Peak Oil Matters

Last week I had occasion to visit with my father at my parents’ property in the lovely Berkshire Mountains region of New England. They live elsewhere in western Massachusetts, but have owned this 30 acre parcel in a very rural community since I was very young. It’s not especially well-developed … there is no running water and thus no usable bathroom (unless trees and bushes count), but it is a peaceful and lovely plot of nature I’ve always enjoyed. For Dad, it’s heaven here on Earth; Mom, not so much, but she deals with it.

As I was making the 135-mile pilgrimage from my home outside of Boston and across the state, contemplating once or twice how much gas my SUV was sucking down and wondering more how families will arrange to visit when the price of gasoline—or its unavailability—make these kind of treks prohibitive, I found myself thinking more and more about all the people who live in the small, out-of-the-way towns at the opposite end of Massachusetts.

What are they going to do?

After I exited the highways just north of Springfield (the largest city in western Massachusetts) and began traveling the sparsely populated back roads and on through occasional farmland—dotted only very rarely by anything that resembled a commercial establishment and miles and miles from any malls or shopping centers of note—I kept wondering: how difficult must it be for them now to just get around and run the types of errands that you and I do rather effortlessly?

What are they going to do?

How are these people going to make do tending to their most basic of everyday needs when gas prices are off the charts, when ownership of autos is prohibitively expensive, and when basic transportation becomes an issue of monumental complexity because we no longer have the readily available supplies of gasoline we’ve been accustomed to for decades? How can we expect public transit to help people when they live miles from anything even resembling a sizeable city?

How will they deal with the loss of the modern, daily conveniences those of us in and near big cities routinely take for granted, conveniences which they even now surely labor to enjoy? From my home in a quaint Boston suburb, I can walk to my bank, my dry cleaners, my wife’s office, the grocery store, several convenience stores and restaurants, the pharmacy, the post office, and scores of different retail establishments. At the bottom of the very steep hill we live on I can grab a bus which takes me to the subway which takes me to the Amtrak station or the MBTA commuter rail system or Logan Airport, and from there, the world.

And these rural townspeople far removed from city life: What are they going to do? Most, living in these hilly towns with neighbors often several acres away at the very least, cannot walk to … anywhere. There is no close-by there, there. Getting there requires a car, even for the simplest of errands (biking up and down some of those hilly stretches is a job best left to Lance Armstrong). I can get a gallon of milk 200 yards from my home. People in these rural communities can get that same gallon of milk three or four or eight miles away right now.

I don’t know if bus service of any kind runs out there (doubtful), but if it does, I’m sure it’s a once a day event for most. “Big city” Springfield is 40 + miles away from my parents’ property; not-quite-so-big-Pittsfield is about 15, tucked in the northwest corner of Massachusetts. While Pittsfield will never be mistaken for a big city, it certainly has most of the modern amenities anyone would need: malls, banks, restaurants, retail establishment, car dealerships, and all the rest. Still … can’t get there from rural here without a car.

Median income is about $45,000 in the town where my parents own their land; population is about 1000. Not a big demand in places like that for malls, stand-alone retail stores, convenience stores, grocery stores, or public transit. Hell, it shares its post office with another town! They do have a fire department and police force, but no one will mistake the size of those forces with what we’re accustomed to in cities or towns of 20,000 or 50,000 or 300,000.

I may be mistaken, but I sense that these people are much more what we recognize as salt-of-the-earth folks: hard-working, straightforward citizens content with many of life’s simpler pleasures (obviously, and to their everlasting credit), living most likely from paycheck to paycheck. I doubt many of them are wealthy progeny of big industry titans, or live on these outskirts thanks to endless piles of family money. They are thus likely to feel a fair amount of pain and stress when fuel prices increase and travel becomes more difficult every day. They are going to suffer more than their fair share.

How do they plan and execute their frequent trips to the market, or to stores to purchase family necessities, or get medical care, or entertain and visit with family members and friends, when they live so far from … well, everything? Right now I imagine it’s a bit of a convoluted process to try and get all of those things done. Surely some careful planning is required, whereas for me, I can just hop in the car any old time and complete my local errands in fifteen minutes. “Local” has a different meaning in the rural Berkshire communities.

What are they going to do?

It’s not just the inhabitants of these pleasant and placid towns that will suffer. What happens when we simply do not have enough oil and gas to meet our own demands—however sourced—and we have to endure restrictions of one kind or another that are much too painful to consider right now? How will those residents—so far removed from our easily accessible every day creature comforts and amenities in big cities as it is—manage when they simply can’t get anywhere?

What are they going to do?

Peak Oil is not just about big city residents suddenly being forced to rely on public transportation more than they care to. Peak Oil is about lots of people in lots of places who are not going to have the resources and conveniences and comforts they need as and when they need them.

What are we all going to do?

Michael Lind is the Policy Director of New America’s Economic Growth Program and a frequent contributor to Salon.com—a publication (and writer) whose perspectives I usually agree with. The new America website is quite good.

However, Mr. Lind recently published an article at Salon regarding the future of transportation—fixed/high-speed rail, specifically—that I take issue with. I do so not so much because his information might be incorrect (and I don’t dispute his knowledge and information on the subject), but I disagree because he offers up an attitude regarding our approach to transportation and automobiles that can only cause us more problems as we confront Peak Oil. It’s an all-too-familiar refrain Peak Oil proponents encounter, and is one we find especially distressing in light of the challenges Peak Oil is going to impose upon all of us.

Lind begins his article advocating more government spending on infrastructure—a position with which I wholeheartedly agree. (Readers familiar with Bob Herbert’s op-eds in the New York Times—which I’ve referenced in several posts—will recall that Mr. Herbert is likewise a passionate advocate of our need to repair, maintain, and enhance infrastructure spending for a host of sound, well-considered reasons.) Enough studies are out there demonstrating the many positive benefits and effects those spending priorities have on our economy and employment numbers.

