I remember when petrol first reached 20 cents per litre in Australia. 1979. I was only a kid at the time, so people must have been complaining pretty loudly for me to remember it.
People have this tendancy to think that what they see in front of their faces everyday is normal. But "normal" changes all the time.
A column mentioning the report -- back when oil was around $40 a barrel -- was met with a barrage of testy e-mails. The basic reaction was that commodity prices were already a bubble that soon would burst. Oil at $100 was seen by most as fanciful. Yet 3 1/2 years later, oil is well above that level and climbing
People have an idea of "normal" based on their experiences during the last decade or two. Anything that doesn't fit with that limited experience is "fanciful" or impossible. I always think it is funny how economists talk about "the post-war period" as if we legislated away chaos in 1945, and any return to the instability of prior errors is so unlikely it is not worth discussing.
If you are willing to go back even a hundred years in shaping your worldview, you have to admit that anything is possible,the rules can change completely in the space of a year and turn the world upside down, and people don't like to think about that.
Your story in Australia in 1979 reminds me of when my Father and I filled up in Los Angeles in 1965 (I was 9) for 28 cents a gallon, (that's almost 4 gallons for 1 buck!) while two guys feverishly washed the windshield, checked tire pressure, trani fluid, radiator and oil. They use to have gas wars back then, where stations would compete for your business by lowering the price to beat the other stations and offering greater service at the pump. They actually had soap in the bucket to clean the windshield, and those guys did it so often they could clean it without leaving a single streak. It's a moment in time etched in memory.
Call it the opposite of today when I passed our local station that has water with no soap to clean the windshield yourself, and every type of gas is over 4 bucks for 1 gallon.
In the UK we still remember, barely, $4.00 a gallon. Try the current price round here £1.079 per litre and thats not the most expenive in the UK - nearly $10.00 a gallon, depending which measure of a gallon you use US or Imperial.
I remember gasoline being about $0.45 per gallon, & motor oil $0.25 per quart. The first time I saw gas >$1.00 per gallon was in the Yukon Territory, driving an F-350 Ford truck to Alaska. I thot "What's the world coming to?" at that price.
We are the lucky generations, favored by chance to have lived during the extremely narrow window in human history when fossil fuels were cheap & abundant and antibiotics actually worked. My greatgrandparents farmed with horses, my grandparents' generation moved to town & worked in factories, my parents were mod & educated and worked in offices, my generation were hippie throwbacks to the land who could afford to not take survival seriously, my kids are IT techies struggling with debt, my grandkids won't have horses to farm with & will likely starve or die of infection from bacteria that have evolved multiple antibiotic resistence. What amazing times these are.
Darwin-
In the 60's in LA, I never paid more that .25 per gallon. (about .09 per liter).
Of course, the dollar did go a bit further those days, and survival was simple.
Rent for 3 months in Huntington Beach? $90.00.
I too have been have similar thoughts regarding the uniqueness of growing up during the Postwar boom, which I would roughly place as the period from about 1953 through the late 1960s, or thereabouts.
Not only was fuel cheap and totally taken for granted, but there was a pervasive optimism that the future would be better (provided we didn't get nuked by them Rooskies) and that one's children would do better than one's own generation. Even throughout the turmoil of the late 1960s, economic and resource worries appeared to more in the background.
If one came from a working-class background, it was a given article of faith that if you acquired a college diploma, it would be an automatic ticket to a life of prosperity. Of course, this may have been wishful thinking on the part of a lot of second-generation immigrant families, but nonetheless there was faith that the system would hold and that there would be a niche in that system for almost everyone (of course it helped to be white).
As an example, I graduated from a small eastern engineering school, class of '67. Of the 270 graduates, EVERY single one had at least one job offer, and the average number of job offers was something like 4.4. When I relate this little factoid to young people that react with total disbelief.
If things continue the way they are, I think colleges and universities are going to be in for a real hard time, as it becomes more and more apparent that going to college is no longer going to offer much promise of bettering oneself economically. College was once largely the domain of the professional and monied classes, and it wasn't until after WW II that there was a flood of young working-class people attending college, all looking for a shot at the American Dream. I think we might see a retrenchment, in which enrollment at colleges and universities will shrink and we will once again see these institutions revert to serving a smaller body of elites. This would be entirely consistent with the ongoing hollowing out of the American middle class. Alas.
"the extremely narrow window in human history when ...antibiotics actually worked"
This reminds me of the return of wheat stem rust (UG99) which has been on my mind lately. We bred disease resistant wheat varieties back in the 60s, which resulted in much more reliable yields, which together with pesticides and fertilisers has allowed grain supplies to increase to the point where we can feed 6 billion people.
However, a new form of wheat rust has evolved which can overcome the most common genes for resistance in modern wheat varieties, and is likely to make it to India in the next couple of years. Wheat yields could be severely reduced. Fertiliser is getting more expensive due to demand and higher oil & gas prices, shipping costs and production costs for pesticides are rising as oil prices rises. Can the "green-revolution" get a second wind post-peak?
We are due to hit 7 billion in 2012, and 8 billion in 2025. Most of the extra people will be a band from Nigeria to Bangladesh.
It seems to me that at some point the population growth omnibus is going to run into the brick wall of peak food. And the more people on the bus when that happens, the more horrific the resulting mess is going to be.
In that band they are breeding madly without any thought as to where their future food is going to come from. I hope they don't intend to export their extra billions to us.
There is no reason why we should suffer for their failure to keep their reproduction to sensable levels. Out food resources wouls break under the strain.
