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Don't bother with the small car argument, it's the same thing as calling them stupid (which they are).
Instead... commiserate. Pretend to understand their pain. Show sadness as you tell them that according to Car and Driver ethanol gets 1/3 LESS MILEAGE and costs MORE MONEY. Let 'em chew on that for a while. Rant about the subsidies.
The next time the subject comes up. And it will. Confess your anger at your rising grocery bill. Be sure to blame ethanol.
Whenever possible turn the issue to ethanol. Eventually they will figure the small car angle.
Back in the 80's, people did abandon the large cars. It will happen if the price is high enough, and probably more importantly if people come to believe that higher prices are permanent.
My own little story is that I buy 15 gallons of diesel roughly once every 2-3 weeks or so. I am about to try joining the ranks of bicycle commuters, and I can telecommute from home - by the summer I might be able to cut driving to work to once a or twice a week or so. My own version of biofuels will be things like powerbar, hammergel, apples, bananas and nuts :-).
My girlfriend looked at me like I had two heads when I told her about the idea of bicycle commuting though. She asked me what route I was planning to take - I jokingly suggested that I would take Interstate-66, but she hadn't had her morning coffee yet, and she didn't realize that I was joking until a few seconds later. In reality there are pretty good bicycle trails that I can take to get to the office - a bit on the long side (18 miles one way), but nothing I cannot handle. And for that matter I can really use the exercise to work off the gut that I built up over the winter.
It happened in the '70s, but that was a sudden, sharp spike.
I wonder if the relatively slow rise we've experienced is letting people get used to higher prices. People complain, but they aren't cutting back any more. They're back to buying SUVs, not Priuses.
Like boiling a frog... do it slowly and they won't jump out of the pot.
Actually, a frog *will* jump.
Which is simply proof that frogs are smarter than humans.
A spike would certainly help. But folks in the '70s and early '80s had much more than that. There were recessions and inflation and unemployment and really expensive war and an impeached president -- a thick fog of economic gloom many years even when things were perking up. (GDP rose over the decade as a whole). It all built a mood for change.
Geez all we got are higher gas prices and some shakey mortgages. Foreigners seem willing to finance the war.
But give it time ....
ADDENDUM: Stronger counterculture back then, too.
Yeah and no. We are getting these seasonal spikes in gasoline costs, so every summer people talk about getting a hybrid or some such. It does bring to mind the story about boiling a frog though.
The thing that is different this summer is that the sub-prime mortgage thing has gone sour in an awful hurry. People will no longer be able to take out the home equity loan on their houses to buy a car. I suppose for a lot of people the type of car you drive is a sort of status symbol (that's what the automakers want). How else could one justify spending 50K$ on a vehicle of any sort, really.
I remember years ago I was listening to Click-N-Clack, and they had a story about someone they knew who was very wealthy with old money. They looked in the garage to see what they drove, and they had something ordinary - like a Dodge Dart or some such. The explanation was that any mechanic in the country could work on such a car.
Which means they'll be stuck with their gas-guzzlers, no matter how expensive gas is.
But at least it will be more comfortable if they have to live in their cars.
It did occur to me, when I was reading Deffeyes' book, that the volatility he predicted might lead to people becoming less responsive to price. People start assuming that prices will go back down, if only they wait. Few seem to notice that the lows keep getting higher.
Thinking about the possibilty of for instance a doubling of gas prices, and the potential effects that would have on their lives, is probably simply too much for many.
For millions, the financial squeeze of gas prices will make it ever harder to even get to work in the first place, and then they have to worry about their rising mortgage payments as well.
And then, as mentioned in this thread, there's sharp increases in food prices. Assuming that all these prices wil at some point start going down again may well be mostly a subconscious reaction.
Prayer and denial often feel much better than reality.
"...the financial squeeze of gas prices>>>"
I saw someone buying a $3.50 cup of coffee at a coffee shack while I filled up on $2.99 gallon midgrade. It's still too cheap. Unless you are lower income and payment straped.
I think we could have riots here in the US. I want to look as poor as possible, an old beater car that smells bad and some crappy looking clothes!
I don't see your logic.
Did you only buy one gallon. Did the coffee drinker buy 10 to twenty cups of coffee each day.
Cheap is relative to other options and long term pricing.
Do you need it to make money and function in society is another question.