Despite his advocacy for this essential governmental strategy, Lind criticizes support for high speed rail. In doing so, he raises common objections to funding and planning for alternative forms of transportation. While factually there may be merit to his arguments, the problem is that despite the rhetoric, the reality of Peak Oil is going to make the stated objections entirely irrelevant.

There is little chance that we’re going to devise a perfect public transportation solution, but to dismiss the approach outright because we’re too spoiled to recognize the need for change is at best foolish. We’re in need of some serious attitude adjustments, and transportation woes are another consequence of Peak Oil that we can either prepare for voluntarily, or have imposed upon us. Something is going to have be done. We can either throw our hands up and keep hoping, or start taking steps to figure out the solutions that just might work. It seems quite obvious that public transportation is going to have to be part of that mix.

Lind observes that “As nations grow more affluent, their people prefer the convenience of personal automobile transportation to the inflexibility of mass transit.” Of course they do! I much prefer jumping in one of our cars to run errands or to go to our beach house or do any number of other things when I feel like doing so rather than walking up and down my lengthy and very steep hill and then figuring out how many different modes of public transit I might need to get where I want to go. Millions and millions of other car owners harbor their own legitimate reasons why they favor the comfort and convenience of their own autos.

If fossil-fuel supplies were unlimited, inexpensive, and always-at-the-ready, we would not be having these discussions. But facts are annoying—especially the true ones!

All of the factors this blog and other writers have set forth regarding the imminence of Peak Oil tell us that unlimited, inexpensive, and always-at-the-ready oil is not going to be an option for much longer—some reports suggest in as few as a couple of years. Many writers have already noted one of Peak Oil’s many obvious warning signs: we’re drilling thousands of feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere because “cheap” and easy-to-find oil no longer exists. It’s just one sign among many. “Affluence” isn’t going to buy anyone bonus points when it comes to oil supply and demand … the transportation needs of the rich won’t stave off Peak Oil.

So when the ever-diminishing supply of unlimited, inexpensive, and always-at-the-ready oil is a factor with which we are all contending every day, preferring “the convenience of personal automobile transportation to the inflexibility of mass transit” won’t be worth the paper that comment is printed on. Peak Oil doesn’t much care about our “preferences,” or whether long-distance air or passenger car travel is “more practical,” as Lind also argued.

That’s simply not going to matter … not a little, not a lot, not at all. It’s nice to discuss preferences and wishes and hopes and all the rest, but geology and reality are what they are, and soon enough we are not going to have anywhere near the amounts of inexpensive oil readily available to each of us so that we can drive wherever and whenever we want. That’s a fact. Wishing it away is a nice sentiment but utterly meaningless. Peak Oil doesn’t much care for wishes and prayers, either.

So objections notwithstanding, we need to be thinking about, planning for, and finding ways to fund, create, and construct the types of public transportation we’re all going to need in the decades to come. It’s painful, but it’s that simple.

It’s no doubt true that implementing passenger rail and other forms of alternative transportation (and sources of energy, which Lind also criticizes) on a scale even remotely approaching the levels we’ll need in the decades to come is a jaw-dropping, almost unfathomably expensive proposition … until you realize we will have no rational alternatives other than to truly shrink our growth and become a nation of many local economies.

There is going to be a lengthy list of items and services and needs that are going to have to continue to be fulfilled by an ever-declining amount of crude oil, and I daresay that your and my carefree choices to run a couple of errands on a near-daily basis or visit with friends on the weekend aren’t going to have much priority on that list of who gets what, when, and how much.

Those who are waiting for a low-cost, ideal alternative to our current forms of personal transportation are in for a very rude awakening somewhere down the road.

Likewise, Lind’s urging that we devote more financial resources to enhance freight transportation on our roadways is just as misguided. Truckers won’t be exempt from Peak Oil’s impact … no one will. He is unfairly and inaccurately dismissive in suggesting that all of our urgings to provide more funding for high-speed rail and the like is so that we can “cut five minutes off the daily commutes of office workers in New York and New Jersey.” Enough high speed rail proposals have been put forth, and the Obama Administration has at least opened the door to enough other high-speed rail projects, to dismiss Lind’s snarky contentions outright. That’s something I’d expect to hear from someone on the Right, for whom facts are all-too-often useless and/or irrelevant when choosing to perpetuate narrow-minded ideology instead.

“Focusing on freight infrastructure improvements means that, among other things, we need to build more highway lanes and in some cases new highways for the trucks that will continue to carry most freight.” I’m hard-pressed to understand how that could possibly be a legitimate solution. Not only will not be able to afford that; higher gas prices and declining supply will leave less cars and trucks on the road. What a waste of limited resources!

And despite Lind’s claims about asphalt as some kind of magic solution, the truth is that asphalt is one of the countless products derived from crude oil, or from the energy-intensive and more expensive extraction process of the tar sands. (See this Oil Drum post for a discussion of asphalt.) Less crude oil equals less asphalt—as some cities have already witnessed first-hand.

Thinking that the enormous population increases expected in the coming decades is going to be properly addressed by building more roads and creating more suburban sprawl where owners are going to be left entirely dependent on automobiles they won’t be able to regularly or readily fuel seems ass-backwards at the very least. Asphalt is not nearly the savior Lind asserts it to be.

Two items of note on this subject from an extremely informative 2009 article by Phillip Longman (a Lind colleague) in The Washington Monthly [1]:

“The Environmental Protection Agency calculates that for distances of more than 1,000 miles, a system in which trucks haul containers only as far as the nearest railhead and then transfer them to a train produces a 65 percent reduction in both fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. As the volume of freight is expected to increase by 57 percent between 2000 and 2020, the potential economic and environmental benefits of such an intermodal system will go higher and higher. Railroads are also potentially very labor efficient. Even in the days of the object-lesson train, when brakes had to be set manually and firemen were needed to stoke steam engines, a five-man crew could easily handle a fifty-car freight train, doing the work of ten times as many modern long-haul truckers.”

and

“Failing to rebuild rail infrastructure will simply further move the burden of ever-increasing shipping demands onto the highways, the expansion and maintenance of which does not come free. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (hardly a shill for the rail industry) estimates that without public investment in rail capacity 450 million tons of freight will shift to highways, costing shippers $162 billion and highway users $238 billion (in travel time, operating, and accident costs), and adding $10 billion to highway costs over the next twenty years. ‘Inclusion of costs for bridges, interchanges, etc., could double this estimate,’ their report adds.”

