Peak Oil Matters

Although here in the Boston area we couldn’t offer definitive proof that it’s winter (a few single digit wind chill days aside)—given that after a surprise few inches of snow here on Halloween weekend, our next accumulation of snow (all of two inches or so) didn’t occur until mid-January …  with just a couple of trivial “storms” since then along with some very nice, mild temperatures such as yesterday’s near-60 degrees—‘tis the season for winter getaways.

Family and business obligations serve as our excuses for upcoming travel. The first trip is to DC, but at the end of February we’ll spend 5 days in Orlando.

That prospect, like most other plans these days, got me thinking about what happens a few years down the road when travel requirements might still be part of at least some portion of the population—business or pleasure.

Both of our trips entail a seven or eight mile drive to and from Boston’s Logan Airport (not a big deal if you avoid the rush-hour-parking-lot-on-the-highway experience) and then round trip (nonstop) flights to both of our destinations. A rental car awaits us on our DC trip, corporate transportation in Orlando.

We figure the fares total about $1500.00 for my wife and I. It’s possible that two of our children will join us on the DC trip, so there’s the potential for added costs.

The nice thing is that we have a number of flight options available at the moment. Both trips afford us multiple nonstop options to and from our destinations, along with a number of other options via connecting flights.

The airline industry, battered though it may be, nonetheless generates tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. That means a lot of employees, suppliers, suppliers’ employees, airports, airport employees and countless others up and down the supply and service chain depend on daily flights to feed their families and pay their bills. Warmer winter weather down South is usually sufficient incentive all by itself!

As will be the case for us, air travel usually includes hotel stays and some other transportation needs. Travel is indeed a big business. Aside from the airline and airline-related personnel and suppliers mentioned above, restaurants and retailers likewise depend on airline-delivered tourists and business travelers to help pad their bottom lines.

One issue that seems fairly obvious to me is that since no one has yet figured out how to fly planes on anything other than jet fuel—at least commercially and on a mass scale—what happens when refineries decrease the supplies of jet fuel because Peak Oil necessitates basic changes in the allocation and supply of crude oil and its by-products? [Tom Whipple wrote a piece on that very subject just last week.]

Supply and demand operates in the airline industry just as it does most other places in our increasingly global economy. So when demand remains as is, but supplies are harder to come by or much more expensive, what happens then?

How much business planning has even been considered to date, let alone implemented to any degree?

When we start brushing up against the limits of oil production (and I believe we already have) and are left scrounging around for less than ideal substitutes as the years go by, what happens to all of the winter tourist travels to warmer locales? What’s our Plan B?

What gets prioritized and why? Which business industries will insist upon travel priorities and actually get what they need? Who will be making those determinations? How will they and their travel planners deal with fewer flights, fewer hotels, fewer transportation, and fewer dining options?

What happens to business conferences [see my 2011 post on that topic here]. What adaptations and transitions will be required of and from businesses from the small local to the mega-giant internationals when travel and transportation needs are restricted? How quickly does all this planning fall into place if we’re not already starting now?

What happens when even more smaller airports shut down when diminished supply cuts into current demand?

And given the incredible shortsightedness our Congressional leaders routinely display, what transportation alternatives will be in place that won’t prove to be infinitely more inconvenient at best?

What happens when your children now living on an opposite coast are no longer afforded the same reasonable and reasonably-priced options to visit you? Now, booking flights is as simple a process as logging on and ordering up a flight. What happens when there aren’t as many flights, or the remaining ones aren’t as affordable, or conveniently located and scheduled because jet fuel prices have shot the through as a result of basic supply and demand constraints? My oldest friend’s daughter (my godchild) now lives in Colorado. How often will she be able to visit with her siblings and parents here on the East Coast when that travel shoe drops?

Of course, we could just come to a conclusion that jet fuel must remain a refinery priority, and the countless other industries relying on their piece of the refined oil product pie will have to take a number and wait their turn? Volunteers? Doubtful.

And what of all the related transportation services dependent on all these flights: rental cars, limos, taxis, hotels, restaurants, airport gift shops and the like? What happens to them, and their employees, and their suppliers? What kind of plans have been discussed in the boardrooms?

How many employees in each of those industries, each individual business establishment, and each spouse or partner or child dependent on each one of those countless employees might be adversely impacted when those businesses start to feel the serious pinch of declining energy supplies? We’ve already gotten a good taste of how our economy gets hammered by poor business environments … what happens when a failure to plan for alternatives leaves with us poor business and economic environments as the norm?

And what of the ripple effect?