I like ice cream. A local grocery has it for 5dollars a 1/2 gallon. Two miles roundtrip. I also need several other items. Sams sells the same ice cream for 3dollars a half gallon. I am buying two so thats a 4 dollar savings. The trip will require one gallon of gas for a 24 mile round trip for my vehicle. This savings more than allows for me to pay for the gas to drive my car. I will save more buy making he longer trip, because other items will also offer savings.
I have used more gasoline, but I have saved money.
thats a problem
Quid Clarius Astris
Ubi Bene ibi patria
"Cheap is relative to other options and long term pricing."
Cheap is relative to income, period. If I make $10,000 per year, then gas at X price is ten times more painful to me than if I made $100,000 per year.
For most people in the U.S., given their incomes, gas is still givaway cheap.
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Actually, it's more than ten times as painful, because in both cases your necessary, fixed costs (food, heating, etc.) are the same - so you have to subtract that first before comparing. If you need, say, 5000$, your disposable income is 95000 vs 5000 - 19 times as much.
if you make 10k or 100k you just have to find a way to live within your means. shoe leather(er.... i mean shoe vinyl) is waaaaaay cheaper than gasoline.
of course our federal government doesnt have a clue about living within it's means and maybe that is the source of the problem.
The point is that as the price of fuel rises then so rises the cost of everything else.
Pretty soon that CUBIC MILE doesn't mean much for we will all be digging groundhogs out of the banks for food and making shoeleather soup.
In case it's not known there are huge number of folks on FIXED INCOMES!!!!
As fuel(oil.energy.whatever)goes..so goes our economy. Its far far more than something to drive to work. Its life. Its "death on a stick". Your lifestyle means more than driving. Its electricity,food,medicine,fertilizer and ...........
Airdale-screw bicycles..I'm getting back to horses. Yeeehaaawwww
(or mules maybe....giddap Sal)they make such nice road apples..so handy you can even cook with em. Mules is where its at.
We are one cubic mile of muleflesh from freedom.
(sorry,couldn't help myself RC)
Perhaps. The other thing about those 50K$ cars is that people tend to lease them instead of purchasing them, so they can dump them back on the manufacturer.
Folks can get a Honda Civic for about 16K$. Not a hybrid, but it would get 30-40 mpg. Spend about 4-5K more, and you get a hybrid that in theory will get nearly 50mpg.
The hard part is going to be getting people to abandon the status symbol thing.
Dunno about you, but $16,000-$20,000 is not exactly chump change to me.
And it would be less so if I had a mortgage that was bleeding me dry, or a loan on a $50,000 SUV to pay off.
Buy a used Honda, then.
Everyone else will be doing the same. Remember the used Priuses going for more than new?
Those gas-guzzling SUVs won't be taken off the road. The price will drop until they sell.
Tstreet,
Listen up: when gas is high enough that people would want to do as you advise, probably in the $4.00 or $5.00 plus range here in the States, the economy will be tanking and people are simply not going to be able to afford new cars even used new cars.
I love this line of thinking which boils down to "the solution to the collapse of the car economy is for people to buy more cars. . . "
Come on Tstreet. If you're on a forum like this one you should be able to see the problem with such thinking. "I can't afford to drive to work. What shall I do? . . . ahh. . . I know . . . I'll buy a new car!!!" and/or "I just lost my job because the economy is tanking as gas goes to $5.00 a gallon . . . What shall I do? . . . Sweet Jesus I'll just buy a new car!!!"
The Prius is a status symbol. They just haven't passed out the book yet that shows people what the latest status symbols are. It's also a chick magnet. :) Actually, I just made that last part up but am trying to start a rumor for all those men trying to attract women with their Chevy Silverados.
We will never abandon the status symbol thing; we just need to change the symbols.
One realises that things in the US are in a serious FUBAR when fuel economies of 30-40mpg are considered good. We have a car that does some 35mpg. It's an old vehicle, reaching the end of its life, and that's the only reason we tolerate such high consumption. If we do buy a new one, never in our minds would we even consider getting a car that wouldn't do at least 45mpg!
I hope I didn't get my figures awfully wrong, though in a way I almost wish I did, since it would mean the US is not that seriously messed up. In Europe the most common metric for fuel economy is "liters per 100 km". Google tells me that 5l/100km (the target number) is about 47mpg. Am I missing something?
Yeah, gas is twice as expensive in Europe. Adjust for that and you've got 23.5 miles to the gallon. In other words, about the same level of financial pain per mile per gallon.