And Lind wants to increase freight transportation on our roads?

As for his urging that we build more airports … seriously? In a few short decades—as things stand now and for the foreseeable future—we’ll be lucky to have one-third the number of airports now existing. It’s also quite likely that only a very small percentage of the population anywhere will be able to afford air travel in any event—assuming jet fuel remains available in any semblance of reasonable supply. How is that a solution?! Ignoring the effects of Peak Oil isn’t going to get us much except more difficulties.

Lind urges us to consider a “harsh reality” that makes no sense in light of Peak Oil: “The greatest economic crisis since the Depression shows no signs of ending soon. A major, long-term program of public investment is needed more than ever. But the public investments must pass the reality test. And the harsh reality is this: There isn’t going to be a significant high-speed rail system in the U.S. in the near- or medium-term future. There isn’t going to be a continental electric grid permitting solar panels on condo buildings in Berkeley, Calif., to power heirloom-poultry farms in Maine. Most Americans are not going to sell their cars and move back from the suburbs to the cities in order to live in tiny apartments or condos and ride the rails to work. These are romantic daydreams that Democrats could afford to indulge only as long as they were out of office and were not responsible for results.”

So how does he reconcile those statements with the fact that majority of the world’s population already lives in cities, with estimates suggesting that as much as 75% of the world’s population will reside in cities by 2050? [2] Hate to say it, but “romantic daydreams” or some reasonable approximations may very well be our only options in the not-too-distant future. That is the very harsh reality we will have to contend with in the face of Peak Oil. The fossil fuel choices he seems to think we’re going to endlessly possess are simply not going to be available to us. Ignoring that truth is an option … just not a very good one.

Lind is absolutely correct that we need a massive commitment to our woefully ill-maintained infrastructure. (See this and the referenced links therein.) But his assertions that we need to rely on more roadways and more fossil-fuel-consuming trucks is not a solution. We will cater to consumer demands or for more suburban sprawl at our collective peril. We won’t have those options once Peak Oil is upon us, either.

Again I’ll emphasize how critical it is that we begin considering alternatives to transportation, the nature of our infrastructure, and our sources of energy. The dislocations will be challenging enough; let’s not make them worse by waiting for some “better” day to get started. (And let’s not forget that putting into place the infrastructure and technologies needed to make the transitions a reality are themselves going to require a lot of fossil fuel. We’re simply not going to have enough to do all of that and still maintain our lifestyles and industries as we do now. Something is going to have to give.)

While Lind is correct that “There is no public support in the U.S. or any other industrial democracy for the combination of self-imposed austerity and massive subsidies that would be necessary to create an economy based on renewable energy,” that is likewise not going to matter. Who among us wants to sacrifice the lifestyles we’ve come to insist upon?! The real issue is that when Peak Oil is here, lack of public support (predicated on selfishness and an unwillingness/inability to make sacrifices voluntarily) won’t matter either. We either suffer from the harsh impact of Peak Oil by choosing to do nothing, or start working on the next best options, whatever they may be (while understanding those undefined options are no guarantee of harsh-free changes).

I fully recognize that the energy, affordability, and efficiencies derived from fossil fuels/crude oil are as yet unmatched by any forms of alternative or renewable sources of energy. That’s a major part of the challenge of Peak Oil: there will be no seamless transitions to something else to keep life going as it does now because we don’t have that option. Changes—perhaps even drastic ones—are looming.

So do we wait until we’re really battered and beleaguered by Peak Oil, or do we make a national commitment (and act upon it) to finding some reasonable means of supplanting fossil fuel usage—especially for transportation, given that it’s going to take us many years (decades is more likely) to effectively and permanently transition away from oil? We’re already too far behind, and we have no guarantees of finding a successful solution in any event. Is waiting and doing nothing the better option? Is that our legacy?

There are no easy fixes. There are no inexpensive fixes. There are no quick fixes, either. But we clearly can no longer rely on what got us here.

The sooner we all understand that and begin acting on that knowing, the sooner we can begin digging our way out of a mess our own successes and innovations have created.

Sources:

[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.longman.html – Back on Tracks: A nineteenth-century technology could be the solution to our twenty-first-century problems by Phillip Longman

[2] http://www.slate.com/id/2256666/- Nimble Cities: Help Slate make transportation in and between cities more efficient, safe, and pleasant by Tom Vanderbilt

One of the main themes that I will return to repeatedly as this blog progresses is that of transportation.

I’ll permit others more technically savvy, experienced, and knowledgeable to address the issue of automobile usage and our eventual conversion of internal combustion engines to those that either run on alternative fuel/energy sources, or electric cars. (I have discussed automobiles in several prior posts such as this one.) My focus will be on the broader theme of how much we depend upon all forms of transportation in our day-to-day lives.

The sooner we can begin having “Oh, I didn’t think of that…” moments, the sooner we can begin effectively dealing with, planning for, and transitioning to ways of living and producing that are no longer dependent on fossil fuels as the energy source needed. We’re all in this together….

My hope is that these types of post will inspire more and more frequent “I didn’t think of that” moments for everyone.

Fairly self-evident, but true: It’s only when we start asking questions that we’ll begin seeking answers. As long as we ignore issues or simply take things for granted, we have zero incentive to make changes. Changes imposed upon us are much less pleasant than those in which we have a say ahead of time.

