Interview With Ian Gordon

IAN: Well I do subscribe to the theory of peak oil. But again, I think the demand for oil is going to drop precipitously. Simply because no one’s gonna be working. Again if we use the idea that 45% of the U.S economy is going to be halted. That means essentially that the same kind of oil demand is the percentage dropping oil demand is also going to occur in the United States. And we are only picking on the United States because she has the largest economy in the world but we are all going be in be in the same boat.

So the whole world economy is going to drop by that kind of percentage.

TRACE: But not necessarily a precipitous enough drop that we could see 90% of the earth’s population washed away in this winter because of unsustainability?

IAN: Well, you are not going to see that because, as you know, there is a significant part of the world’s population who basically do not have anything anyway. If we go into Africa, or huge parts of China, India, etc. even though they are emerging nations they still have a large percentage of the population that are extremely poor.

The following is a guest post by Dan Allen, a high school teacher in New Jersey. Previously on TheOilDrum, Dr. Allen wrote The Speech Obama Needs to Give.

Note from the author (Dan Allen): As a high-school teacher, I wanted to give my thoroughly-industrial, suburban-NJ students a more detailed peek at their upcoming post-industrial future. I felt the need to challenge their prevailing mindsets regarding our resource-depletion predicament: the “shorter showers & change the light-bulbs” crowd, the “engineers will surely come to our rescue” folks, and the “problem? -- what problem?” people. This essay and the before/after comparison chart that follows are part of my ongoing (unsanctioned) attempts at doing so.

Monday, November 2, Arthur Berman wrote in his blog:

Pressure from Petrohawk helps cancel World Oil column

In an act of extraordinary courage, a top Petrohawk executive threatened to cancel his free subscription to World Oil if the magazine continued to publish my column. Today, John Royall, President and CEO for Gulf Publishing, cancelled my November column.

I have accordingly resigned as contributing editor.

Heading Out (Dave Summers) and I have been talking about the issues Arthur Berman raises for quite a while now. Most recently, Dave wrote a post called Shale Gas Estimates Perhaps Optimistic - An Interesting and Worrying Talk at ASPO.

So what are the issues involved?

This is a guest post from Will Stewart. Will is a systems engineer in the DC area and previously has written several guest posts on The Oil Drum, including a series on Passive Solar Design.

As oil production falls and volatile oil prices in concert with a struggling economy induce a pattern of demand suppression/destruction, mobility choices will narrow and Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) will decline. What should governments at all levels be proactively preparing for? What should individuals and their families be preparing for in advance? The choices are broad: at a high level, land use planners could refine cities into a series of compact, carfree urban districts interconnected with mass transit. For the existing built-out suburban and exurban communities, however, such choices are limited. Aside from telecommuting, transportation choices will increasingly include biking, carpooling/vanpooling, bus rapid transit, and other efficient means of transportation. Travel between cities and countries will also undergo a transformation, with air travel becoming less and less affordable.

This series will cover current and projected land-based vehicle energy efficiency and a high level overview of the factors that determine it, such as aerodynamic drag, weight, efficiency of motive force (e.g., engine, motor), rolling resistance, driver behavior, drivetrain losses, parasitic losses, environmental factors, Passenger Miles Traveled (PMT), etc. In this first article of the series, we will focus on energy losses associated with aerodynamic drag losses, or more succinctly, “drag”.

Tri Sled Avatar, a velomobile	Bus rapid transit in Cleveland