Yeah! When I got my Honda Insight, I started ribbing my wife about her 'gas hog' Subaru Justy (45mpg).
Here in France fuel is expensive, currently at €1.24/litre ($3.50/US gallon). But our cars seem to achieve far better mileage than those in the US, no doubt due to their smaller size. I get circa 45mpg in winter and 55mpg in summer in my Fiat Punto (the Citroen C1 diesel gets 80mpg). A friend gets 55mpg from his secondhand VW Golf diesel.
A car is just another machine and its utility is in going from A to B with its passengers. The Punto costs about US$11,000 new. I wouldn't buy an overly complex and expensive vehicle like a Prius, why would anyone (especially with their limited life and expensive to replace batteries)? The technology already exists to get better MPG from cars and its already mass produced, the only problem seems to be in the mind of people worrying about what's an acceptable vehicle to be seen driving (fashion victims).
Like most on here I believe we're at peak, but I also believe we have to face the future with what we've currently got in the way of useful technology (which excludes about 90% of available technology). I'm also alarmed, as a European, that people in the US seem to think we're going to go from our current situation to a "mad max" scenario overnight or we're going to fix the problem with new technological/political breakthroughs. The threats we will face more than likely will be more mundane, but just as dangerous if not more so.
For example, today people are less hardy than their forefathers, this is a constant complaint by the military, but it also indicates we are also too unfit to live as our forefathers did. The biggest medical complaint around here, amongst people moving to the countryside, is back problems (including me). A serious back injury can mean the end of self-sufficiency, how mundane is that?.
If civilisation as we know it is under threat from its own complexity (ie. dependence on oil, economy, etc), then presumably we have to remove the threat by simplifying and making it less complex (eg. less technology). Probably impossible at the nation state level and probably only achievable at the individual, family or community level acting in their own self-interest.
I look forward to Westexas's article on ELP.
The desire to revert society back to a 'simpler' or less interdependent social structure, while emotionally attractive, can only happen as a result of a catastrophe that destroys the existing social order.
Just like in biology, the inexorable direction of social order is increasing organization and interdependence. This is governed by the 2nd law of thermodynamics (yes, I do have a degree in Physics, and no, that statement is not backwards, despite the common understanding of entropy as "maximum disorder"...)
Note that in biology, evolution always results in a more complex, more organized creature than the ancestor species - never the reverse. Single-celled creatures -> multi-celled creatures -> worms & such -> fish & reptiles -> birds & mammals... The same is true for societies. A more highly organized society, where the individuals have fewer and fewer degrees of freedom, and are more and more interdependent, has higher entropy than a less organized, less interdependent society. (This is my extension of the work of Prigogine, and Brooks and Wiley in modelling entropy for hierarchical information structures). But you can't reduce entropy - so whatever form of "simpler" society we want to achieve must have an even higher entropy than our current society. That implies that there will be vastly fewer choices, and a commensurate loss in security, for individuals in the simpler society
The only way to reduce interdependence is to reduce our standard of living dramatically. Since the only way to do that is to make a lot of people and companies poor who are currently wealthy (by shrinking their markets), and to make each of dramatically less safe than we currently are, it can't happen 'voluntarily'.
Note that it is entirely possible for individuals to live less interdependent lives within the context of the larger interdependent society without losing most of the benefits of the larger social organization. This argument is discussing the transformation of society as a whole, rather than individuals and small communities, which would destroy our ability to sustain most of our modern health care, food production, IT, manufacturing, etc...
I haven't figured out exactly what this means for our world today. Obviously, a catastrophic, or cataleptic decline in society would increase the entropy of society as a whole - so they are certainly very real paths to a 'simpler' social organization. But I can't conceive of any way for society to voluntarily move to a simpler form without a catastrophe (or catalepsis)...
There seems to be some irony that if you truly desire a simpler and less interdependent world, you are asking for a war, or famine, or massive decline in the available energy supply... pain and suffering for billions, and a return to lives that are 'nasty, brutish, and short' within a few generations, at most.