Everything we do that requires transportation via automobile, either of necessity or of convenience, is going to be affected when the ready supply of relatively inexpensive and always available gasoline from our local service station is no longer relatively inexpensive and always available. We may not have in place formal rationing once the steady decline of gasoline is upon us, but we will experience de facto rationing.

The effect is going to be the same: we are not going to be able to just hop into our cars for a fill-up whenever we need it. Somewhere along the line, limited allocations are going to be imposed upon our lifestyles. It will happen voluntarily and with careful planning, or it will indeed be imposed upon all of us, protests notwithstanding. Which would you prefer?

With that significant change will come all kinds of changes and adaptations in what we do day-to-day. How we live our everyday lives, what we need to do or should do or prefer to do are all going to be impacted in one way or another when that trip to the local gas station is no longer an immediate option for us.

So let’s consider one of those every day common events and how this, too, will be impacted by Peak Oil: the appointment with our dentist/doctor.

How many of us regularly schedule appointments with our family MD or dentist? How many trips on average do we/our family make to see them during the course of a year? Two? Five? Twelve? How many of us walk to those appointments? How many of us have accessible and convenient public transportation enabling us to go with minimal difficulties?

I’m going to guess that the percentage is probably less than fifty—perhaps much less. Certainly those who live in major cities and whose medical providers likewise have practices in the “downtown” areas likely take advantage of public transportation, but most of us either don’t have that option, or for any number of other reasons choose to drive.

It’s quite likely that we combine trips around those appointments: perhaps some grocery shopping after the dentist appointment, or we’ll run over to our children’s school and pick them up after class, or we have to take the kids to practice on our way to the doctor, or we just decide to stop off at a couple of places along the way. There are any number of possibilities that strike us all as perfectly normal and routine events.

Peak Oil is going to change “normal” and “routine.”

So what happens when gasoline has become prohibitively expensive? How many of these combination trips suddenly require much more planning? How many of these trips even become possible? What sort of juggling are we all going to have to do to figure out how to accomplish these routine tasks when it’s either costing us small fortunes to fill up our gas tanks, or when we only have the option of doing so under guidelines that are completely foreign to us today?

If our dentist or MD has an office too far to walk to, too far from public transportation stops (or we have no public transportation options), what are we going to do? For that matter, what are those medical service providers and their staffs going to do when confronted with the exact same issues? How are they going to get to their offices?

Right now I have the option, inconvenient though it may be, of getting to my doctor’s office via two separate modes of public transportation and a half mile walk. But I know that my primary care physician (25 years and counting) lives nowhere near his office, and there is no public transportation that will get him from his home to his medical practice in any manner that might be considered convenient. What’s he going to do? What am I going to do when he can’t get to his office any longer?

My family dentist’s office is about 15 miles from our home. What is plan B for us? For he and his extensive staff? There is a subway stop about half a mile from his office, so once again I have the option of getting there via three separate modes of public transportation), but how convenient is that in comparison to just hopping into my car and shooting down interstate 95?

The solutions for me are not impossible, and indeed for a sizeable percentage of us, that may be true as well. But when a single twenty-five minute trip to our medical care provider—at our convenience (ignoring the countless other routine trips we take each week)—suddenly requires coordinating walking to and from public transportation (hoping that the weather cooperates, by the way), and then having to take into consideration multiple forms of public transportation with the time factors doubling or tripling or worse (all the while ignoring the types of routine errands we now tack on to these trips without a second thought), what are we all going to do?

It is a goal of the United States to develop a national intermodal transportation system that moves people and goods in an energy efficient  manner. The Nation’s future economic direction is dependent on its ability to confront directly the enormous challenges of the global  economy, declining productivity growth, energy vulnerability, air pollution, and the need to rebuild the Nation’s infrastructure.

That prescient language came from a 1991 piece of legislation, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. At the dawn of Peak Oil, and with an infrastructure woefully inadequate and under-maintained so as to properly meet the changing needs of our economic, environmental, and energy-driven revival, these words should serve as the foundation for a renewed commitment to transportation. To be sure, the President understands this, and his initial commitments to high-speed rail are a welcome first step. But so much more needs to be done.

Unfortunately, that language was stricken from successor pieces of legislation, and the result over the years has been (as is true of too much legislation) a mish-mash of efforts with no overriding vision and structure. We too often continue to plug holes here and there instead of summoning the national will, courage, vision, and leadership to plot new courses. President Obama recognizes this, but as with too many other visionary ideas he brings to us, they fall victim to the ugly and insane workings of Congress and an even more insane opposition from the Right. “Long-term” planning continues to serve as four-letter words to those out of power and to those too concerned with their next election, polls, and donations.

Make no mistake: we will not be running out of oil soon, as all legitimate Peak Oil advocates continue to insist despite the at-best disingenuous contradictions from other quarters. Even though production is probably going to soon begin its inexorable decline, we should have enough to meet almost all of our needs, albeit more costly, for years to come.

The problems will really hit home later, when we can no longer borrow from Peter to pay Paul or cover up the decreasing resources with band-aids or sleight-of-hand. What happens then?

We cannot afford to wait until those more drastic times to start making changes to our infrastructure or modes of transportation. They are too vital to our well-being. When production declines really take hold, we will have too many segments of our infrastructure, too many business models, too many political decisions, and too many financial concerns that will all have be addressed, modified, repaired, renewed, or invented in fairly short order. We will simply be unable to meet those challenges only after they all appear.

We must begin planning now, and that can only happen if we understand what is at stake and what changes we’ll all be obliged to make. This is not a problem to be solved by the government … that nebulous entity “out there.” We—all of us—have a stake and a role to play. We cannot afford to pass the responsibility of doing to anyone else.

Almost everything we do and have is in place because we’ve had inexpensive and plentiful amounts of oil available to help us build, produce, market, transport, invent, and repair/replace … almost everything! Few aspects of our industrial society will be unaffected when Peak Oil is in full bloom, and we will then have no choice but to make drastic changes in virtually everything we do. Do we prepare, or hope for the best and continue on our merry little delusional and ignorant ways?

