The Oil Drum

The impact of high energy prices will come through the economy. May be the consumers can afford a $4 gasoline, but think about an industry that has - say - energy costs of 20% of total costs. Doubling of energy prices will make the share of energy costs to 33%. This will easily wipe all profits out.  Energy-intensive manufacturing is already dying, industrial investments are down and trade deficit up. This will bite.

I think sincerely that the American driving habits are rational in that social and physical environment. People are not fools. The drive like this because they can afford it and they have good reasons for it. The problems will arrive, but not from there you are looking at. The suburbs are not the real problem, industry is.

Everybody knows how to decrease gasoline costs (take the smaller car, slow down, avoid unecessary driving, car pool etc.), but how do you cope 20% unemployment? Dollar down 50%?

Roger Conner  known to you as ThatsItImout

But it is not.   All energy resources on this planet come from solar bodies.   PV takes the photons from the sun and converts them to energy humans use.

Now, why is a watt of power from a PV panel 'priced' the same as a watt from coal?  Because the photons of energy that results in a watt DO have a time value.

average salary is probably greater than $12/hr.

And all these workers do such valuable stuff like reading TOD.

Many of the cars that speed past me for a few exits down the NY Thruway I encounter again at the toll plaza. If I have EZ-Pass (electronic payment) rather than having to pay cash then I almost always make up the time lost due to slower speed - they are sitting in the line waiting to pay while I just go on thru with hardly a hesitation.  Naturally down the road a bit they fly by me again - but they gained no time on me - and we're usually sitting a couple vehicles apart at the next red light.  All they've done is waste fuel.

All other things being equal of course going faster will get you an equal distance in less time - but another observation - large vehicles tend to drive the fastest where I drive - and they definitely use more fuel than I do.  So chances are on a long trip, where extra speed actually translates into a meaningful amount of miles versus someone traveling slower, they are going to have to stop to re-fuel at some point.  Well then a 5 or 10 minute fuel stop (the bigger the tank the longer the fill up) knocks off some of the speed advantage; couple this with the toll lane and a couple red lights and the extra speed probably ends up netting the faster driver just a slight advantage in the end.

Of course I'm not arguing that going faster can't get you somewhere faster - just that a simple calculation assumes that all this is done as some kind of physics problem in a vacuum.  But of course real world driving is full of so many variables that it's difficult to say whether in any given trip driving faster will actually get you somewhere significantly quicker.

I would also argue that there is no worse congestion than the dead stand still you have to sit in when some idiot going 20 mph over the speed limit rolls his car and the emergency crews have to come in to clean up after them.  Speed is a THE major factor in auto accidents and I can only imagine the amount of fuel wasted in this country due to idling in traffic while an accident is being mopped up.