Easter Sunday Open Thread
Posted by Super G on April 16, 2006 - 7:37pm
Topic: Miscellaneous
Tags: peak oil [list all tags]
Sorry for the technical difficulties earlier. Hopefully things have been resolved now. Thread away!
[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] And, oil hit $70 briefly today.
I suspect that if there are actual shortages when TSHTF, it will be the cities that are supplied, not rural areas. And not just gas, but food, electricity, water, etc.
In regard to your suspicions:
- During the 1970s, when gas was rationed to retailers, rural and small-town areas did fine, while urban stations developed long lines, rage, and occasional gunfights over vehicles cutting into long gas lines.
- During World War II, when gasoline was rationed nationwide by coupon, urban folk often put their cars up on blocks--except for those who knew farmers, whose fuel was unrationed. These fortunate people (many of whom lived in rural villages or small towns) had a fine source of extra income selling immense quantities of bootleg gasoline.
History suggests that TSHTF first in urban areas.what does that mean 'put their car up on blocks'? How much could they bootleg on one tank of gas? unless im misunderstanding..
Urbanites had ration cards and were permitted to buy X gallons of gas. You were allocated a reasonable amount of gas if you were a doctor or a civic official, otherwise you were allocated so little it made more sense to jack the car up and set the axles on blocks of wood. This lifted the wheels off the ground and prevented damage to tires during an extended period of storage.
Farmers were not rationed for gas. They could buy what they needed to work tractors etc. They could also buy more than they needed and sell the extra to city dwellers.
The BLACK MARKET that will crop up in every venue for everything that is in short supply, or even illegal. Someone will have acess to a good steady supply and/or be able to trade for other items.
We have also had a few gas stations close here in Manhattan, but that's more because the local real estate market is still booming
the insanity of this should be pretty clear. At the peak, maybe the brain is ruined before going down the slope?
I actually am not a great believer in Tainter's complexity framework as leading to a society's failure - to a certain extent, the various formulas to describe human ecology are more or less tautological, in the same sense most socio-biology (old fashioned term) is tautological, generally being unable to escape the social/cultural blinders of its practioners.
But certainly, this would be a shining proof - vehicles and people being run ragged and a finite resource being exhausted so that people can keep driving their vehicles since they cannot imagine living differently.
Insanity.
I find the aspect of complexity necessarily leading to collapse a deceptive problem - who defines complexity? For that matter, who defines collapse?
But the idea that finite resources are exhausted in meaningless or counterproductive ways when viewed from outside the context of those engaging in such actions was what I found insane (yes, not exactly Tainter's perspective, but a society without cars will appear to most modern eyes as one with containing less complexity in the sense that Tainter would likely find acceptable). And much like the wooden shipbuilding industry migrated throughout human history, with many of the literal cradles of that craft being turned into stony or sandy wastelands, the fact that resources are exhausted does cause people to live differently, whether they imagined it first or not. In the case of shipbuilding, by ending up with the Industrial Revolution, which ended the problem of trees in terms of shipbuilding.
But burning increasing amounts of fuel simply to be able to keep burning fuel doesn't seem likely to lead to anything but depletion for reasons which will not likely be very comprehensible in the future.
But truly, how many people in America are imagining life without their cars? On the other hand, how many are burning increasing amounts of gasoline because they can't imagine living differently?
Tainter defines his terms in his book.
I'll swipe this part of Chris Stolz's excellent review at Amazon.com:
Collapse, then, is the loss of this quantifiable complexity. Almost always accompanied by a 75%-90% drop in population.
That last is, I suspect, a big reason why complex societies stick with their strategy long past the point of diminishing returns. They become so committed to their way of life that changing ends up being very difficult and painful...perhaps even fatal. Hence it is avoided as long as possible.
"Being committed to their way of life" implies volition and perhaps even a measure of obstinacy. An alternative perspective would view the society as having become embedded in a certain set of memes that permits one course of action and forecloses many others.
There are those of us who remember life before suburbia. There are a far larger number who know nothing but suburbia and cannot conceive of an alternative, or perceive any need for change. This ignorance is very different from committment. A high level of Tainter Complexity would promote this ignorance; milk comes from the corner store not from a cow.
Then I'm sorry I used that word. It's not what I meant. How about "locked in"? I don't mean they're being obstinate, and I don't mean they are blind to alternatives. I mean they end up logistically unable to change without significant pain.
As an example...the oil-fueled Green Revolution has resulted in a lot of problems that weren't visible at first. With the knowledge we have now...many of us are now thinking we should never have started down the agribusiness path in the first place.
But what are we going to do about it? Agribusiness has allowed us to increase the population to levels undreamt of a hundred years ago. If we give up agribusiness, how are we going to feed all the "extra" people? We are locked in by our previous choices.
This also takes care of the problem of volition - an individual can make choices, but if they go into the territory that society excludes, the individual no longer has any meaningful impact in that society. And stepping outside of society is generally very dangerous - here, you could make a simple natural selection argument on why this is so, but I hate such perspectives.
