Ten years ago GM was telling a story: we'd drive gasoline cars (and SUVs!) now, and when oil or global warming became a problem, hydrogen cars would be ready to replace them. This might have been a cynical marketing move ( tobacco companies & cancer, Exxon & global warming, GM & fossil fuels ), but it is also possible that they bought into it themselves, over time.

They may have come to believe their own BS that oil would stay cheap, and then (cheap?) hydrogen would be there to replace it.

I snagged this quote in July of 2005:

[…] Sherrie Childers Arb, director of environment and energy communications for GM, said it’s wrong to assume higher oil prices.

“Our indicators show that oil will go down, not up,” she said, pointing to information she gets from the federal Energy Information Agency, which is part of the Department of Energy.

By 2010, the agency expects a barrel of oil to fall to $26, she said.

The source is now gone but my old blog entry is here: http://odograph.com/?p=267

Anyway, I think GM got caught flat-footed, either because they thought they had more time to run the SUV -> hydrogen game, or because they'd fallen for their own marketing. At that point they were stuck with a lot of product and a long design cycle (it takes years to get a totally new car on the road). So they had to talk a story that supported their current inventory. They had (desperately) to keep people buying, while (secretly?) in the back room scrambling to come up with the new generation.

But again the interesting thing is that they can't be too "forward" in their statements. They've got a lot of Tahoes down there on the lot, right now.

Notice that the Volt has a gas fired generator on board. One of the "problems" with the electric vehicle like the EV1 is that it required very little maintenance, a very unattractive option for an auto company. As long as we can perpetuate some sort of ICE along with the battery, we can ensure the need for continue and long term maintenance like oil changes, etc.

I will believe that people like Lutz "get it" when they announce that the overwhelming dependency on the automobile for transportation is a model that it is inappropriate for the survival of the planet as we know it and continues to be a serious hindrance to livable cities and a high level quality of life.

I note with sadness that another article above points out that places like Ireland have decided to follow in our footsteps. No one ever learns until it is too late.

Yes it is puzzling. Switz. is very green and ecologically minded, has a hands on democracy, and the vested interests are not oil lobbies or car/machine manufacturers or the military-industrial complex, so called. .. Corps, all the same, eg. Bank-insurance and Big Pharma. And CH produces a LOT of arms.

And yet the picture is very similar.

It seems to be the case that ‘oil’ (fossil fuels) is so tightly wound into our ‘modern’ economies that the very thought reducing their use is frightening; for the present economic scheme - capitalistic growth- to continue, oil must keep on pouring in and giving forth its miraculous free lunch. Without it, or realistically, with mild or sharp reductions in availability, so much changes that no-one can really contemplate it.

This attitude is shared by pols (who want to be elected or remain in place), the ‘economic milieu’ (who wants to keep earning pots of money with their businesses), and ‘the people’, mostly employees, who want their children to succeed, want to drive a car (even a second, why not?), want to indulge in expensive leisure (planes, ski holidays, trips to the mall) and generally consider that living standards, including medical care for. ex. have to rise. Disabled people, special ed kids, and pensioners live off the investments made by their ‘funds’, which have to perform, return at least so much %.

Not new, I know. Says little about the future. The point is that much of the tortuous discussion and real life attempts re. green energy and renewables are attempts to maintain the status quo, if only psychologically...those in the know (vested interests, savvy Gvmt. types, the military, etc) understand that much of the ‘diversification’ of energy proposed is not reasonable, cannot really function (EROEI, long term considerations, etc.) so their response is luke warm or muted or even scornful.

Birds that fly in flocks have genetic collision avoidance systems, humans do not.

I see flying humans in rush hour flyways as a massive disaster waiting to happen.

Useful for rural travel no doubt, but electrified Urban Rail is a better solution that can be implemented quicker than raising a next generation of flying children (think teenagers with wings and ground bound parents !#).