It has taken decades to build the structure of society we now live in, and it will take probably just as long to put into place a new foundation and framework by which we hope to progress in decades to come—without plentiful and inexpensive oil.

What are we going to do, starting now?

Urban transportation systems in particular will be of critical importance as we fashion new ways of growth and development in a Peak Oil world. I hold no illusions that the transitions will be effortless and that we’ll just continue growing and inventing and prospering pretty much as we always have without any bumps in the road. We’re going to have a different future to contend with, and we can either choose to be part of its creation, or be victims of the changes that we’ll have no choice but to accept.

With less oil/gas available in the years to come, we’re all going to be faced with very different and very difficult choices about how we conduct our daily lives. Transportation, as essential as it is to our ways of life—personal, industrial, and political—will continue to play a pivotal role in what we achieve, but it will of necessity take on very different hues when we can no longer afford to fill the gas tanks of our several thousand pound, 140-miles-per-hour-top-speed SUVs and passenger autos (luxury and otherwise) so that we can travel a mile or two into town at fifteen miles per hour in (we hope) less than half an hour (along with thousands of others doing the same and at the same time) to buy two bags of groceries or visit the dentist or pick up our children from school or visit our elderly parents or shop for new household gadgets or drop in on a friend or go to the office or….

We’re simply NOT going to have the energy resources we now have at our disposal. With urban areas carrying the majority of the world’s population now, we’ll have to create different modes of transportation to accomplish all of those necessary elements of daily life mentioned above. With millions still living in more rural settings, or in suburbs individually designed and thus with no broader strategy in mind (and subject to the same energy-deprivations as those living in downtowns all over the country), a comprehensive, creative, and national strategic vision for transportation will be mandatory if we have any hope of meeting the challenges of day-to-day living in a world where oil and gas are simply not available for the countless, mindless all-too-easy and too-often-taken-for-granted chores and trips and errands we all run multiple times per day. Whew!

What are we going to do? Anyone who thinks for even a micro-second that magic technology is going to save the day just in the nick of time and prevent any of us from having to endure even the slightest changes in the ways we live is practicing delusion on a grand scale.

Do we drag ourselves kicking and screaming into the future, or do we begin recognizing what is at stake—what’s involved in doing our best to avoid inconceivable disruptions to our lifestyles—and instead work together to create and seize new opportunities now?

I’m already on record as stating that I absolutely do not want my lovely lifestyle to change at all. I love the luxury vehicles my wife and I drive, I love our forty-five-miles-away-seven-bedroom-ocean-view summer home—the one I can get to in less than an hour any time I want by just hopping into the car and going there, and I love the fact that I can do exactly the same thing when I go and visit my parents at the opposite end of my state. Do I want to have to ride a couple of different bus and/or subway lines near my suburban home in order to get to the train station so that I can take a MUCH longer ride on someone else’s schedule to go to our summer home or to see my parents (and make the same alternative and time-sucking transportation arrangements at the other end) instead of … just driving there on my own? Of course not! But I’m not going to have much choice in the years to come, and I for one know that I’d like to have a say in how our governments and our business leaders and our fellow citizens work together to create new transportation systems so I can (I hope) still do those things with only slightly less convenience.

Slightly less convenience would be a good goal to shoot for.

With much less oil available to us in the years to come yet with the same personal/travel/food/goods/work needs and wants then as we have today, we’re going to have to figure out different ways of dealing with those myriad transportation issues. Fifty thousand dollar SUVs that get forty miles per gallon instead of eighteen really won’t make that much of a difference when all is said and done. The sooner we recognize what we’ll have to change (sacrifice) in order to continue to live prosperous and fulfilling lives with readily available and inexpensive supplies of oil and gas no longer at our disposal, the sooner we provide ourselves with the best opportunities for making those continuing ambitions a reality. Waiting until “then” to do something cannot be the plan.

The federal government will have to lead, but there will also be vital roles played by state and municipal governments in implementing the strategies needed. We will not be able to afford ad hoc experiments. While each locality will have its own unique needs, responding to those transportation needs and concerns will have to be shaped at the “top” so that we minimize the waste and unsuccessful attempts that hundreds if not thousands of individual transportation plans would otherwise occasion. Funding considerations can be adopted with national purposes and goals in mind, so that we avoid the unfortunate and unnecessary competitions that still take place from one congressional district to another.

Goods and citizens will still have to be transported across state lines, from the suburbs to regional hubs, and within urban/metropolitan areas. That won’t change. Given the economic demands, safety requirements, environmental concerns, and yes, climate considerations, a national transportation strategy (high-speed rail and other forms as well) must be what guides our decision-making.

How soon can we start?

I’ll be back next week with something new….

I’ve touched on the theme of transportation previously (here), and would like to devote the next couple of posts to exploring this vital topic a bit more.

“The automobile industry simply can no longer rely on oil to supply 98 percent of the world’s automotive energy  requirements.” Robert A. Lutz, General Motors’ vice chairman for marketing

Changes are coming. Not necessarily soon, but not too long from now, either.

Peak Oil will leave us with few options but to change—drastically—how we transport our goods, our services, and ourselves. Once production of oil reaches its peak (and there’s enough evidence to suggest that’s probably already happened), we’ll all begin seeing cutbacks here and there, rising prices that don’t really come back down much, if at all, and a dawning realization in industry, government, and its citizens that what we once had so easily and freely will no longer be ours again.

I’ll say again: this is not happening next week or next month, and probably not in the next year or two. But the scope of changes necessitate that we start acting as if they’ll change then, because we’ll have a lot of prep’ work to accomplish first.

This great recession has impacted almost every segment of society, transportation as much any other. Two of our Big Three automakers nearly ceased to exist; vehicle miles driven has been in a more or less steady decline for several years now; auto sales have plummeted, and that recovery will likely never reach its peak again. If lost jobs didn’t do it, then the fear kept buyers away.