An example could be made of something like aircraft motors - the original models had a fair number of moving parts, as time went one various improvements were made adding more moving parts, and as more time went on, the number of moving parts was reduced, until, at least in theory/practice, something like a SCRAM 'motor' has essentially no moving parts, except for the fuel pumping system.
But the SCRAM 'motor' is much more complex, even if it has many fewer moving parts - but here, complexity comes in the design and development of materials (and airframe), not in the number of parts. Further, after the design and material development phase is over, it is also quite conceivable that the infrastructure to construct and maintain such motors would be considerably less quantifiably complex than that required for the first Boeing 707s in terms of tools, parts, etc.
Complexity and simplicity are often in the eyes of the viewer, and that is what I find difficult when engaging in such discussions.
I haven't even begun to engage the idea of 'simple' or 'complex' language, except to note that most 'older' languages are actually considered more complex in grammar than English.
Or the idea of social roles - personally, I think the entire advertising/marketing branch of our society could go away without any loss of complexity, since in my eyes, that complexity is merely manufactured.
In a sense, whether the solution to a manufactured problem is part of a measure of complexity is the sort of question which would need to be addressed.
I could even further add that this idea of complexity could also be seen as the rise of parasites, with the parasites being considered the measure of the host.
And on, and on. Endless discussion.
This has been the trend for a long time. The amount of money gas stations make on gas is very low - usually around several cents a gallon from various articles I've read like this one. Thus something like an attached convenience store is needed in order to stay profitable.
What killed them was having to pull their tanks and do ground water testing/remediation if necessary and then reinstall approved tanks and monitoring systems. A friend of mine had a small station. He personally did any remediation but it would have cost over $100K to put in new tanks and no one would finance it.
Another friend's father had a major gas company outlet as an independent. They tore down the old station, which also did repair work, and put in a mini-mart plus pumps. They had to put up $100k plus take on a million dollar loan.
The son, who actually managed everything, then started a stand-alone repair shop in addition to the station, for even more money. He eventually sold it to one of his employees for about $500k.
Being the only gas station in the town and the last one for 20 miles, they do alright.
the costco in reno now has gas pumps and with a membership card you can get dicount gas. also on the way into reno a gas station that seems to be affiliated with the small casino at border town has the lowest price gas I've seen. maybe .50 $ cheaper than it is were i live, 70 miles away
The Future of E85
My contention is that the market for E85 will disappear after next year when the federal ethanol subsidy is scheduled to expire. However, there are a couple of things I wasn't sure about, and maybe someone here knows. I don't the status of various state subsidies, and I don't know whether state and federal taxes will be waived for the ethanol in the E85 blends. Does anyone know the status here? If the taxes are waived, it will offset a big chunk of the loss of the subsidy, but I don't know if this is the case.
Thanks,
RR
Regarding the military "subsidy", I maintain that it isn't the oil companies that benefit from this. They benefit if they already have infrastructure in place, but as far as access to markets go, it is the consumer who benefits from lower gas prices. Oil companies would still produce gasoline, they just might pay a lot more for crude oil.
I am not defending military action to secure oil by any means; quite the contrary. But there isn't enough ethanol to replace but a fraction of our gasoline supply, so if we are over there primarly for oil, we would be over there even if we were producing all the ethanol we can produce. Finally, ethanol benefits from this military "subsidy" as well, because it takes fossil fuel to make ethanol. If you look at the price history of ethanol:
http://www.neo.state.ne.us/statshtml/66.html
You will see that it gets more expensive as gasoline gets more expensive. So it would be a false conclusion to suggest that gasoline could not compete if you added in the costs of the military. Ethanol would also become much more expensive.
RR
Maybe biofuels can't replace all dinofuel but it could be more than enough to power rural America while urban America goes to electric vehicles.
The hope is the you can harvest junk crops that don't need fertilizer or much fossil fuel inputs to grow. Let's see if that happens.
That said, agriculture is not the most efficient method to harvest sunlight. I favor making hydrogen from bacteria, algae, or enzymes stuck in a polymer. There have been some papers on it recently but we are still years away from commercial system. Hopefully DOE will fund more of this type of research. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fuel cell advocate. I think we could burn hydrogen (ala BMW) or convert it to CNG.
In the meantime, let's bomb Iran, shut down the Middle East and convert our cars to run on electricity. That should create some American jobs.
http://ethanolmarket.aghost.net/
Given that gasoline contains 1.45 times more energy than ethanol the effective price of ethanol is: $3.93
So for ethanol to actually be cheaper than $2.70 gasoline it would have to cost $1.86 per gallon.
I'm not convinced that ethanol is a good solution to anything.
What sort of environmental/economic/social costs would the production of methanol on large scale produce?
Subkommander Dred
RR
I haven't read anything so funny in a long, long time. I guess all that work in Missoruh has just gone out the windo dag nab it!
RR seems to think that the ONLY reason for producing ethanol is the subsidy. Tsk tsk.
Ethanol and the Biofuel industry in general promise so many positive benefits i.e. envrionment, security, jobs... that I don't even know where to begin.
