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I'm more and more suspicious of any proposal that depends on switching where switching involves much in the way of rebuilding. Because if it takes something like 25 barrels of oil to build a prius and then maybe a barrel a month to run it the barrels to convert will themselves be too much. All of society will be trying to invest oil now to reduce future demand for oil. [I know because I'm doing that personally.]
It won't be only one sector of society, eg automobiles, but it will be the grid, food, industry - all at the same time. The recognition of peak oil is going to drive any entity willing to prepare into a spend-it-while-you-have-it mode. Sort of a pre-hurricane rush to the store.
Duct tape!
cfm in Gray, ME
The flaw in many of these reports is that they report energy usage as oil consumption when in fact most of the steps either can or even already are not done in oil. What such reports should honestly say is barrels of oil equivalent in energy, but they do not.
For example, there is a large myth on this website that most mining can only be done with fossil fueled machinery. This is simply not true as almost all underground mining is done electrically which means that above ground mining could be if necessary. And the manufacture of an automobile in the assembly line is very electrically oriented, not fossil fuel oriented.
This is precisely why we could change how we live. Fossil fuels are not how many people portray them. We have many other energy sources that are close enough in cost that we could use those instead. The problem is not can we do this but rather will we do this?
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett