The Oil Drum

33 comments on Houston ASPO Day 2 part 1

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ThatsItImout on October 21, 2007 - 7:18pm

"He began by showing the rate at which the electric light was adopted into American homes, noting that essentially 100% was not reached until the 1980’s from inception in 1890."

That's a very poor comparison to the world today. We must recall that rural electrification was not even a priority until the 1930's when the RECC and the TVA came into being, and that not only did the lights have to be provided, the whole nation had to be wired from scratch.

Why not use a comparison like home computers or air conditioning, in which a prior structure already existed, and the technology simply had to be incorporated into it. On those, the adaption rates were quite fast.

This is the situation with, and helps make the case for the "plug hybrid" or "grid based hybrid". The electric power grid is already there. We simply have to find ways to plug transport into it.

We should recall that we do not have to reach 100% adoption for years, anything over a 10% to 20% market penetration will have huge effects.

Likewise the remark reminding that the Prius hybrid has only .02% market penetration since 1997. First, we must recall that for the first 4 years of that period, gasoline was very cheap, and no one gave a damm about fuel savings.

But the Prius Hybrid has had an impact out of all proportion to those raw numbers in sending developers and auto companies down a different path of development, and opening the door to the great and far reaching work by Calcars and the plug hybrid auto idea. That .02% penetration by Toyota has now been worth more in development of advanced transport than can have ever been imagined when the car was created, although I think some visionaries at Toyota knew exactly where they wanted to go, and where it would go. Likewise, the breakthrough work by A123 batteries and the PV solar panel developers.

But we will not really begin to see the effects of much of this for about 4 to 5 years. The ideas are just now being incorporated into future product planning, which is generally about a 5 year cycle.

We are now getting ready to see if the confluence can take hold. Like industrialism itself, if it does, it will begin to spread like a virus across industry after industry. We are already late, yes, we should have been doing these things since the 1970's. But if we can avoid World War, a now increasing spectre unless this administration is somehow pulled away from the buttons of power, we can do this. 70% of the oil consumed is in transportation.

The revolution will have to happen in your driveway. All the slander against the advanced development of transportation will not change that.

RC

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oilmanbob on October 21, 2007 - 10:53pm

ThatsItI'mOut
Roger

You are exactly right that the revolution starts in our driveways.

The nature of political leadership is that it is almost always reactive to the last set of problems. Rather than taking action to eliminate and head off problems before they become critical, there is an inherent bias towards conservatism, a bias towards using solutions that have worked in the past.

However, we had the rate of change speed up during the 20th century with two brand spanking new problems, population growth and geological maximums in energy and arable land.

I was born in 1951, when world population was approximately 2.5 billion people. Had the population stabilised at that level peak oil would be a dim prospect on the horizon and climate change from human pollution a growing but manageable problem. That extra 4 billion people is the excess population that the die-off folks seem to consider the problem for the long term survival of the human species on this planet.

The population growth is mainly amoung the poor. About 1/6th of the people on our planet lack electricity, live in huts, have noclean water, and have no education for their children so that the kids can have decent prospects in modern life. If their is any education, its the memorisation of the bible or the Koran and huge numbers are jihadists and crusabers that aggravate the situation with myths of Pie in the Sky When you Die. They are depressed because they see their prospects as hopeless and their children's prospects as hopeless.

These people want and need a way to get to a modern way of life, yet the resources to do this are just not available through the route that our part of humanity used. We've used up the cheap oil and the cheap resources like copper that hsve made the prosperity of North America, Europe and Japan possible, leaving us with a real conumdrum, what can we do? Since population growth is tied to desperate poverty, it seems our own intellegent sef-interest is to help lift the mass of humanity from destitution to prospects of hope and dignity.

But people don't respond very well to exhortation, they respond to example. If we have electric transportation in our driveways when TSHTF on gasoline, we'll have transportation while our neighbors are stuck in their SUVs waiting for the gasoline ration to be released. If we've reduced our use of electricity and invested in personal wind and solar, storing the excess in the battery of an electric vehicle or selling the excess back to the grid, we'll have more prosperity and transportation when others are franticially trying to rearrange their lives without a giant step down in the quality of their lives.

I concentrate a lot in my postings on the huge hole in our national security from energy because its the truth. Our reliance on ever increasing foreign imports is the root of the foreign policy disasters of the last 30 years. We are importing 2/3rds of the oil we use , an amount equal to our transportation needs. We've only a couple of months worth of imports in our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and we have hemoraged money and our manufacturing base to areas with cheap labor and energy supplies. Meanwhile, our foreign policies seem designed to alienate the rest of the world, its really scary.

But the solution starts at the end of our driveways. We are going to have to lead our political "leadership" by example, its the only resolution that will work.

Bob Ebersole