Personally, I do hope that we can sustain our modern, global civilization, and that we can transition, however painfully, to alternative sources of energy. While I am contantly outraged by the behavior of our governments and military and monied elites, and I see clearly the pain and suffering and injustice in the world; I also see that we feed, clothe, educate, nurture, and gainfully employ more people today than ever in history. More people live free from repression, disease, and violence than have ever done so in all of history. This is an extraordinary achievement!!! And we are learning, or re-learning wisdom throughout the world, slowly, painfully accruing lessons on the impact of our now massive presence on the now fragile globe. We are polluting less, we are conserving more, and I believe we will reach equilibrium, if we survive long enough...
So I will fight to preserve what we have; I work to educate friends and family (and soon my town council) to start thinking about lives without petroleum & natural gas. I will support HEV, PHEV, and EV with my consumer dollars; I will install solar HW and electricity and brag about them insufferably to my friends & co-workers. Above all, I will keep a sense of perspective about life, balancing the good and the bad, seeing past fear, toward hope.
And of course, I'll keep reading TOD :-)
CW
Global peak: 2007 - 2010
Global decline rate, Post peak: 2%
Economic response: Severe global recession, ~5 years, then slow recovery
CW,
Awesome post.
I'm sypmathetic to many of the normative political agendas that are now advertising their agenda as a solution to this problem but at the same time I've grown a bit tired of their bullshit, as you explain:
What I find really ironic is there is now a subculture of people flying all around the country going to Peak Oil conferences telling us we need to live a simpler life?! Puh-lease.
sorry but hunter gather lifestyle was not 'nasty, brutish, and short'
it at the same time was not a paradise.
i do not know why people swing from those two extremes, but from what i can see from what all i have read.
it was a hard life, but you were better fed and suffered from less diseases then one can now. though at the same time you did not have people living into their infirm 80's. you had hard years but only when everything else is suffering.
you could get bad injury's but thats the same with farming.
quality vs quantity basically.
Security was orders of magnitude lower for hunter gatherers than it was for successive social organizations: Injury, famine from climate variability, predation (from other tribes and animals competing for the food/land/water resources) led to extremely short live expectancies. Education was non-existant other than for food production knowledge - literacy was not developed until societies were far more copmlex than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle could support.
Although it is a simple treatment, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is an excellent description of the 'physics' of civilization, and the reasons why we can confidently say that we have progressed immensely since the days of hunter-gatherer societies.
CW
Global peak: 2007 - 2010
Global decline rate, Post peak: 2%
Economic response: Severe global recession, ~5 years, then slow recovery
The sources before civilization are very sparse. The sources of early civilization are not much more numerous, worse, they are biased as they were conceived by the top beneficiaries of civilization.
Injury:
People don't fall from stairs if they're civilized?
Famine:
That is a vulnerability of farmers, not hunter-gatherers. Nomads move when it becomes harder than they like to procure food. Farmers starve if their crop fails/granary burns/land floods/etc..
Predation:
At least wolves stop being hungry now and then. Cars are always ready to bite. Besides, it's not like the tribal wars have stopped, or have they?
Life expectancy:
Use their cultural bias (i.e. exclude everyone before 3 years - call it a late abortion) and you get a whole different picture.
Education:
Come on, every tribe had elaborate customs and a large oral culture.
Literacy:
Finally, a good point. They did lack a broader vision of time and space, and the ability to accumulate knowledge. Still - what's the difference with a large part of today's population?
To conclude, it's not so simple to make an unbiased comparison; let alone a judgement about what kind of life is preferable for a homo sapiens sapiens.
I can't believe you are seriously arguing for a return to cave-man levels of civilisation. Tell you what. How about you practice what you preach ... log off, sell your house and go move to the African bush. Just don't get killed by wild animals, other people or ebola.
It also makes me laugh that you consider passing down creation stories from parent to child as "education". If I were to pass down ancient knowledge to my children they'd probably be taken away by the CPS ... talking crap about the moon and the stars doesn't equal an education in anybodies books.
I am not arguing for a return to caveman levels of civilization. Just providing another viewpoint, namely that history is not a single trend leading from misery, vice and squalor to bliss, virtue and paradise (of which our society would than, coincidentally, happen to be the pinnacle).
The knowledge and culture passed down was adequate for their needs. They wouldn't need a driver's licence, or a degree in Law. As for walking the talk: civilization is taking up all real estate right now, so I don't have the choice at the moment. Neither does my viewpoint require it. Besides, if I were to do that, I would end up cold and starving. Just like a hunter-gatherer in a city today. Civilized skills are not useful as a hunter-gatherer, and vice versa. The concept of "progress" is defined by civilization - of course they are better at it than a tribe.