What happens when this air travel decline is extended to hotels and rental cars and all the rest; when rental cars are either much more costly and/or there are less of them to begin with? What happens when the preferred hotels have downsized because business and tourist travel has declined?

Nothing escapes the reach of declining fossil fuel availability, and there is nothing on the horizon which suggests that any substitutes currently in place are anywhere near as plentiful, affordable, or energy efficient as good ‘ol crude oil.

The resource agenda for business leaders
To thrive in an era of higher and more volatile resource prices, companies will need to pay greater attention to resource-related issues in their business strategies. The goal must be to improve a company’s understanding of how resources will affect profits, produce new opportunities for growth and disruptive innovation, create new risks, generate competitive asymmetries, and change the regulatory context. [1]

It won’t happen all at once. Slow leaks are the more likely scenarios played out across countless industries. But if we’re not thinking about these possibilities now, or getting better ideas about what changes will be sure to occur and what options might be available to us as this years-long process unfolds, we’re not giving ourselves much of a chance.

I believe the top three challenges to making progress on solutions are: 1) a lack of public and policy maker knowledge on these issues, and strong resistance to understanding and believing that such a profound threat to everything that many of us hold so dear–our big houses, automobile-centered lifestyles, frequent air travel, access to consumer goods from around the world– is close at hand; 2) very strong vested interests that will oppose changes in their industries and how they do business; and 3) our amazing lack of preparation for what we are facing, after investing in a built environment, food production system, transportation system, and overall economy that is so heavily reliant on cheap and plentiful oil. [2]

Thinking about and planning for these likelihoods before they become monumental problems might not be a bad idea….

Sources:

[1] https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/ghost.aspx?ID=/Energy_Resources_Materials/Strategy_Analysis/Mobilizing_for_a_resource_revolution_2908; Mobilizing for a resource revolution by Richard Dobbs, Jeremy Oppenheim, and Fraser Thompson – January 2012
[2] http://countercurrents.org/cardoni230110.htm; Dealing With Peak Oil by Salvatore Cardoni & Dr. Brian Schwartz – 01.23.10