They know it takes many dozens of them to match the consumption of any ONE of us. What is the reason that they should suffer for our failure to keep our consumption to sensible levels?
Not to forget that you're making a blanket statement about the reproduction choices of the population between Nigeria and Bangladesh.
Damn, you almost sound American with such rubbish!
But it's OK for developed countries to use virtually all of the energy resources (US: <5% of population, but uses >20% of all the energy) and to waste enough food to feed millions?
Well I doubt Weatherman is Jesus, but I agree with his thoughts.
Humans love to tie arguments together, especially if it avoids dealing with them properly. The developed world uses too much. Thats a problem. The undeveloped world breeds too much. Thats a problem.
Yes because every day I hear a government spokesman telling people to stop consuming to benefit the economy and to stop breeding to save national resources..... Oh wait no I don't!
Anyone who blames the current food crisis on the poor is __________. (< fill in your own adjective.)
This isn't even worth discussing. There is, at present, the ability to feed the world. There is, at present, not enough willingness to do so. While total numbers will be a problem, they are not the problem now. This is obvious and it is inarguable.
Studies have shown the birth rates in NW Africa are amongst the highest in the world. No mention was made of race. It may be lack of ethics, poor planning, not seeing the results of one's actions, lack of good education, different moral values, etc.
Beyond that, these Nations have been subjected (literally) to colonization by Nations that are adept at painting their own moral superiority, probably with a thick layer of material frosting to emphasize their provenance and approval by God, the material being supplied by these perpetually impoverished subjects.. 'Different Moral Values', indeed.
On the northeast corner of Nineteenth Avenue and Ortega in San Francisco is a Standard (Chevron) gas-station. I worked at that gas-station from January, 1972 to October, 1976; I was at San Francisco State at this time, so I worked weekends during the school year and full-time for most of the summer.
When I first started working there, gasoline fluctuated between 25.9 and 35.9 cents per gallon, (for Premium, or Ethyl, as it was then often known, Regular was a three or four cents a gallon cheaper) as, if I recall correctly, they had for the past decade or more. The price fluctuation was due to the ongoing “gas wars” conducted by local gas-stations. I could come to work one weekend and gas prices would be at the bottom of the range, and we would be quite busy, the next weekend the prices would have gone up a few cents, and the weekend after that we would be at or near the top or the scale, and business was quite slow. Then, the next week, prices would have plunged down to the bottom of the scale again, and the whole cycle would continue.
But, although none of us working at the gas station were aware of Peak Oil, or the fact that the US had hit its peak back in 1970, this last fact undoubtedly was behind the unexplained minor shortages that started appearing in mid to late 1972, the first of the long lines at the station, and the price (temporarily, as I recall) rising to an unprecedented 40 cents a gallon. But the optimism of that era was deeply entrenched, I recall at the time gas hit the 40 cent mark sitting around with four or five co-workers at the gas-station on a slow day, and asking how long it would take gas to reach a buck a gallon. Everyone looked around, thought, then the unanimous verdict was: “Naah, never happen.”
Anyway, I don’t know if we made arrangements with the Saudis or others for increased imports, because, as I recall, this 1972 mini-crisis seemed to melt away after a few months. But this didn’t last long, as the Arab Oil Embargo came down in mid-October of 1973, and its effects begin to be felt at the pumps only several weeks later. At first this consisted of price rises, to what were for the times, unprecedented levels. I recall going out to service a car, and the old guy in it looked at the price on the pump, a mind-boggling 50 cents a gallon. He looked at me and said “F**k you, I’m not paying you rip-offs” He started to drive off, but before he left, I snarled back at him, “Well, Asshole, you’ll run out of gas before you find anything cheaper, the price is the same everywhere.” And the price WAS the same everywhere, from now on it would only move upward or at best hang steady, the era of the “gas-wars” between service-stations was over, forever.
And the gas-wars were not the only long-standing business practice to end, forever. Before the Arab Oil Embargo, gas-stations, grocery stores of all sizes, and other retail outlets gave away trading stamps. People born this side of the late ‘60’s probably have never seen these, but they were a regular feature at retail outlets throughout my childhood and teenage years. On the West Coast, the trading stamps were Blue Chip Stamps and S&H Green Stamps, with Blue Chip being by far the more widely offered. Each stamp had printed on it “Cash Value One Mill.” (A mill is one tenth of one cent.) These were actual stamps, about two-thirds the size of an ordinary postage stamp, and gummed on the back, and you pasted them into booklets which, when a sufficient quantity was amassed, could be redeemed for stuff like toasters, vacuum cleaners, etc., mostly household appliances and stuff, as I recall. Anyway, these vanished from the entire retail scene, not just the gas stations shortly after the Arab Oil Embargo really started kicking in. Gas-stations in general, as far back as I remember, also offered free state and local highway maps that they gave away to their customers. Maps didn’t disappear, but they were no longer free as a price-tag of from 50 cent to a buck was now charged. And, of course, the Embargo was the beginning of the end for the true “service-station”, before, “self-service” was rare, but from this point in time on, it expanded, while the full service stations continued to diminish in numbers over the years.