"I also see that we feed, clothe, educate, nurture, and gainfully employ more people today than ever in history. More people live free from repression, disease, and violence than have ever done so in all of history. This is an extraordinary achievement!!!" Posted by Hindmost
But all this is entirely dependent on abundent and ever growing supplies of cheap energy. (And other finite raw materials as well)
Antoinetta III
No, it's not. We fed, clothed, and gainfully employed many more people than ever before in history long before fossil fuels were discovered.
True. It is interesting though that the major acceleration in population growth that resulted from improved medical 'technology' (like penicillin, vaccines, and doctors learning to wash their hands before delivering babies...) occurred at almost the same time that we harnessed fuels for mechanical work (e.g steam engine).
Clearly, supporting the current (and future!) levels of population is almost literally inconceivable without fossil fuels...
CW
Global peak: 2007 - 2010
Global decline rate, Post peak: 2%
Economic response: Severe global recession, ~5 years, then slow recovery
That's not true. It is one of the most commonly held misconceptions about evolution though.
Evolution has no goal, no end point, no 'feelings' over what is or isn't a better organism. It is a process that ensures that an organism is best adapted to its enviroment, nothing more.
There are plenty of examples of organisms that have shed unessicary complexity to move into new niches or adapt to changing enviroments. Snakes, for example, shed the complexity of limbs to move into their neiche (and some of the most primitive snakes such as pythons still have the residual bone structures).
If the enviroments changes and complexity becomes mal-adaptive then evolution ensures that either that complexity is shed or the complex organism dies out. Which outcome is likely depends on many factors such as the reproductive rate of the organism in question, the nature of the change, the degree of the maladaption, the presence or absence of competing organisms and the rate of the change.
If you are going to subscribe to the super-organism theory of applying biological principles to larger groupings of organisms such as ant colonies or even human society that is fine. But there is nothing inherent in biology that says the direction of change must always be from less complex to more complex.
The only direction that the change must go is from less adapted to more adapted to a particular enviroment.
Excellent summary.
Reminds me of Darwin's quote, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
Its so hard to articulate complex ideas in a blog format :-)
I agree that evolution has no goal or end point; I'll try to clarify my contention a bit. The Hierarchical Information theory outlined in "Evolution as Entropy" (Brooks & Wiley) as applied to biology states that the information contained in the genome of a given species & population is governed by the laws of entropy. This is more specific than a discussion of the morphological complexity of the species, and doesn't preclude apparent morphological simplification at speciation. Each speciation event results in a greater entropy in the genome than was present in the genome of the previous species. The higher entropy genome will have more complexity, but fewer of the possible combinations will be expressed in the descendant species. The # of 'excluded' combinations represents the entropy of the genome, and must increase at every speciation.
I don't have a ready description of how that works for the case that you highlighted - presumably the snake genome became more complex as it evolved from the ancestral species, even though specific features such as legs were no longer expressed.
Disclaimer: I am not a biologist, and I am liberally adapting a still-controversial model of information entropy to (loosely) apply it to social hierarchies. This is only a personal model of How The World Works, not a formal theory. This model fits my intuitive understanding of how social systems operate, but I have not explored the literature on this topic, and can't claim that this model is authoritative.
I don't subscribe to the super-organism metaphor (can it really be called a theory, if it doesn't have a causal model?), to the degree that I am familiar with it. I subscribe to the theory that the 2nd law of thermodynamics governs the the information embodied in hierarchical social systems, and the constraints that it imposes are analogous to those that apply to the hierarchical information embodied in the genomes of species. Thus the biological model of evolution can be used as a guiding metaphor for social systems to the degree that the physical information storage and transmission is comparable. Since there are significant differences in the way that information is stored and transmitted in these 2 types of systems, there are limits to the utility of the comparisons.
The inexorable trend toward increasing complexity and interdependence seems to be consistent with history as I understand it; except for catastrophic reductions in population, societies have always progressed from forms of low interdependence to higher interdependence, with commensurate reductions of individual freedoms. Obviously, this would be a tremendously complex contention to justify, with thousands of specific, fascinating cases to argue about. It would make a great Masters or Phd Thesis, I suspect. Someday...
CW
Global peak: 2007 - 2010
Global decline rate, Post peak: 2%
Economic response: Severe global recession, ~5 years, then slow recovery