The days of our auto-centered life may very well now be in our rear view mirrors. The recession has forced many families to abandon not just plans to buy or add new cars, but to cut back on the ones they already owned. Last year, more autos were scrapped than purchased, and trends suggest that will continue.

In my generation, owning a car as a teen was almost a religion. Not, not so much.

If we wanted jobs to pay for cars, we rarely had much trouble finding one, or two. Today’s teens clearly do not have that option, and since Moms and Dads aren’t usually in a position to buy one for them, that market segment has seen a marked change in purchasing in these last couple of years. More environmentally-conscious youths are more concerned about pollution and global warming and other consequences stemming from autos, so their urgency in owning a car may be curtailed in part for those reasons as well.

In the not-too-distant future … perhaps a decade or two at most, both suburban and urban modes of transportation will likely be very different creatures than the several thousand pound giants we use today to travel that long one-third of a mile to the store or bank. (The vast majority of Americans travel less than 50 miles per day.) Even though more people now live in urban area than anywhere else, the many who still reside in rural areas will be severely impacted. What will they do?

The simple fact that oil/gasoline will be both prohibitively expensive and not-so-easily obtained will mandate different ways of meeting our various needs. Our metropolitan areas will have no choice but to re-fashion themselves in ways more conducive to smaller modes of transport, with electric grids capable of “fueling” the vehicles of tomorrow, and urban and industrial design geared more towards walking and biking. Of necessity, most of our consumer needs will be met more locally than they are now.

We’re unlikely to discover, refine, and mass produce technologies or alternative sources of energy fast enough to permit a seamless transition to a new generation of those heavy, 5, 6, or 8 passenger beasts that dominate the roads today. We likely won’t have as many passable roads then! Repairs and maintenance will no longer be economically feasible in many instances. Asphalt will be harder to come by, as it already is.

This all sounds terrible because it will be so … different. What?! I can’t own a BMW 7 series and a Lexus SUV? I can’t even own one of them? How about just a basic Ford F-150 or a Honda Accord? No? No way!

Trust me: I’m one of those people! As I stated in my very first post, I am not Peak Oil’s poster child. My wife and I own a German luxury vehicle; we own a Japanese luxury SUV; and we own two more cars (one brand-spanking new) for our three children. I’m not even a little bit happy that someday in the not too distant future my enjoyment of these kinds of vehicles will be fond memories of  “the good old days.”

I’m not nearly smart enough to know with any certainty whether electric or hybrid vehicles will actually work in years to come. Is it even possible to mass produce those alternatives in anywhere near enough quantities to replace the several hundred million cars we now own? How can that possibly work?

But with changing demographics and a soon-to-be-urgent need to reconfigure our urban areas to reflect an increasingly car-less society, I do know that in just a couple of short decades, our modes of transportation will be different; our communities will be different; our ways of life will be different. I’m an optimist, so I’m thinking “different” will be okay, and maybe even a lot better. Quieter.

It’s all about what we do with the opportunities we’re now presented.

Truth is, we won’t have any choice. Using whatever precious reserves of oil might then be feasible for extraction to fill up cars and SUVs and pickups will seem insane to most of us.

Suburban sprawl will pose new challenges for us in the years ahead. Largely designed for access by automobiles, those far-flung residential centers will require a new face and new means of egress and ingress. Of necessity they will have to be more self-sufficient. The challenges are daunting, make no mistake. The sheer volume alone is staggering to contemplate. It’s easy to understand why those transitions will not take place in a time period anyone could rationally consider “short.” Opportunities….

We need to begin planning now for a 21st century transportation system, one that addresses our desires and expectations for mobility, productivity, and a better, healthier environment. We can’t afford to get caught wondering “what the hell happened?”

We’re ten years in already. We cannot be having these same discussions at the outset of our next decade.

Next: More Transportation Considerations

Following up once more on my January 11th post about China’s increasing demand for oil (http://peakoilmatters.com/2010/01/11/the-world-of-transportation/), some more information courtesy of Tom Whipple and today’s Energy Bulletin:

China ended 2009 with oil imports averaging some 5 million b/d in December for the first time ever. Chinese demand is  expected to remain strong in 2010….Evidence abounds that China now is growing at an extraordinary pace

The Chinese Expressway system is growing in length so fast that it will likely surpass the US Interstate Highway system in two  years…Between the rapid growth of private passenger transportation, and the remaining diesel powered railroads, Chinese  transportation is probably almost as oil dependent as US transportation

Source:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51213 – Peak oil review – Jan 18 by Tom Whipple, ASPO-USA

On the heels of my post earlier this week regarding automobiles (http://peakoilmatters.com/2010/01/11/the-world-of-transportation/) and the impact on Peak Oil resulting from the increasing worldwide demand (notably in China and India), a recent article from the Financial Times notes the following:

China yesterday underlined the power shift from western car markets to Asia as data confirmed car sales in the country shot up  last year and the government said it expected a strong 2010.

Car sales rose by nearly 53 per cent to 10.3m while total vehicle sales – including buses, trucks and the small commercial vans  that powered much of last year’s growth – rose 46.2 per cent to 13.6m units.

This allowed China to coast past the US and become the leading global auto market, several years ahead of expectation. US  cars and light truck sales last year were 10.4m.

More demand for oil … and it’s not going to stop anytime soon. Just one of the many little facts about oil usage we ought to keep in mind.

Source:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ca637a30-ff1a-11de-a677-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1  – China vehicle sales underline power shift By Patti Waldmeir, January 12

Hello again, and Happy New Year!

I’ll now be posting with greater frequency, and hope that you’ll feel free to offer commentary on these posts and the ideas they generate.

So far I’ve tried to set out some of the basic considerations about Peak Oil. As I stated at the outset, I’ll leave it to others more knowledgeable than me to provide more detailed analyses and greater technical material in their own posts. To that end, I do hope you’ll consider reviewing the sites suggested in my Blog Roll.