[NOTE: This post is part of an ongoing series (which started here) through the next few months whose purpose is to provide tangible examples of what our future might be like in a world where we will no longer have available to us the quality and quantity of fossil fuel energy sources as we have long been accustomed to possessing and using. Some examples will describe significant impacts beyond the most obvious one: less but more expensive gas to power our vehicles.
Other posts will describe routine aspects of daily living that will likely change when producers of goods and services no longer have inexpensive and adequate supplies of the fossil fuel resources they need. I’m certain that the questions I raise will in turn raise other concerns as well. It is only by acknowledging the consequences affecting each of us that we can begin an intelligent national process of planning and implementing new methods of providing the goods and services we’ll need or desire.]

~~~

I am now the very proud father of a college graduate (a wonderful young woman who completed her four-year curriculum in only three years—impressive!—and has now returned to the Boston area). I could not be more delighted or happier for her!

Last week, I flew to New Orleans to attend her graduation, and stayed there for five nights (had to help pack the van in which she and her friend were traveling back home). My wife, her son and a friend of his flew down separately, and stayed in New Orleans for three nights.

No great surprise, but my daughter was not the only graduate. While I do not have the exact statistics, I believe the overwhelming majority of the approximately 2300 graduates came from someplace other than the immediate New Orleans area. That’s lot of graduates now driving/flying someplace else, and a lot of family members who attended the graduation after having flown in/driven from some other location. In what may be a stunning revelation, this is not the only year a graduation was held at Tulane University … shocking I know!

Even more shocking, this happened several times recently not just in New Orleans. Rumors abound that graduations were also held in Boston, New York, and possibly someplace in California, with more expected soon.

Putting aside the affordability of college for many if our economic path does not change soon, how are families going to deal with the impact of Peak Oil on just the most basic travel options for significant family events such as this?

What kind of choices will families and students be forced to make in the years to come when travel expenses to and from colleges become prohibitively expensive for many if not most of them? The college visits most engage in during senior year of high school has become an industry unto itself, and travel expenses for that aspect of college planning are not insignificant. Our trip to New Orleans was the only college visit we made via airplane, but there was also no small amount of driving involved as my daughter and I checked out a number of colleges here in the New England area.

When gas was $2 and change it was a barely noticeable expense. But at the current $4.29 per gallon (which was $3.99 six weeks ago), families are going to start taking note. Restaurants and hotels and assorted other merchants and service providers who derive no small amount of revenue from these travels by countless hundreds of thousands of prospective college students and their families will suffer in the process.

I’ve been to New Orleans nearly a dozen times in the three years that my daughter attended Tulane. My wife has joined me on three of those trips, and my daughter traveled home on multiple occasions as well.

Each of those trips required some combination of air fare and hotels and rental cars and cab fare and parking fees and gas expenditures and/or use of our own vehicles getting to and from airports….We’re fortunate in that our other daughter attends school in New York City, making Amtrak an enjoyable option, but how many families can or will be able to rely on mass transit for these types of travels? The complete failure of too many of our leaders to recognize the need for more investment in mass transit will prove a damning regret in years to come.

My daughter attended Tulane in part because it was one of the few that offered the major she sought (and a substantial scholarship to boot). What if traveling that far had not been an option? Or if it had been, what kind of dynamics would have been involved if she had moved down there, and we didn’t see each other for nearly 3 years because travel expenses had become prohibitively expensive for us (not that it wasn’t a drain on my finances to begin with)?

What kind of lifestyle changes would this young college student have had to make, knowing that she was essentially on her own for three or four years without the intangibles of family contact? (As it is, a week after she moved to New Orleans for the first time, hurricane warnings forced an evacuation of all area colleges, and she was on a plane back home about 8 days after she and I had said good-bye!) What happens in these or similar conditions when plane fare is out of the question for most? Buying airline tickets last minute is not exactly an inexpensive proposition! And what kind of options have to be put into place when vehicular travel is not feasible, and there is no mass transit available?

“Our friend of past online debates, Randall O’Toole, is a champion of both the auto-based transportation system and mobility in general. His argument is essential that there is a correlation between mobility and prosperity, that the more mobile a society is, the more at liberty people are to follow endeavors that enhance life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Greater mobility increases job opportunities, shopping selection, service competitiveness, school choices and even the gene pool people have a chance to select from when seeking a mate. There is no question that, in a broad sense, he is correct.” [1]

Greater mobility has been a wonderful option for many years for countless millions of us. What happens in the years to come when it’s not?

Sources:

[1] http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/4/4/mobilitys-diminishing-returns.html; Mobility’s Diminishing Returns by Charles Marohn – April 4, 2011

[NOTE: This post is part of an ongoing series (which started here) through the next few months whose purpose is to provide tangible examples of what our future might be like in a world where we will no longer have available to us the quality and quantity of fossil fuel energy sources as we have long been accustomed to possessing and using. Some examples will describe significant impacts beyond the most obvious one: less but more expensive gas to power our vehicles.
Other posts will describe routine aspects of daily living that will likely change when producers of goods and services no longer have inexpensive and adequate supplies of the fossil fuel resources they need. I’m certain that the questions I raise will in turn raise other concerns as well. It is only by acknowledging the consequences affecting each of us that we can begin an intelligent national process of planning and implementing new methods of providing the goods and services we’ll need or desire.]

~~~

I recently had the good fortune to visit my daughter at the university she attends in New Orleans. Scheduled many months ago, the trip was designed to coincide with the spectacular Mardi Gras festival which serves as a grand and delightful marker for a city too often associated instead with the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. Although the weather was not as cooperative as we would have liked during the four days of my trip (tornado warnings on the night of Mardi Gras dampened at least my enthusiasm to wander around the French Quarter), I nonetheless caught my fair share of beads during one of the amazing parades that wind their way down St. Charles Avenue, while taking in many other sights and sounds of the celebrations.

It’s an incredible event, wildly entertaining and just plain wilder than one can imagine. Reports indicated that it drew upwards of a million revelers to this unique city—the most since Katrina struck in 2005.

Being as involved with the subject of Peak Oil as I am these days, I soon enough found myself wondering what happens to this spectacle once we are fully engulfed by the effects of ever-declining oil production.

Last summer, I took an initial look at air travel. Among others, I posed the following question: “What decisions are the various transportation industries—freight and aviation in particular—going to be faced with when the worldwide supply of oil cannot ever match demand again? Who decides which of those two will have priority? It’s unlikely that only one industry will have all of its demand met, so that means both industries will suffer reductions in what is available to them. Then what?”

What does happen a few short years down the road when we have nowhere near the same amounts of fossil fuels at our disposal (and/or at prices even remotely affordable) to travel to New Orleans, and when those who design and operate the hundreds of floats and tractors and emergency vehicles that are part and parcel of the Mardi Gras festivities are now at the mercy of fuel prices that have doubled? Tripled? Quadrupled? Hundreds of gas-sucking vehicles crawling along a 5 or 7 mile parade route run up a serious gas/diesel tab in today’s economy.