Best Hopes for electrified Urban Rail :-P

Alan

#"Grounding" as punishment would take on a completely new meaning ;-)

Yes, here's a great quote:
"I’ve heard the opposite of Lynch’s claim, but it hardly makes any difference. What we see when we observe these curves is that they go up on the left, and they go down on the right, and regardless of what happens in between, that is enough to claim that something very unpleasant could eventually take place with the global supply of oil"

Great article.

Dave Cohen wrote:

Oh, for everyone -- I highly recommend An Almost Friendly Update on World Oil that Leanan found.

Just checked out the online discussion group mentioned in that article.

It's called "Energy Pulse" and can be found at:
http://www.energypulse.net/

Very high quality. It's moderated. In fact, it seems you have to be somebody to participate. But quality is very high.

James

In my opinion, investing in Public transportation systems is the way to go. Hybrid are just a lost cause and should never be considered as a option.

If I was to implement a public policy I would try to do both. I would gradually tax up gasoline and cars and move them to the luxury category, where they belong. The revenue goes to building mass transit!!! The only alternative to the suburban nightmare we are putting ourselves into.

In my opinion, investing in Public transportation systems is the way to go. Hybrid are just a lost cause and should never be considered as a option.

If lithium gets too expensive they'll have to figure out how to use sodium. It will weigh more but probably not prohibitively so for a battery pack of that future time when it happens. After all, the containment system and oxidizer seem to be the major weight factors for large batteries.

IMO you're likely to see some kind of electric car, like it or not, because public transportation really only works for trips within places having stacks and stacks of wall-to-wall people. The majority of Americans loathe such places - for example, they go to the country on vacation, not, as Europeans sometimes do, to the city. (And electronic media have greatly lessened the need for them to physically visit performing arts centers, stadiums, and other such urban facilities.) Indeed, today's articles suggest that the majority even of Europeans may not actually want to live in crowds either, even if history and rampant confiscatory taxation have thus far fated them to do so. (And what little I've seen of European suburbanization seems to align with this.) I don't see how anyone gets around this sort of thing anytime soon, unless one herds countless millions at gunpoint along some new Trail of Tears into some unimaginable new kind of artificially densified concentration camps.

Oil is not used in any large amount in the grid---gas is, of course.

Off hours have some significant capacity with coal and nuclear.

In the end, all logical deductions, quantitative computations, and recognition of current technological abilities, point to one thing: we need more nuclear plants.

There will be a strain in off-hours power production, but it is not fundamentally limited by geophysics. Remember that the amount of money to order 1 going to oil companies will go to electricity, and there will be enough desire to increase capacity.

"In my opinion, investing in Public transportation systems is the way to go"

This just doesn't work for a large number of people. The investments in homes and physical locations of businesses is much larger than in vehicles. Plug-in hybrids will come first.

The danger is that they will be coal-fueled instead of nuclear and wind fueled.

However, how will we power large vehicles and construction machinery, etc. without a carbon-neutral diesel substitute? Biofuels in one form or another make sense as part of a long-term energy portfolio.

Yes, there will always be a need for some biofuels. And "some" biofuels is not an issue. Replacing gasoline with biofuels is the issue. It can't be done.

We in the U.S. need to reduce our carbon emissions by at least 80%. Do you honestly think that automobile electrification can do that in the transportation sector? Not a chance. What's going to fuel automobile manufacturing? What's going to provide the electricity?

The thing about electricity is that it can come from a lot of different sources. We can start to electrify now, and start supplementing our coal-generated electricity with more solar, wind, and electricity from biomass gasification. Ultimately I can see solar panels on a large fraction of houses as the source for electricity for personal transport.

There is no physical law that states that the energy stored in carbohydrates can never be converted into liquid fuel without requiring a massive fossil fuel input. Most likely, gasification and catalysts will be able to do the job, even if nothing else works.

Again, the issue is one of scale. Biofuels can and will make a contribution, as they are now. People who think we will continue motoring along in our SUVs as biofuels replace gasoline are delusional. That's the point.