The Oil Drum

I like this speech which was in part about peak oil. It was 31 years ago.

The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily [...]

This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.[...]

I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.

All of us have heard about the large oil fields [in] Alaska [...] In a few years when [Alaska] is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years' increase in our nation's energy demand.[...]

But we do have a choice about how we will spend the next few years. Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.

Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste. [...]

[This proposal] will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives. [...]

But the sacrifices will be gradual, realistic and necessary. Above all, they will be fair. No one will gain an unfair advantage through this plan. No one will be asked to bear an unfair burden. We will monitor the accuracy of data from the oil and natural gas companies, so that we will know their true production, supplies, reserves, and profits.

The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.

We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group, would be crushing.

There should be only one test for this program: whether it will help our country.

Of course, Jimmy lost the next election...

So no, I don't think the people will reward the truth with votes. That's not what history shows.

Let's see ... a policy for self-reliance on a personal level. This is *not* going to be pushed by democrats, EVER. So you'll have Barack Obama as an opponent in this.

Local authority at least partially superseeding federal authority. Again only in the republican party this policy has a (small) chance of becoming reality. Though given Bush's track record I doubt it.

Can you understand that people in cities (which are the dem strongholds) do not want this at all ? They are not capable of self-reliance and come from families where for 3-4 generations there hasn't been a farmer. They *hate* farmers. And a lot of them *are* looking for a handout.

Government "leadership" has always lead to not leadership, but to nepotism and communist (oh excuse me "socialist") policies, and from there to massive inefficiency and collapse. Leadership is not the answer, letting go is the answer.

If you ask me there is exactly one way of making research happen. Give darpa $1 bil in extra budget. Have 5 "100-mpg challenges" with a top prize of $250 mil or so. And for the love of God, have the government stay away from minimum efficiency standards. Create a second darpa, in, say the DoE, and give them a billion too. Make it clear that the "winner takes all". Oh if you need a source for those amounts of money, get out of ITER, since it can't help us in our current predicament.

And the lifeblood of the American economy has been ingenuity (and business spirit) for a long time. In case you didn't notice ... America isn't producing all that oil itself.

I think the only way this policy of yours will happen is in the case of a collapse of the U.S. Nothing else can make it happen. The republicans might push it, and move us a *tiny* nudge in the right direction, but they'll run into a democratic mob demanding handouts before they really get anywhere. People have it easy in the cities and suburbs, in at least partially government funded jobs, and multinational cartels' jobs. They're not about to give that up, which would be a total requirement for your policy.

Nobody could work at a citybank, at a microsoft, google or any really large company in general if your policy is to become reality ... Cities like New York and Los Angeles should be disbanded and the people spread over the empty countryside ... who's going to explain this to these people ? Are *YOU* prepared to become at least a part-time farmer in what dems generally refer to as "some middle-american gun-loving church-going deadbeat hellhole"* ? Because that's what you're asking a few tens of millions of people to do ...

* I don't agree with this assessment, in fact I would love to move into one someday. And go to church every sunday. It's a lot less fake than life in the large cities. Even if it means becoming a farmer (though obviously, I'll need a few pointers to put it mildly)