When the Oil Embargo was first announced, the first effect were the price rises. Most people must have (incredibly, naively, from to-day’s vantage point) thought all this would be quite temporary, as for the first week or two of the Embargo, business was slow, as, I suppose people, like the guy who buzzed me off over 50-cent gas must have thought that prices would soon come down. It takes about six weeks for a tanker to sail from Saudi Arabia to the U.S., so six weeks after the Embargo was announced, the effect became quite noticeable, and the real gas lines became an everyday feature. This was when the government installed the odd-even (based on your car’s license number) sort of “Rationing Lite” system. And the oil companies practiced their own rationing, as each service station received a specific monthly allotment of gasoline. Scotty (Scotty Petrie, the operator of the 19th and Ortega station at this time) calculated that if he sold every car all the gas they wanted, that he would exhaust the monthly allotment that Standard Oil granted him in slightly more than two weeks. So Scotty instituted a limit of 8 gallons to every car coming into the pumps. Business hours were also cut back, and this created problems with the long lines of waiting autos, which backed out of the station and went up the street, frequently curling around the block and extend up most of that block. So, a couple of hours before closing time, we would take a large cardboard sign that said “Last Car”, go out to the last car an the line and inform the driver he was lucky, as he would be the last getting gas here to-day, then hang the sign on the back of his car. One day, I went out with the sign, and as it turned out, the last car sort of stood out, an almost overwhelmingly bright yellow VW Bug. I put the sign on the car, and returned to the gas-station and continued pumping gas. A couple hours later the yellow VW comes up and I sell it its gas, and went on to service the next car after the VW departed. It wasn’t until three or four cars had bought their eight gallons that I flashed on the fact that the VW was supposed to be the last car for the day. There were several cars still in line with the sign now on the last of them. It turned out that after I left the sign on the VW, the next car came up, and offered the driver of the VW $5 to take the sign and put it on his own car; he then sold the sign to the next car coming behind him, and so on. Ever after that, an employee of the gas-station had to simply stand by the last car, and slowly walk with it as it inched towards the station, and waving off all would-be customers.
After five months, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia felt he had wrested as much as he could out of the US and the West insofar as seriously addressing the (at the time) 25 year old Arab-Israel conflict. So the Embargo was lifted, and the oil flow resumed. But before the Embargo, the Saudis were getting something like $2.80 per barrel, afterward, as part of the price for restoring production, Faisal insisted on, and got a price of $11.65 per barrel. And the era of 25-35 cent gasoline, along with free maps and trading stamps, was over….Forever.
Anyway, thanks for the trip down Memory Lane. A lot of it just seems unbelievable now, free maps and trading stamps and getting cussed out behind 50 cent gas. Definitely, it was another era.
I bought 90 cents' worth of gas today, because that's what I had in my pocket and I wanted to be able to get into Town *and* back. Did some (caricature) work so I can now afford to gas up the bike AND go to the Laundromat. I'm really looking forward to not having to buy gas at all.........
Cheer up, your grand kids won't have the many compounds in their food that suppress their immune systems, or fragile immune systems from being raised too clean. Antibiotic resistance is only an advantage for a bug if there is antibiotics.
I remember when I was around 12 years old, there was a "gas war". Now, this is different than the current war over oil in Iraq. It was where the gas stations would compete over customers by lowering prices to extremely low levels. The station my Dad patronized was offering gas for *FREE* for any customers with their station's credit card. Here we are 40 years later at $3.99.9 now at our local N.CA. stations (diesel is $4.39.9).
Our local county and city "leaders" are busy talking about "economic development" and getting more tourists to come and spend money here... while I see LESS road traffic and tourists as energy prices continue to climb. This is happening while the county is saying they will have to cut back on road maintenance and winter snow plowing because they cannot afford asphalt and diesel fuel.
The nearest airport is in the midst of a huge expansion... Obviously they are not considering how these planes will be fueled. When will people "get" what is going on and direct meaningful and appropriate change? Probably not until forced.
I'm assuming you live in or near Shasta, California, a beautiful area. I live near a similar area that is almost completely dependent upon tourism in Colorado.
We just had a local election for Mayor and town board and one of the questions is what we do in the fact of rising oil and gas prices given our dependency on those who get here by auto. A very popular answer had to do with "Better marketing". Impose an additional 2% tax on lodging and beef up the marketing effort.
So, in this area, I guess, the future for dependency on the automobile is secure.
I will give some credit to one of the mayoral candidates, however. I asked him what we were going to do with $200 oil and $10 per gallon gasoline. The gist of his answer is that the town might just wither away to something resembling the 1920s, a playground essentially for the the rich. That may be the more realistic and honest answer.
Yes, indeedy. All America needs is better marketing and this country is gonna grow.
There are a few tourist destinations left, however, that are adjacent to or near what is left of our train system, i.e., AMTRAK. In the future, especially if we could get the system upgraded to Bulgarian standards, these tourist areas will prosper, relatively speaking,to those completely dependent upon the auto.
There are a few tourist destinations left, however, that are adjacent to or near what is left of our train system, i.e., AMTRAK. In the future, especially if we could get the system upgraded to Bulgarian standards, these tourist areas will prosper, relatively speaking,to those completely dependent upon the auto.
That may include us down here in South East Florida USA (beaches) 'cept we might be under water in 25+ years.
That a highway was considered to be more important than a rail connection to a few keys with no point on each more than an hours bike ride apart is something that I still can't understand.
I'm assuming as a Floridian you're familiar with the East Coast line down to Key West which was wiped out in...1920?
Well there were hurricanes but I guess the one that did it in was the 1935 one...Labor day storm?
There is a region (the entire keys) crying out for transit and a bike sharing program.
It's been years since I have been down that way. I agree with you, but the old time Conchs - they think of themselves as the Conch Republic and quite apart from the mainland - can be quite self sufficent and I image will return to such a status once the pretenders in their McMansions desert the place post carbon.
I guess they'll have to figure out how to get fresh water since the main pipeline comes for the mainline.