The theories and overviews about Peak Oil are of course vitally important. We need a solid grounding on this subject in order to not just properly understand Peak Oil and its implications; so too do we need that level of understanding in order to begin addressing the challenges that will confront us in the years to come.

Overnight fixes are not an option, and a reliance on the magic of technology may prove to be a horrendous miscalculation.

I’ll continue to provide more information about Peak Oil in future posts, but today, I’d like to take the opportunity to provide some very basic considerations about the ubiquitous automobile. Most of us own at least one, and most if not all of us drive. The automobile is one of this country’s most prominent success stories (at least until this Great Recession), and the lifestyle promoted and encouraged by the great American (and European and Japanese) car is a hallmark of our society. (My family owns models from all three categories.)

Ours is a culture defined in no small part by the automobile and the images of success and freedom ownership has afforded us. It is a great American story!

Our highway systems, residence in our countless suburban locations, mall-shopping, the daily commute, and innumerable other aspects of our daily lives (most of which we barely give a first thought to, let alone a second) have been created, designed, and perpetuated on the ready availability of cheap oil and the expediency of automobile travel. Our continuing love affair with the automobile remains unabated notwithstanding our current economic downturn, (and is one I am just as guilty of embracing as anyone).

More driving has lead to more driving, which means more oil/gas consumption. The United States uses more than nine million barrels of oil per day for our cars and trucks [1], which translates into several hundred million gallons of gas each day. We cannot afford to continue our belief that the supply of cheap oil and cheap gasoline will continue indefinitely. Just today, we’re seeing signs that gas prices are starting to inch up yet again. It’s a trend we’re going to have to become accustomed to.

From our local urban planning decisions and zoning by-laws to our national transportation legislation and construction and everything in between, there are few state/city/neighborhood planning aspects that have not been predicated on automobile usage. For all the talk of public transportation and biking, we’ve built our lives as we know it on our ability to just jump in the car and drive. I doubt there are many of us who would instantly know what to do to meet daily responsibilities and needs without the beloved automobile parked just outside our doors. Few things required to sustain us in daily living (or for our enjoyment, for that matter) have been designed for access via alternative transportation. It’s almost all about the car.

(In just fifteen years, it is estimated that the U.S. will have to import seventy-five per cent of the approximate thirty million barrels per day of consumption we’re expected to require. Two-thirds of that is devoted to our transportation needs. [2] How can we sustain this?)

And therein resides a looming problem few of us are aware of, and even fewer know how to deal with … yet. More opportunities….

We’ve seen automobile mileage totals drop by nearly 100 billion miles per year during this Recession. It’s likely that trend will persist into the foreseeable future, notwithstanding occasional rises in usage. That’s wonderful from an environmental standpoint, but it comes at a price … our way of life as we’ve known it is changing. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it is fraught with great uncertainty.

How well we choose to prepare now will determine how effortless, or how disruptive, this transition will prove to be. It will take a great long while to unfold, but unfold it will.

Those of us hoping that gas prices will remain low (or at least low enough that we can justify traveling here and there just as we always have) may be in for a rude and unpleasant shock. My prior posts have attempted to provide the simplest overview of the problems we’ll be confronted with in the face of Peak Oil. I can only suggest that they be given due consideration.

A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. report suggests that the number of automobiles in use in China by 2050 will approach a half-billion (and even more than that in India). By 2010, China will have 36 times more cars than it had twenty years earlier! Hello! [3]

Economists at the International Monetary Fund estimate that the number of cars worldwide will more than quadruple to 2.9 billion in 2050. They expect China’s car fleet will have overtaken America’s (which itself will have increased by more than half) in just twenty more years, and by 2050 their prediction is that China will have almost as many cars as the entire world has today. India isn’t too far behind, as estimates suggest that that country will by 2050 have 45 times the number of automobiles on the road as it has today. [4]

China expects to add 120 million vehicles over the next decade, requiring 11.7 million barrels per day of new crude oil supplies. (As noted in the sourced material, that’s more than Saudi Arabia’s entire annual output—and all of that just to provide for China’s new cars!) [5]

The International Energy Agency recently estimated that the total number of motor vehicles could increase to as many as 1.2 billion by 2013, from the current 800 million.
 
Where is all the extra oil/gasoline to power those vehicles supposed to come from (to say nothing of the increasing non-transportation energy requirements)? Which nations will be required to curtail their usage and slow down the pace of their progress in order to feed this enormous appetite?

World population is not slowing down. And with the rise in population and the desire of developing nations to enhance the way of life for their citizens, more energy is a fundamental necessity to ensure the prosperity they rightfully seek. What are we to do?

All the wishing and hoping in the world won’t change the fact that we are simply not finding enough oil fast enough to meet increasing need. We may be okay right now, but it’s not going to take too much longer for the scales to tip. Then what?

A recent Business Week article touted a new project in the Netherlands that is expected to produce 120 million barrels of oil over a twenty year period, hailing it as an indication that we indeed have, as the article’s title suggests, “Endless Oil.” [6] Twenty years to produce an amount of oil that, if 100 % of it became available at breakfast this morning, would have been consumed by dinner tomorrow. This is what we rely on?

Can we afford to devote so much of ever-declining quantities of precious oil just so we can all drive around? That’s a question we’re all going to have to start pondering. Better to ask it a day too early than a day too late

Next: Some Other Things To Think About

Sources

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/26/AR2008072601025.html?sid=ST2008072601558&pos= This Time, It’s Different: Global Pressures Have Converged to Forge a New Oil Reality By Steven Mufson, July 27, 2008
[2]: http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/53791 – A Vision for Change: An American Energy Policy by William John Cox, August 18, 2008
[3]: http://www.peakoil.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=47228 (citing a 3/30/09 story published in the Miami Gerald and also referencing Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon’s book, “Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability” (Oxford University Press, $24.95)
[4]: http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12544947 “The art of the possible” – Economist magazine, Nov 13th 2008
[5]: Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century – Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder, (p61). Wiley Publishing. See also  http://www.profitfromthepeak.com/
[6]: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_03/b4163046952385.htm – “Endless Oil: Technology, politics, and lower demand will yield a bumper crop of crude” By Stanley Reed, January 7, 2010

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In order for us to begin thinking differently about Peak Oil and its implications, and to begin envisioning what kinds of changes we can make (and will likely have no choice about), we should first understand our oil situation and consumption. This post is an introduction.

