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Likely Congress would throw a hissy-fit if any truly meaningful proposals were made to increase (by government requirement) mileage.
Well now, that is the 4 million bpd question, isn't it? I wonder what gasoline would have to cost to make that 20% happen by demand destruction? I've also wondered for some time what would happen if gasoline was sold (at retail) by auction, as in eBay or one of its many copy-cats. Who would bid $5, who would bid $6? Are the gasoline stations leaving money on the table by having pre-determined prices? We have the technology to implement an auction system... I wonder if it will come about....
Yes, but there was pressure (except from Michigan elected officals) to raise CAFE by small "reasonable" amounts OR just move SUVs out of the "light truck" category and into the "automobile" category :-)
I think my suggestions can save 2+ million b/day and with the aid of higher oil prices even more.
Add sharply higher CAFE and we are almost there !
Best Hopes,
Alan
I think US business tax policy is also to blame. You get a 100% this year deduction for trucks /suv's with over 7600 gvw. Buy a fuel efficient one and you must deduct slowly. We nned to stop propping up detriot and favoring oil consumption via the tax system. This should be a no brainer...
The real no-brainer should be that it's way too late for any such changes to have any effect at all.
It would be as cruel as refusing a dying man his last cigarette. Once the poor sod is hooked up to 3 respirators, 2 heart-pumps and a dozen in-vitro tubes, his eyes haven't opened in a month and the morphine doses are at good-enough-to-put-down-an-elephant level, maybe you should just accept it's over. He has Japanese kidneys, his third heart from China and 6 Saudi pacemakers. What did you expect?
Start writing the obituary, and leave him that last cigarette and his last bit of dignity. Sure it's hard, and the women are wailing and all, but we all have to go one day. And even though he was a mean SOB, and many who knew him are more likely to party than to mourn him for even a second, he too did have his moments.
You are very funny :-)
Well, thank you.
But only on Sundays.
My point is serious enough, though: I posted two comments (1, 2) in yesterday's thread, both referring to the same article, that connected a few more dots. For me, at least, I don't think many people understand.
It's clear by now that the housing crisis will ravage the US economy, drag the Dow to new lows and leave millions desolate, unemployed and on the street. However, there always seems to be the hope of a recovery. As every economist knows, the economy moves in cyles of boom and bust, that sort of logic.
What I figured out yesterday is that recovery is impossible in the US for at least the entire next generation. The US loss of its manufacturing base has reached epic proportions in the past 10-20 years. This is justified by "experts" and politicians through the claim that we are moving towards a "knowledge-based economy".
Forget for a moment that there are enormous doubts whether such a thing could even exist, and stick with the numbers: the article states that it's become so expensive to get an education in the US, only 18% of kids finish college, let alone university.
So on our "march" towards that "knowledge-based economy", we are confronted with the fact that we are losing our knowledge base maybe as fast as we are losing our manufacturing base. Ergo: we will have neither a knowledge-based economy, for lack of a knowledge base, nor a manufacturing based economy, for lack of a manufacturing base.
What will we have then?
(I also evoked the Law of Receding Horizons: only an economy with a strong manufacturing base, i.e. a productive economy, is able to offer its children affordable education, which is essential for aquiring knowledge, step 1 towards a knowledge-based economy. In the process of moving from manufacturing to knowledge-based, the economy loses this ability. It is thus a self-defeating process, similar to tar sands, oil shale, ethanol et al)
From Drudge:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070429/D8OQ9IMG0.html
Flippers Flop As Housing Market Cools
Apr 29, 9:09 AM (ET)
By RYAN NAKASHIMA
I wonder what percentage of workers in Clark County (Las Vegas) live off the discretionary spending of other Americans, or work for the government?
It seems that housing starts are down, which is followed by completions, and then declining employment. However, this time it appears that employment is not falling like it should. However decreasing shipments of $ to latin america is now the economic indicator of declining employment by illegal aliens who don't get unemployment benefits.
http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini/190912
If illegals are underemployed, and Cantarell is crashing what are the mexicans going to do? besides go north
Hi HeIsSoFly,
I have trouble with the word, economy.
Edit from Merriam-Webster is this definition,
economy: noun:
careful management of material resources
Near Antonyms extravagance, improvidence, lavishness, prodigality, squandering
Antonyms wastefulness
From this it would seem that, What we will have then is Economy. (Just not so good as it used to was)
I too am serious. The commons has been destroyed by the beast with many names, corporatism, capitalism, globalism to give a few. It devours the worlds true wealth including its peoples and defecates dollars in return for the commons. The solid or base economies of markets that sustain have been displaced by hierarchal systems of amassing wealth.