Then what indeed? A reasonable several hundred dollar round trip air fare from Boston to New Orleans during this celebration is likely going to be a lot more expensive in years to come, and most likely prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of visitors. Granted, many thousands may still find ways to get there, but you can be certain that if air fares have spiked through the roof in a few years, gas prices for our automobiles won’t be far behind. Are citizens who live even just a few hundred miles away going to want to pay $6.00, $8.00, $11.00 for a gallon of gas to go to a festival? Is something like Mardi Gras going to be any kind of priority for most?

Given the dazzling levels of shortsightedness on display by those who balk at investing in mass transit and/or high-speed rail, what options might be available in a half-dozen or so years from now (not that mass transit will be in place in so short a period of time)? Anyone thinking that we’ll just rev’ up design, production, and construction in a week or two is even more delusional than imaginable. Those are investments (among others) which must begin now.

A determined segment of leaders are hell-bent on cutting funding for alternative energy research and transportation—among many other categories vital to our future well-being—and are doing so contrary to what most polls state that Americans want. What’s going on? If they succeed in their efforts, what then? Can we all just rely on whatever magical technology these officials seem to believe will come flying to the rescue in years ahead? Are there some special alternatives that are going to be envisioned, designed, produced, and implemented successfully, commercially, and nationally overnight? Is that the plan for those so determined to cut spending so as to preserve tax benefits for the oil companies and multi-millionaires among us? Is that what we’re about?

The Mardi Gras pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into the New Orleans economy. Not too difficult to imagine that city more so than most, and its industry leaders, count on that revenue more than just a little. What’s the ripple effect to New Orleans and its businesses when hundreds of millions of dollars are not-so-suddenly reduced by half, or more, simply because most attendees can no longer (or choose to no longer) afford the travel and lodging costs? What city services will be placed on the chopping block? How many more will suffer?

What of the restaurants and hotels that likewise depend on Mardi Gras? It was almost impossible to find lodging in the few months leading up to Mardi Gras unless you were willing to pay some seriously jacked-up prices and travel a long way into New Orleans each day. Many, many fewer patrons represent a tremendous hit to the bottom lines of those in the lodging and food service industries.

Many if not most of those retailers depend on tractor-trailers to deliver or transport supplies. Can you say diesel fuel price hikes? It’s hard to imagine that either the transportation industry or the lodging and restaurant industries are each going to absorb on their own the increased fuel prices (another domino effect which comes into play when supply no longer satisfies demand). As freight delivery charges increase and are passed on to end-users such as hotels and restaurants, and food costs themselves increase because the fossil fuels needed to provide fertilizers and a host of other “ingredients” of food production have likewise climbed into new territory (while the quantity of the fossil fuels themselves are on the decline), the unpleasant outcome is fairly obvious.

What happens to the taxi drivers who escort all these new patrons who descend on their city? (Based on my conversations with several of them however, the drivers have decidedly mixed feelings about Mardi Gras, given the logistical nightmares they must deal with every time a parade route or street-cleaning crew cuts off their travel options.)

I usually rent a car when I travel to New Orleans to visit my daughter. She cautioned me against doing so during Mardi Gras. Heeding her advice, I made do with buses, the partially-available street car lines, or a good pair of sneakers to get me around during my stay. I had the choice of taking a cab or the airport shuttle to get me to/from the city. I opted for the latter. The 55-minute or so trip from pick-up on campus to a half-dozen or so hotel stops en route to the airport when I left was by contrast a two and a half hour “adventure” when I first arrived.

Getting dropped off at my daughter’s school was the last of 8 stops the shuttle made in New Orleans after we left the airport. It seemed that almost every street was closed off that Saturday afternoon either by police barricades, an actual parade, or the random hoards of street cleaning crews which materialized seemingly out of thin air on multiple occasions as we wound our way through the city proper. At one point, although we were only four cars from a Canal Street intersection, those crews held up the shuttle van through four consecutive light cycles! That is a lot of wasted fuel….No doubt the very reasonable $40.00 or so round trip shuttle fare is going to also be a lot more expensive in years to come—assuming they (and the taxi drivers) have access to the fuel they need as and when needed. No guarantees….

Hundreds if not thousands of merchants, from street vendors on up to retail stores in and around the French Quarter, also no doubt depend on Mardi Gras revenue to bolster their bottom line. Whatever merchandise they offer is also most likely trucked in from somewhere else. Those suppliers won’t be immune to increased fuel prices and/or limitations on availability, and that means at least one entity somewhere along the supply chain is going to wind up paying, and then passing the costs along.