If the Peak Oil proponents are correct, we are in for a rude awakening in the near or immediate future (as measured against our ability to transition effortlessly to new energy sources).  Many of us won’t understand why. I’d like to help.

At first glance, addressing the potential fuel/oil replacement problems will appear to be quite daunting. A second glance will suggest that we have incredible opportunities to effect changes that could carry us for decades to come into a safer, cleaner, prosperous future.

At the risk of excess hyperbole, we may very well be at the dawn of a potentially new industrial and economic revolution, if we all understand what’s involved and what’s at stake….I won’t even pretend that this will be easy. It won’t be. But we own the choices. We can prepare, or we can ignore and keep our fingers and toes crossed that some way and some how, we’re going to find the tens of millions of barrels of oil everyone is going to need each and every day, and that we will continue to find those same/increasing amounts … well, forever. I’m an optimist, but not that much.

For those of us more familiar with peak oil statistics, this is a popular one: The United States represents approximately 4% of the world’s population, yet it consumes more than a quarter of the world’s oil each year. (By way of comparison, Europe’s population is nearly 50% greater than ours, yet it uses less than half of the oil we do.)

We own more than a quarter of a billion 2-axle vehicles, and have approximately 200 million drivers. For those of us near large cities, most days it seems as though all 200 million drivers are parked on the same highways as we are.

Two-thirds of the nearly seven billion barrels of oil we use each year is used by those same quarter of a billion cars, trucks, and vans. That’s more than any other nation’s total usage! Almost 90% of America’s workforce uses those cars and trucks to get to work. Our gas mileage standards are remarkably poor for a nation such as ours, and so we waste a tremendous amount of oil and gas. (One estimate suggests that lost productivity and wasted fuel caused by traffic congestion in the U.S. costs us more than $80 billion per year. And German auto mileage standards, for example, are nearly twice as high as ours.) This is not good math.

Another estimate suggests that the 20 million or so barrels of oil we use each day translates into 10,000 barrels of oil per second!  (I won’t do the math to verify it, but feel free to do so on your own.)

About 60% of our oil is now imported, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Those numbers will only increase as time passes. Fifteen years from now, it’s expected that we’ll be importing close to 75% of the oil we need. Some suggest the amount will be much higher. Other nations (notably China and India) are increasing their oil consumption exponentially. At some point limited supply will crash headfirst into increasing worldwide demand as more and more nations seek to improve their standards and emulate our way of life. What happens then?

Our military alone uses close to half a million barrels of oil each and every day. Its entire infrastructure has been built on the foundation of readily-available oil. Limit oil’s availability or supply and what happens to our military operations, our national and international commitments, and the protection of oil transport from the Middle East?

Fortunately, we’re already seeing signs that the military leadership understands this. The rest of us ought to start doing so as well. As I try to emphasize, this is either a disaster in the making or an incredible opportunity. I am an optimist on that score.

We’re sending hundreds of billions of our dollars to Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, and many other nations each year—dollars we no doubt could find good use for here in the United States. We do so in part because our oil peaked in production about 40 years ago. (Even Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, our largest oil field, is now at about one-fifth of its peak production.) We are still finding oil, as the there’s-more-than-enough-oil optimists like to point out in their snarky criticisms of peak oil proponents. We’re just not finding enough, and that hasn’t changed for decades. We’re using more and finding less, and third-grade arithmetic will tell you that that is not a good outcome.

For all the talk of  the “massive” amounts of oil offshore and in Alaska and the “obvious” need for us to just “drill, baby, drill”, we’re several decades away from full production in those regions, and the amounts anticipated will wind up meeting far less than even 5% of our needs. None of it will come cheaply. Drilling in the Arctic is a wee bit more challenging than punching a hole in the ground in Texas, and one does not require an engineering degree to understand that. The “drill, baby, drill” crowd never gets around to spelling any of that out for us. Magical thinking is nice, as is a denial of pesky truths, but on the planet we occupy, it’s a fairly useless exercise.

Data from the Energy Information Agency as of 2007 indicates that our “proven” reserves of conventional oil are about 21 billion barrels. That’s about a 3 year supply for us. More bad math.

One-third of those reserves are “light sweet crude,” which is considered the easy, good stuff. The rest is the not-so-easy and not-so-good stuff … the kind of oil that isn’t produced or refined very efficiently, or inexpensively. Few of our refineries can convert that heavy crude oil into gasoline. None of this is good news.

Opportunity….

There just aren’t any more places on this planet where we can find bottomless pools of oil flowing freely, easily, and inexpensively. That’s certainly true here in the U.S. We’re tapped out. It’s starting to take a lot more effort, many more years, and a lot more money to find and produce what was once so readily available. We’re paying for that, too. Even more bad math.

Cantarell in Mexico has long been considered of the supergiant oil fields on the planet. As recently as 2004 it was producing about 2.5 million barrels a day of oil, and about half of that was shipped here. Production has fallen off a cliff since then, and in 2 – 3 years, it’s expected that production will have declined by close to 80%. Aside from the enormous financial, political, and social problems that will create for our neighbor south of the border (Cantarell was the major source of income to the Mexican government), this also poses a dilemma for us. Where and how do we make up that shortfall?

None of these statistics are especially pleasant to consider. Potential bad news rarely is. But if we understand our situation, if we understand our needs, if we understand that we must individually and collectively begin making better choices and devoting our incredible talents to creating and implementing new means of energy production while revising and improving how we use energy, the bumps in the road we’re destined to confront might be a bit smoother. And in these times, that may not be such a bad option.

Next: More Considerations About American Oil Consumption