I suppose the few left can sail around once the gas is gone and the road infrastructure collapses - either from deferred maint or another Cat 3+ storm.
Florida is a mess while the High speed rail has been denied funding by the state, there are numerous road projects going on and of course there is a lot of sports infrastructure being built.
One has to wonder why sports venues are replaces before they are paid for. i.e the old Tampa stadium, "the big sombrero"
Why Miami needs three arenas, etc. Why does Orlando need two football stadiums and why does it need a new arena (O-rena) when the current one is less than 20 years old?
The money and materials that are to be spent replacing the dome in st pete, a perfectly good venue that has many good years left, could be better spent on public transit, the money and materials spent on the Raymond James stadium, if put toward the teco street car line could have added miles to the system and better prepared Tampa for a post oil future. What good will these new stadiums be after the peak oil crises destroys major sports leagues.
I just stepped off Amtrak in Portland, OR -- started in Washington DC. Certainly the only civilized way to travel these days.
My question, however, is whether Amtrack is really any more fuel efficient than cars, busses or even airliners -- if each mode of transportation were to run full, that is. Those big trains use up a lot of Diesel fuel.
As an engineering consultant that works in the transportation field and formerly worked in the engineering department of an aircraft manufacturer and two railroads I can say this:
A 2004 Oak Ridge National Labs study www.narprail.org/cms/index.php/resources/more/oak_ridge_fuel showed that Amtrak trains, which were also hauling many cars of freight and mail, were only 17% more efficient than airplanes. Then the average long distance train had three to ten cars of freight and 6 to 8 passenger cars. Since 2004 Amtrak has discontinued its mail and express freight business, except for hauling 100 lb or less parcels in the baggage compartments, just like airplanes. So, many of these trains decreased their fuel consumption by half or more as the locomotives required to pull the trains dropped from four to two and from two to one. The Oak Ridge study did not account for the freight hauled by the long distance trains thus skewing the results to make trains appear less fuel afficient.
In 1979 the Budd Company and the Electromotive Division of General Motors did a study that showed short distance passenger trains attained 250 to 500 seat miles per gallon. Since then trains have become more fuel efficient and so have airplanes. But note that the best fuel performance by any plane will be the Boeing 787 which attains only 70 to 80 seat miles per gallon.
I would venture to say that a cross country trip today on Amtrak is around 100% more fuel efficient than the typical jet plane trip.
I did a study a few years ago (things have changed a bit) and diesel Amtrak (exclude NEC which is electrified) got about 85 pax-mpg with 58% load factors. Southwest Airlines got 53 pax-mpg with low 80% load factor. Belly freight needs to be added to SW for better evaluation of overall fuel efficiency.
I am not a great fan of expanding Amtrak where it runs on diesel, except where it picks up passengers who would have otherwise driven (<250 miles trips ?).
Stationary hotels and restaurants running off grid power are more energy efficient than rolling ones running off diesel.
I would rather see federal subsidies go to capital improvements that will last over a century (DC Metro to Dulles) than annual subsidies that evaporate the next year.
NOT a popular position with rail fans that I hang out with :-(
Not sure how freight affects the airline fuel efficiency, but it is not much. My company used to regularily ship by Southwest Air freight and I would venture to say that it is not much compared to what Amtrak had in their trains in 2004. Just looking at what was on the floor of the SW air freight terminal in St. Louis (near the end of the day) would not half fill one boxcar that Amtrak hauled. Likewise I have made hundreds of flights on SW over the last 20 years and have watched what was put on board at most stops - not much compared to passenger baggage.
My comment about the 250 - 500 seat mile per gallon (SMPG) shows short distance diesel trains hugely more efficient than short air trips. Part of my job as a new hire mechanical engineer with ATSF RR in 1981 was keeping track of fuel used by locomotives and trains traveling cross country. Those figures on diesel locomotive fuel usage/ seat miles per gallon from GM were accurate. I have also examined fuel consumption of Amtrak long distance trains and they would consume around 3 0r 4 gallons a mile with 200 passengers (maybe 300 seats) and two or three cars of mail/freight. This was in the 1999 to 2002 years. So your figure for 85 PMPG is also accurate.
I am against annual subsidies to energy inefficient modes of transport, like the $10 to $12 billion per year for air traffic control and part of airport security that is not user paid.
I agree the best scenario for trains is electric power, but diesel powered trains can save oil here and now.
I would rather see federal subsidies go to capital improvements that will last over a century (DC Metro to Dulles) than annual subsidies that evaporate the next year.
NOT a popular position with rail fans that I hang out with :-(
Let me take this opportunity to second your theses here... The very important issue, if what we are concerned with is continuation of a decent society for our descendants, is to think long term. In this case capital improvements that change local communities, change they can live with over an entire lifetime and not just over the next fiscal year.
I live in Durango. Same deal. In the 50's we tore out the train lines that connected us to everywhere else. All the grocery stores and hotels on Main Avenue now sit with their backs against a train track that doesn't go anywhere, while the groceries and tourists arrive in cars and trucks over hundreds of miles of heavily-maintained mountain road.
I used to live in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia surrounded by the old deserted hot springs resort towns of the 19th century that have just withered away to a single super-expensive hotel (if that) and no other jobs - I wonder if those towns will soon come back and we'll end up like them.
Ahhh, the good ol' days:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27257
"Driving to and from living room and fridge" - why not? It's a free country, right?
I still remember gas being 92.9 cents per gallon.