Ok, I'll throw this one out - flex fuel vehicles.
GM, Ford and Chrysler are going to be stuck with massive inventories of vehicles they can't sell UNLESS they convert them flex fuel vehicles.
In the process, the big three might realize that they can stick it to their Japanese buddies (for a little while anyways) who are busy pouring resources into hybrids and fuel-cell autos.
See the dirty secret here is that Honda knows full-well that its $ million hydrogen pisscutter is a public relations non-starter. No not because the car is so expensive... rather, it's because the hydrogen infrastructure is not going to be built in our lifetime.
Here's a clue...
See Joe Idiot pump gas in Smallville USA.
See Joe Idiot get shiny new hydrogen filling station in Smallville USA.
See Joe Idiot pump hydrogen in Smallville USA.
Bye Bye Joe.
Bye Bye Smallville.
Biofuels are the future.
Ironically it's Ford who knew this 100 years ago. And yet STILL today, guys like RR are trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
Wait till drought year or Oglala aquifer requires exogenous energy to pump from deeper if at all.. Wait for soil nutrients to deplete faster than NG fertilizers can replace them. At least now, Hubberts curve gives us 95% of the oil we had the prior year - ethanol could go from X to 30% of X in one year based on crop conditions.
1 - Ethanol is the fuel of the future. Hands down. Keepsies.
2 - Infrastructure?? We don't NEED to rebuild the infrastructure - that's the sweet part of the whole damn thing.
3 - Ethanol. That's it. Ethanol. Or SWEET FUEL : ) There are many different ways to produce it, so don't try and break them all down i.e. cellulosic, ecalene, corn-based or what have you. For our purposes, ethanol is alcohol produced from biomass.
4 - Ethanol is already here big time! Demand is SO LARGE RIGHT NOW, that in cerain parts of the country, you can't get a crew to come out and build your town a new ethanol plant.
...think about that for a second...
It was FORD (an American dude) who looked out into his backyard and exclaimed, "AND THAT!, my dear Sedgewick, is how we will power the dam thing!"
I haven't read anything so funny in a long, long time. I guess all that work in Missoruh has just gone out the windo dag nab it!
What a well-thought out rebuttal! I can scarcely find an argument in your response. One thing is clear, though. You definitely did not read my article, and don't seem to understand the argument. The argument is not that ethanol will disappear, but that E85 will disappear once the subsidies do. Who is going to pay an extra $0.50 a gallon for E85, only to have their gas mileage drop by 8 mpg? Perhaps you can begin by addressing that question.
It's fine to disagree, but a logical argument would do wonders for you.
RR
Well, considering you ignored my last logical argument, I decided that this time I would just make fun of yours :)
But if I must...
"Who is going to pay an extra $o.50 a gallon for E85, only to have their gas mileage drop by 8 mpg?"
Answer - The same people who believed that they could put put a man on the moon.
FYI, I know all about ethanol. I have done graduate school research on it. You, on the other hand, seem to be painfully uneducated about it. Read a few of my blog posts, especially the one you are attempting to address, and learn a few things.
RR
Stryke 2 - Ford has built more than 1.6 million FFVs in the U.S. over the past 25 years and will make 250,000 FFVs this year. "Ford has partnered with VeraSun Energy -- a leading ethanol producer -- to build a 'Midwest Ethanol Corridor' stretching through Missouri and Illinois," Rippon said. "The corridor will allow FFV owners to travel from Chicago to Kansas City operating only on E85. Ford believes that helping our FFV customers to conveniently find and use E85 is the right thing to do."
Stryke 3 - Toyota is planning to sell ethanol-powered vehicles in the US by 2008 in the latest push by the Japanese carmaker into segments dominated by the Detroit-based manufacturers, a company executive said. It will start selling a flexible-fuel vehicle, which can run on up to 85 per cent ethanol or ordinary petrol, after a surge of interest in ethanol, a fuel made from plants such as corn or sugar cane.
FROM RR - "FYI, I know all about ethanol. I have done graduate school research on it. You, on the other hand, seem to be painfully uneducated about it."
Uh huh...
3 Strykes and yer out dude.
Stryke 1
Quite irrelevant to the point. Since they are flex-fuel, they can burn gasoline when E85 becomes too expensive in 2008. Ball 1.
Stryke 2
Same as 1. Ball 2.
Stryke 3
Same as 1. Ball 3.
Uh huh...
Ball 4.
You can hop over to my blog and check out my research track record. I have links to it. Or, if you want to engage in an actual debate on the merits of ethanol, we can do that too. But you are going to have to a bit better than you are doing here. You seem to think that because people are making flex-fuel vehicles, which cost little more than straight gasoline engines, there will be a market for E85 when it costs $50 more for every 1,000 miles of driving. I don't see it, and you haven't done anything to challenge my argument.
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/
RR
Those people are dead and buried (many of them were German immigrants BTW).
Their children cannot get their act together.
Try an echo chamber, you are definitely preaching to yourself.