I doubt that tinkering with a false economic sytem will do much good. Not with global warming here and global heating waiting in the wings.
Don't ask me for any realistic solution, I'm just here for the show and the popcorn.
BTW, enjoyed your dying man bit. Keep the punters awake, eh!
Lately I've been thinking of technology as knowledge applied to resources and exchange - a form of culture almost. So you cannot have technology or culture advanced to a different degree than the resources and exchange can support. Jevon's Paradox seems only to apply within a single congruent mix of those factors; it won't apply to dropping our use of fossil energy so much that technology, culture and exchange change to a different congruent state as well. Oil use would not increase, for example, if only the rich had horses and everyone else walked.
What I'm trying to figure out is whether or not the downslope of technology looks like the upslope or whether radically different mixes are possible. Can one have windmills and semi-conductors with a transport mode of horse-drawn wagons, bicycles and some rail? Will there be any high-speed rail or will trolleys be about the best we can do? We cannot have simply a knowledge based economy; someone has to make the donuts and toilets and they will have to be made locally. My head hurts.
cfm in Gray, ME
Today, the Chinese are making the toilets and most of everything else, yes, perhaps even the donut ingredients.
And lo and behold, we wouldn't have any economy left that would merit mentioning if we didn't borrow our money from them. That includes the money we need to educate at leeat the 18% of our kids that still DO get an education. Most of whom will end up as overseeing less-educated burger-flippers.
A knowledge-based economy, and even the very notion and idea of it, is a theoretical monstrosity that kills itself, in and of itself. To put it crudely: such an economy requires the presence of slaves, either domestically or abroad.
Apart from the knowledge based economy or manufacturing based economy, neither of which we will have, what else is there? I see two alternatives:
1/ an agricultural economy, 100 million farmers.
2/ a military economy, with all resources, natural and/or human, directed towards the same goal.
i have a dark feeling about that choice.
Just like the growth economy, the human brain works in one direction only. They are a perfect match.
i don't think it's the economy that requires slaves.
it's civilization it's self, and we were lucky enough to be born at a time where those slaves were replaced by machines run on fossil fuels.
TrueKaiser, I think you are right.
I remember some of the city born heads in the 60's deciding to go off to the country and be part of nature...they were back after 3 days, shaking. Yet that is where we all came from. I also read an article that talked of how the human mind adjusts to it's surroundings, viewing the familiar as beautiful even if not very nurturing.
We were lucky to be born now but It would have been nice to have been born wise as well. I've thought for a long time this morsel from an earlier age quite apt for ours:Give a peasant a horse(or a technical civilization) and he will ride it to death.
Looks like back to the fields for me. I would like this communication machine to be still around though. For the rest, I am finding, there is very little that I can not make grow or trade for within a days walk that I actually need. And a lot outside, that days walk, that I can do without.
Of course I just bought a wood stove manufactured in a small city/town under 50,000 (energy efficient of course)about two days walk from here and I imagine they did use a lot of imported fossil fuel in its construction, and I didn't walk there and pack it back myself,
Here is a scary article about how people react to the housing market.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/04/29/ap3665826.html
"The day Schwartz reserved his home, the sales staff was raising prices $20,000 after every fifth buyer came inside. The $500,000 house he and his wife were eyeing had shot up to $540,000 by the time they sat down. Somehow, it still seemed like a good deal."
The sales staff were adding value to the home, just because.
Further down in the article it talks about the crazy lending practices where someone was able to put $1,000 down on a $1,000,000 home. This is why the housing market is taking a nose dive off a short cliff. WE did this to ourselves.
Of course we do most things to ourselves, this is just one more in a long line of things that we have done that bite us back in later years.
As the housing market goes through it's corrections, the money lost can mostly be explained as "make believe money" We added value where there was nothing of substance there to begin with, so it is all just paper money gone poof.
What will get hurt the most is the workers making all these houses. As the craftsmen slow to a crawl the lack of funds will trickle down to the rest of the Economy one way or another.
My sister told me this past weekend that she no longer felt any desire to give up smoking. Between the missing bees, the melamine in the human food supply and the new trash to energy plants dumping toxics everywhere in Maine, what's not to like about smoking?
cfm in Gray, ME
Hi Dr.
Ouch. My guess this is a result of the emotional side of "not being able to" stop. (I so much want to jump in here, which is just 'cause it hurts to read this.) The idea of (as you probably know) is not the death itself, it's the debilitating disease that precedes it. Anyway, the brain sometimes talks when the emotions can't (or don't know how to) deal with withdrawal, is what I've observed.