I remember when petrol first reached 20 cents per litre in Australia. 1979. I was only a kid at the time, so people must have been complaining pretty loudly for me to remember it.
People have this tendancy to think that what they see in front of their faces everyday is normal. But "normal" changes all the time.
People have an idea of "normal" based on their experiences during the last decade or two. Anything that doesn't fit with that limited experience is "fanciful" or impossible. I always think it is funny how economists talk about "the post-war period" as if we legislated away chaos in 1945, and any return to the instability of prior errors is so unlikely it is not worth discussing.
If you are willing to go back even a hundred years in shaping your worldview, you have to admit that anything is possible,the rules can change completely in the space of a year and turn the world upside down, and people don't like to think about that.
Your story in Australia in 1979 reminds me of when my Father and I filled up in Los Angeles in 1965 (I was 9) for 28 cents a gallon, (that's almost 4 gallons for 1 buck!) while two guys feverishly washed the windshield, checked tire pressure, trani fluid, radiator and oil. They use to have gas wars back then, where stations would compete for your business by lowering the price to beat the other stations and offering greater service at the pump. They actually had soap in the bucket to clean the windshield, and those guys did it so often they could clean it without leaving a single streak. It's a moment in time etched in memory.
Call it the opposite of today when I passed our local station that has water with no soap to clean the windshield yourself, and every type of gas is over 4 bucks for 1 gallon.
In the UK we still remember, barely, $4.00 a gallon. Try the current price round here £1.079 per litre and thats not the most expenive in the UK - nearly $10.00 a gallon, depending which measure of a gallon you use US or Imperial.
I remember gasoline being about $0.45 per gallon, & motor oil $0.25 per quart. The first time I saw gas >$1.00 per gallon was in the Yukon Territory, driving an F-350 Ford truck to Alaska. I thot "What's the world coming to?" at that price.
We are the lucky generations, favored by chance to have lived during the extremely narrow window in human history when fossil fuels were cheap & abundant and antibiotics actually worked. My greatgrandparents farmed with horses, my grandparents' generation moved to town & worked in factories, my parents were mod & educated and worked in offices, my generation were hippie throwbacks to the land who could afford to not take survival seriously, my kids are IT techies struggling with debt, my grandkids won't have horses to farm with & will likely starve or die of infection from bacteria that have evolved multiple antibiotic resistence. What amazing times these are.
Darwin-
In the 60's in LA, I never paid more that .25 per gallon. (about .09 per liter).
Of course, the dollar did go a bit further those days, and survival was simple.
Rent for 3 months in Huntington Beach? $90.00.
Darwinsdog -
I too have been have similar thoughts regarding the uniqueness of growing up during the Postwar boom, which I would roughly place as the period from about 1953 through the late 1960s, or thereabouts.
Not only was fuel cheap and totally taken for granted, but there was a pervasive optimism that the future would be better (provided we didn't get nuked by them Rooskies) and that one's children would do better than one's own generation. Even throughout the turmoil of the late 1960s, economic and resource worries appeared to more in the background.
If one came from a working-class background, it was a given article of faith that if you acquired a college diploma, it would be an automatic ticket to a life of prosperity. Of course, this may have been wishful thinking on the part of a lot of second-generation immigrant families, but nonetheless there was faith that the system would hold and that there would be a niche in that system for almost everyone (of course it helped to be white).
As an example, I graduated from a small eastern engineering school, class of '67. Of the 270 graduates, EVERY single one had at least one job offer, and the average number of job offers was something like 4.4. When I relate this little factoid to young people that react with total disbelief.
If things continue the way they are, I think colleges and universities are going to be in for a real hard time, as it becomes more and more apparent that going to college is no longer going to offer much promise of bettering oneself economically. College was once largely the domain of the professional and monied classes, and it wasn't until after WW II that there was a flood of young working-class people attending college, all looking for a shot at the American Dream. I think we might see a retrenchment, in which enrollment at colleges and universities will shrink and we will once again see these institutions revert to serving a smaller body of elites. This would be entirely consistent with the ongoing hollowing out of the American middle class. Alas.
This reminds me of the return of wheat stem rust (UG99) which has been on my mind lately. We bred disease resistant wheat varieties back in the 60s, which resulted in much more reliable yields, which together with pesticides and fertilisers has allowed grain supplies to increase to the point where we can feed 6 billion people.
However, a new form of wheat rust has evolved which can overcome the most common genes for resistance in modern wheat varieties, and is likely to make it to India in the next couple of years. Wheat yields could be severely reduced. Fertiliser is getting more expensive due to demand and higher oil & gas prices, shipping costs and production costs for pesticides are rising as oil prices rises. Can the "green-revolution" get a second wind post-peak?
We are due to hit 7 billion in 2012, and 8 billion in 2025. Most of the extra people will be a band from Nigeria to Bangladesh.
It seems to me that at some point the population growth omnibus is going to run into the brick wall of peak food. And the more people on the bus when that happens, the more horrific the resulting mess is going to be.
In that band they are breeding madly without any thought as to where their future food is going to come from. I hope they don't intend to export their extra billions to us.
Racist much?
There is no reason why we should suffer for their failure to keep their reproduction to sensable levels. Out food resources wouls break under the strain.
They're just doing what they can...
They know it takes many dozens of them to match the consumption of any ONE of us. What is the reason that they should suffer for our failure to keep our consumption to sensible levels?
Not to forget that you're making a blanket statement about the reproduction choices of the population between Nigeria and Bangladesh.
Damn, you almost sound American with such rubbish!
