% a year(already there or close to it), then jumps some more after that. One good hard winter causing shortages and then the price spikes some more. Ok, so your in Kentucky, where it gets warm but not that warm. Now imagine Phoenix, where the "heat island" effect alone is now worth about 10 degrees these days in the summer putting it above 100F ALL day many days thru the summer.......can you live w/o air conditioning? Maybe if your young, but you wont like it. How bout South Florida? My Mom is already stuck there, or take about a 30% bath on her house she cant get rid of already due to the housing market dying in under 4 months. I know she couldnt live w/o it, but she couldnt afford paying $5-$700/month for it either, and it will get that high or higher unless an awful lot of demand goes away.

Then consider this country lives paycheck to paycheck on borrowed money, we dont have enough savings for a bailout plan, at least most dont. Sure, there is an enormous amount of waste and discretionary spending that can be wrung out of the system, still, that leaves the same problems in place. We've spent more than 100 years building a system that doesnt work without fairly cheap energy. Too many people moving and doing so alone and great distances. Our actual home arrangements may last awhile for those within a reasonable distance to work, but transportation will be the first issue added to increased costs for everything else. Without cheap transportation much of what we built doesnt work so well. Adding fuel to the problem is wringing out the excess means a serious downturn in our service economy because we let our base slip away to globalization, that isnt easily reversed.

An investment is only an investment if it returns money, if your upside down and cant hold on to your "investment", then you walk away from it, and under todays new BK laws, you may get stuck. The current inflation rate alone is wiping out or has wiped out most of the gains many have seen, even if they are too out of it to notice, that will get far worse.

Apocalyptic, ya maybe, but for some it will be a boom time, for others it will be ugly. For some its already ugly, almost a year later and the Katrina aftermath is still ever present for example. Depends on your situation and what your prepared to do, most I fear based on my observations wont fare to well in a crisis, and Uncle Sam cant be counted on to help, if anything the govt can be counted on to make things worse.

Yes, places that are 100% percent systhetic like Vegas, Phoenix, SoCal, etc etc that require massive amounts of water and electric just for basic needs will get pinched hard first. Those in more fortunate areas wont wanna sell either. Its a two pronged problem, your house becomes worthless and you cant sell it, but cant move w/o the cash from it, and if you could, finding a new place may be tough. Same with SUV's, they are about to become very very cheap and plentiful. Then because the economy will likely stall at  best and crash at worse, employment goes down the tubes too, what then? How many people do you know can go unemployed and for quite awhile, most cant.

Solutions, sure, lots of those. Most can be done with existing technology, ALL require the same sacrifice, culture change and a drop in living standrds, in a country that has been raised to believe that should never happen and cant happen. The mindset must be fixed first or none of this flies.

It all boils down to timeframe, is it spread out over a decade or more, or is it just a few years? If its soon, most people will be F'd for awhile, just the way it is.

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davebygolly on June 26, 2006 - 12:41am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Well put.
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Ablokeimet on June 26, 2006 - 7:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Where Kunstler & the die-off crowd are wrong is that they think everywhere is like Phoenix.  It's not.  Outside the US, hardly anywhere is like Phoenix.  Society is adaptable and will cope with Peak Oil - though not without some pretty drastic changes during power-down.  You'd be amazed how quickly people's mindset can change once their current one stops working.

There are two issues being discussed here: a possible near term crisis in the natural gas section of the US electricity grid; and actual shortages of fossil fuels caused by global depletion and reflected in high & rising prices.  I'll deal with the near term crisis first.

  1. Does anyone really believe that the US government will just stand by & let the power grid collapse for good in areas fuelled by natural gas?  I'll grant that they may just be stupid enough to allow a short-term collapse to happen through "leaving it to the market", but the solution to a natural gas crisis is so screamingly obvious - coal.  They'll fund the necessary work to connect the grid up properly so that coal plants further away can make up the gap between supply of natural gas fired power and demand.  Of course that will aggravate Global Warming, but that won't even slow down, let alone stop, the current political elite.  I can just imagine Bush & co saying "The Dutch can drown, but Phoenix is gonna have their power.  The American way of life is not negotiable."

  2. Turning to the longer term, despite anything anyone tells you, people don't actually need air conditioning.  The human race got along just fine without it for millenia and will again.  Think Mad Dogs & Englishmen:

          http://www.sabrizain.demon.co.uk/malaya/coward.htm

  1. When air conditioning becomes unaffordable, it will be junked in order to allow people to keep what they do need.  This process will be a great deal quicker if power companies get to introduce "time of use" charging.  They're moving towards this here in Australia and, when it's brought in, I predict a massive drop in air conditioner use.  Most people with one will probably still keep it, but they'll be much more sparing in their use and adjust the thermostat so that the machine is just taking the edge off the heat rather than making the house a "just right" temperature.  Even this is a luxury rather than a necessity and will go eventually if it needs to.

  2. The die-off brigade like to go on about the massive resources it will take to adjust to Peak Oil.  What they don't tell you is the massive resources that are presently going into unsustainable consumption & investment patterns.  By building railways instead of roads, trains instead of cars, and medium density flats instead of McMansions, you'd be amazed at how quickly many cities can be transformed.

  3. Of course, some cities just won't make the grade - they'll have too far to shift in too short a time.  I can certainly imagine Phoenix as one.  And it's quite possible many people might just have to pack up & go.  It's happened before.  Has anyone read The Grapes of Wrath?

      http://www.ac.wwu.edu/%7Estephan/Steinbeck/grapes.html

The good news is they won't have nearly as far to travel.  The bad news is they probably won't be driving.

6. Eventually, even coal will run out.  By then, however, people will have got the point about non-renewable resources.  Peak Oil will put the cornucopians out of business for good, so we'll be able to use the remaining fossil fuels as an energy bank to fund the transition to a sustainable society.

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59 comments on Natural Gas concerns continued

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