But it's OK for developed countries to use virtually all of the energy resources (US: <5% of population, but uses >20% of all the energy) and to waste enough food to feed millions?
Jesus, I hope you are banned soon.
Jeers
Well I doubt Weatherman is Jesus, but I agree with his thoughts.
Humans love to tie arguments together, especially if it avoids dealing with them properly. The developed world uses too much. Thats a problem. The undeveloped world breeds too much. Thats a problem.
You cannot excuse one because of the other.
Both are caused by lack of government.
Which is the unstabilised, exponential problem?
Yes because every day I hear a government spokesman telling people to stop consuming to benefit the economy and to stop breeding to save national resources..... Oh wait no I don't!
Anyone who blames the current food crisis on the poor is __________. (< fill in your own adjective.)
This isn't even worth discussing. There is, at present, the ability to feed the world. There is, at present, not enough willingness to do so. While total numbers will be a problem, they are not the problem now. This is obvious and it is inarguable.
I have no patience for those who blame victims.
Color me disgusted.
Cheers
How about plain old classism? Rich VS poor.
There only two classes of people those that labour for their returns and those that steal from the first class.
You're probably right, Eric.
The two are tough to disentangle, much of the time.. but it's rarely useful to sling that word around, regardless.
Weatherman, to be clear, I don't know you, and I would just say that your >Statement< was racist or classist, not necessarily you.
Apologies, Bob
Studies have shown the birth rates in NW Africa are amongst the highest in the world. No mention was made of race. It may be lack of ethics, poor planning, not seeing the results of one's actions, lack of good education, different moral values, etc.
And the American contributers should realise that we are on the doorstep of NW Africa.
At that point, you might say Which studies.
Beyond that, these Nations have been subjected (literally) to colonization by Nations that are adept at painting their own moral superiority, probably with a thick layer of material frosting to emphasize their provenance and approval by God, the material being supplied by these perpetually impoverished subjects.. 'Different Moral Values', indeed.
On the northeast corner of Nineteenth Avenue and Ortega in San Francisco is a Standard (Chevron) gas-station. I worked at that gas-station from January, 1972 to October, 1976; I was at San Francisco State at this time, so I worked weekends during the school year and full-time for most of the summer.
When I first started working there, gasoline fluctuated between 25.9 and 35.9 cents per gallon, (for Premium, or Ethyl, as it was then often known, Regular was a three or four cents a gallon cheaper) as, if I recall correctly, they had for the past decade or more. The price fluctuation was due to the ongoing “gas wars” conducted by local gas-stations. I could come to work one weekend and gas prices would be at the bottom of the range, and we would be quite busy, the next weekend the prices would have gone up a few cents, and the weekend after that we would be at or near the top or the scale, and business was quite slow. Then, the next week, prices would have plunged down to the bottom of the scale again, and the whole cycle would continue.
But, although none of us working at the gas station were aware of Peak Oil, or the fact that the US had hit its peak back in 1970, this last fact undoubtedly was behind the unexplained minor shortages that started appearing in mid to late 1972, the first of the long lines at the station, and the price (temporarily, as I recall) rising to an unprecedented 40 cents a gallon. But the optimism of that era was deeply entrenched, I recall at the time gas hit the 40 cent mark sitting around with four or five co-workers at the gas-station on a slow day, and asking how long it would take gas to reach a buck a gallon. Everyone looked around, thought, then the unanimous verdict was: “Naah, never happen.”
Anyway, I don’t know if we made arrangements with the Saudis or others for increased imports, because, as I recall, this 1972 mini-crisis seemed to melt away after a few months. But this didn’t last long, as the Arab Oil Embargo came down in mid-October of 1973, and its effects begin to be felt at the pumps only several weeks later. At first this consisted of price rises, to what were for the times, unprecedented levels. I recall going out to service a car, and the old guy in it looked at the price on the pump, a mind-boggling 50 cents a gallon. He looked at me and said “F**k you, I’m not paying you rip-offs” He started to drive off, but before he left, I snarled back at him, “Well, Asshole, you’ll run out of gas before you find anything cheaper, the price is the same everywhere.” And the price WAS the same everywhere, from now on it would only move upward or at best hang steady, the era of the “gas-wars” between service-stations was over, forever.
And the gas-wars were not the only long-standing business practice to end, forever. Before the Arab Oil Embargo, gas-stations, grocery stores of all sizes, and other retail outlets gave away trading stamps. People born this side of the late ‘60’s probably have never seen these, but they were a regular feature at retail outlets throughout my childhood and teenage years. On the West Coast, the trading stamps were Blue Chip Stamps and S&H Green Stamps, with Blue Chip being by far the more widely offered. Each stamp had printed on it “Cash Value One Mill.” (A mill is one tenth of one cent.) These were actual stamps, about two-thirds the size of an ordinary postage stamp, and gummed on the back, and you pasted them into booklets which, when a sufficient quantity was amassed, could be redeemed for stuff like toasters, vacuum cleaners, etc., mostly household appliances and stuff, as I recall. Anyway, these vanished from the entire retail scene, not just the gas stations shortly after the Arab Oil Embargo really started kicking in. Gas-stations in general, as far back as I remember, also offered free state and local highway maps that they gave away to their customers. Maps didn’t disappear, but they were no longer free as a price-tag of from 50 cent to a buck was now charged. And, of course, the Embargo was the beginning of the end for the true “service-station”, before, “self-service” was rare, but from this point in time on, it expanded, while the full service stations continued to diminish in numbers over the years.
When the Oil Embargo was first announced, the first effect were the price rises. Most people must have (incredibly, naively, from to-day’s vantage point) thought all this would be quite temporary, as for the first week or two of the Embargo, business was slow, as, I suppose people, like the guy who buzzed me off over 50-cent gas must have thought that prices would soon come down. It takes about six weeks for a tanker to sail from Saudi Arabia to the U.S., so six weeks after the Embargo was announced, the effect became quite noticeable, and the real gas lines became an everyday feature. This was when the government installed the odd-even (based on your car’s license number) sort of “Rationing Lite” system. And the oil companies practiced their own rationing, as each service station received a specific monthly allotment of gasoline. Scotty (Scotty Petrie, the operator of the 19th and Ortega station at this time) calculated that if he sold every car all the gas they wanted, that he would exhaust the monthly allotment that Standard Oil granted him in slightly more than two weeks. So Scotty instituted a limit of 8 gallons to every car coming into the pumps. Business hours were also cut back, and this created problems with the long lines of waiting autos, which backed out of the station and went up the street, frequently curling around the block and extend up most of that block. So, a couple of hours before closing time, we would take a large cardboard sign that said “Last Car”, go out to the last car an the line and inform the driver he was lucky, as he would be the last getting gas here to-day, then hang the sign on the back of his car. One day, I went out with the sign, and as it turned out, the last car sort of stood out, an almost overwhelmingly bright yellow VW Bug. I put the sign on the car, and returned to the gas-station and continued pumping gas. A couple hours later the yellow VW comes up and I sell it its gas, and went on to service the next car after the VW departed. It wasn’t until three or four cars had bought their eight gallons that I flashed on the fact that the VW was supposed to be the last car for the day. There were several cars still in line with the sign now on the last of them. It turned out that after I left the sign on the VW, the next car came up, and offered the driver of the VW $5 to take the sign and put it on his own car; he then sold the sign to the next car coming behind him, and so on. Ever after that, an employee of the gas-station had to simply stand by the last car, and slowly walk with it as it inched towards the station, and waving off all would-be customers.
After five months, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia felt he had wrested as much as he could out of the US and the West insofar as seriously addressing the (at the time) 25 year old Arab-Israel conflict. So the Embargo was lifted, and the oil flow resumed. But before the Embargo, the Saudis were getting something like $2.80 per barrel, afterward, as part of the price for restoring production, Faisal insisted on, and got a price of $11.65 per barrel. And the era of 25-35 cent gasoline, along with free maps and trading stamps, was over….Forever.
Anyway, thanks for the trip down Memory Lane. A lot of it just seems unbelievable now, free maps and trading stamps and getting cussed out behind 50 cent gas. Definitely, it was another era.
Antoinetta III
AntoinettaIII, thanks for the great bit of writing---better than Herb Caen!...
Thanks for that, just great.
I bought 90 cents' worth of gas today, because that's what I had in my pocket and I wanted to be able to get into Town *and* back. Did some (caricature) work so I can now afford to gas up the bike AND go to the Laundromat. I'm really looking forward to not having to buy gas at all.........
Cheer up, your grand kids won't have the many compounds in their food that suppress their immune systems, or fragile immune systems from being raised too clean. Antibiotic resistance is only an advantage for a bug if there is antibiotics.
I remember when I was around 12 years old, there was a "gas war". Now, this is different than the current war over oil in Iraq. It was where the gas stations would compete over customers by lowering prices to extremely low levels. The station my Dad patronized was offering gas for *FREE* for any customers with their station's credit card. Here we are 40 years later at $3.99.9 now at our local N.CA. stations (diesel is $4.39.9).
Our local county and city "leaders" are busy talking about "economic development" and getting more tourists to come and spend money here... while I see LESS road traffic and tourists as energy prices continue to climb. This is happening while the county is saying they will have to cut back on road maintenance and winter snow plowing because they cannot afford asphalt and diesel fuel.
The nearest airport is in the midst of a huge expansion... Obviously they are not considering how these planes will be fueled. When will people "get" what is going on and direct meaningful and appropriate change? Probably not until forced.
Todd
I'm assuming you live in or near Shasta, California, a beautiful area. I live near a similar area that is almost completely dependent upon tourism in Colorado.
We just had a local election for Mayor and town board and one of the questions is what we do in the fact of rising oil and gas prices given our dependency on those who get here by auto. A very popular answer had to do with "Better marketing". Impose an additional 2% tax on lodging and beef up the marketing effort.
So, in this area, I guess, the future for dependency on the automobile is secure.
I will give some credit to one of the mayoral candidates, however. I asked him what we were going to do with $200 oil and $10 per gallon gasoline. The gist of his answer is that the town might just wither away to something resembling the 1920s, a playground essentially for the the rich. That may be the more realistic and honest answer.
Yes, indeedy. All America needs is better marketing and this country is gonna grow.
There are a few tourist destinations left, however, that are adjacent to or near what is left of our train system, i.e., AMTRAK. In the future, especially if we could get the system upgraded to Bulgarian standards, these tourist areas will prosper, relatively speaking,to those completely dependent upon the auto.
That may include us down here in South East Florida USA (beaches) 'cept we might be under water in 25+ years.
Pete
That a highway was considered to be more important than a rail connection to a few keys with no point on each more than an hours bike ride apart is something that I still can't understand.
I'm assuming as a Floridian you're familiar with the East Coast line down to Key West which was wiped out in...1920?
Well there were hurricanes but I guess the one that did it in was the 1935 one...Labor day storm?
There is a region (the entire keys) crying out for transit and a bike sharing program.
Yup 1935 (estimated Cat 5 storm). Before my time, but not by much ;-) I am one of those few "almost 60" NATIVE Floridians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Railroad
It's been years since I have been down that way. I agree with you, but the old time Conchs - they think of themselves as the Conch Republic and quite apart from the mainland - can be quite self sufficent and I image will return to such a status once the pretenders in their McMansions desert the place post carbon.
I guess they'll have to figure out how to get fresh water since the main pipeline comes for the mainline.
I suppose the few left can sail around once the gas is gone and the road infrastructure collapses - either from deferred maint or another Cat 3+ storm.
Pete
Florida is a mess while the High speed rail has been denied funding by the state, there are numerous road projects going on and of course there is a lot of sports infrastructure being built.
One has to wonder why sports venues are replaces before they are paid for. i.e the old Tampa stadium, "the big sombrero"
Why Miami needs three arenas, etc. Why does Orlando need two football stadiums and why does it need a new arena (O-rena) when the current one is less than 20 years old?
The money and materials that are to be spent replacing the dome in st pete, a perfectly good venue that has many good years left, could be better spent on public transit, the money and materials spent on the Raymond James stadium, if put toward the teco street car line could have added miles to the system and better prepared Tampa for a post oil future. What good will these new stadiums be after the peak oil crises destroys major sports leagues.
I just stepped off Amtrak in Portland, OR -- started in Washington DC. Certainly the only civilized way to travel these days.
My question, however, is whether Amtrack is really any more fuel efficient than cars, busses or even airliners -- if each mode of transportation were to run full, that is. Those big trains use up a lot of Diesel fuel.
As an engineering consultant that works in the transportation field and formerly worked in the engineering department of an aircraft manufacturer and two railroads I can say this:
A 2004 Oak Ridge National Labs study www.narprail.org/cms/index.php/resources/more/oak_ridge_fuel showed that Amtrak trains, which were also hauling many cars of freight and mail, were only 17% more efficient than airplanes. Then the average long distance train had three to ten cars of freight and 6 to 8 passenger cars. Since 2004 Amtrak has discontinued its mail and express freight business, except for hauling 100 lb or less parcels in the baggage compartments, just like airplanes. So, many of these trains decreased their fuel consumption by half or more as the locomotives required to pull the trains dropped from four to two and from two to one. The Oak Ridge study did not account for the freight hauled by the long distance trains thus skewing the results to make trains appear less fuel afficient.
In 1979 the Budd Company and the Electromotive Division of General Motors did a study that showed short distance passenger trains attained 250 to 500 seat miles per gallon. Since then trains have become more fuel efficient and so have airplanes. But note that the best fuel performance by any plane will be the Boeing 787 which attains only 70 to 80 seat miles per gallon.
I would venture to say that a cross country trip today on Amtrak is around 100% more fuel efficient than the typical jet plane trip.
I did a study a few years ago (things have changed a bit) and diesel Amtrak (exclude NEC which is electrified) got about 85 pax-mpg with 58% load factors. Southwest Airlines got 53 pax-mpg with low 80% load factor. Belly freight needs to be added to SW for better evaluation of overall fuel efficiency.
I am not a great fan of expanding Amtrak where it runs on diesel, except where it picks up passengers who would have otherwise driven (<250 miles trips ?).
Stationary hotels and restaurants running off grid power are more energy efficient than rolling ones running off diesel.
I would rather see federal subsidies go to capital improvements that will last over a century (DC Metro to Dulles) than annual subsidies that evaporate the next year.
NOT a popular position with rail fans that I hang out with :-(
Alan
Not sure how freight affects the airline fuel efficiency, but it is not much. My company used to regularily ship by Southwest Air freight and I would venture to say that it is not much compared to what Amtrak had in their trains in 2004. Just looking at what was on the floor of the SW air freight terminal in St. Louis (near the end of the day) would not half fill one boxcar that Amtrak hauled. Likewise I have made hundreds of flights on SW over the last 20 years and have watched what was put on board at most stops - not much compared to passenger baggage.
My comment about the 250 - 500 seat mile per gallon (SMPG) shows short distance diesel trains hugely more efficient than short air trips. Part of my job as a new hire mechanical engineer with ATSF RR in 1981 was keeping track of fuel used by locomotives and trains traveling cross country. Those figures on diesel locomotive fuel usage/ seat miles per gallon from GM were accurate. I have also examined fuel consumption of Amtrak long distance trains and they would consume around 3 0r 4 gallons a mile with 200 passengers (maybe 300 seats) and two or three cars of mail/freight. This was in the 1999 to 2002 years. So your figure for 85 PMPG is also accurate.
I am against annual subsidies to energy inefficient modes of transport, like the $10 to $12 billion per year for air traffic control and part of airport security that is not user paid.
I agree the best scenario for trains is electric power, but diesel powered trains can save oil here and now.
Let me take this opportunity to second your theses here... The very important issue, if what we are concerned with is continuation of a decent society for our descendants, is to think long term. In this case capital improvements that change local communities, change they can live with over an entire lifetime and not just over the next fiscal year.
I live in Durango. Same deal. In the 50's we tore out the train lines that connected us to everywhere else. All the grocery stores and hotels on Main Avenue now sit with their backs against a train track that doesn't go anywhere, while the groceries and tourists arrive in cars and trucks over hundreds of miles of heavily-maintained mountain road.
I used to live in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia surrounded by the old deserted hot springs resort towns of the 19th century that have just withered away to a single super-expensive hotel (if that) and no other jobs - I wonder if those towns will soon come back and we'll end up like them.