And the employees of the countless industries who depend on events like the Mardi Gras for a substantial portion of their annual income (keeping in mind that Peak Oil is not limited to impacting just the Mardi Gras festival while other lesser events and conventions escape unscathed)? When all of these increased prices are absorbed and then passed on to the ultimate end-users, more than a substantial percentage of those businesses are not going to be able to endure the increases or supply restrictions or lack of buyers because consumers no longer want to pay the higher prices. And that then means that more than a fair amount of employees and business owners are going to find themselves looking for work elsewhere. A lot of dominoes tumble when people are out of work … no need to elaborate.

“Just do something to lower fuel prices and none of this will be a problem” is a wonderful strategy and solution … if you don’t mind living in some alternate reality. Here on earth, however, these declining oil production consequences all inevitable, logical, and unavoidable—despite heavy doses of political grandstanding.

We can either duck for cover, or start appreciating the tasks at hand and get busy adding our voices and offering productive input into the almost-inconceivably complex planning and implementing Peak Oil will mandate—regardless of political ideology.

It is, as mentioned repeatedly, time to get busy.

More to come….

“We are trapped in a very complex civilization that is rapidly losing the sources of energy and numerous other raw materials that built and maintained it….
“If current trends continue, somewhere in the next five years a critical mass of us will realize that new foundations for civilization, and new ways of life must be found and implemented if we are going to survive with a modicum of comfort, economic, and political stability. Until then there will be many false prophets calling for a return to a civilization which is no longer possible.” [1]

A stubborn insistence that we’re just going to ignore the facts about global warming and the arrival of a peak in worldwide oil production—paying no attention to a rather large body of quite convincing evidence in the process—and instead plow ahead with public investments and plans that will in due course prove to be nothing more than monumental wastes of time (and incredibly short-sighted to boot), ought to be revisited.

We cannot afford to continue to design and then implement plans based only on what seems feasible now, or much worse, because it’s what we’ve always done, or it’s what an uninformed electorate would prefer. The first task, as I’ve mentioned in my recent posts, is that we all need to make a commitment to learning more and understanding the facts. In doing so, we need to find and rely upon the resources where the truth is the only option.

Allowing current business and political leaders to decide what will need to be done based on what has been done before is not the solution. There is no clearer indication of that than the continued resistance to spending money and investing in alternative forms of transportation.

“[N]ewly elected Republicans soon to enter gubernatorial offices have promised to shut down their local federally funded intercity rail corridors that they fear will overwhelm them with future operating expenses. Of course, those complaints are patently absurd when put in context of each state’s respective overall transportation budget. Wisconsin, for instance, spends more than a billion dollars on roadway construction annually and would have been asked to contribute a mere $7.5 million to train operations. Is such a small contribution really such a huge price to pay for a transportation alternative?” [2]

A worthwhile question that demands a much better response than what we’re seeing.

To be fair, there’s no question that making these kinds of investment decisions and committing even more funds from a limited supply is under no one’s definition an easy, simple or—at first—an obvious solution. There are indeed many legitimate arguments against such a commitment. I’m firmly in the camp that believes high speed rail is a necessity, but I’m just as clear that we need to think through the strategies more than we have to date. High-speed rail aside, I’m more convinced by the day that a great deal more reliance on public transportation will be mandatory.

A fear of deficits and increased public spending are going to have to give way to a longer term vision for the kind of nation we choose to be and the levels of growth and prosperity we at least hope to attain in a world no longer able to rely on fossil fuels. That vision and the corresponding plans of necessity must include a greater commitment to public transit. The choice to devote our limited transportation capital funds on the more familiar roadwork projects makes perfectly good sense in a vacuum where growth is expected to return to “normal” soon enough. The harsh truth is that it will not because it cannot. There will be new definitions of “normal” in the years to come.

I don’t like it any more than anyone else, but we create only more difficulties for ourselves by denying the facts and delaying our efforts to create an industrial economy that no longer depends on fossil fuels. It’s a monumental undertaking to be sure, and is not one we should expect to complete for at least a couple of decades. But oil supplies have reached their peak and it is soon enough all downhill from there, so we’re confronted with the dual challenge of re-creating the way our economy functions while utilizing declining supplies of oil in the process, and simultaneously trying to keep our heads above water under current conditions, dependent on that exact same declining supply. All the creativity and spin in the world cannot make that math come out in our favor. Change is a-comin’.

The bottom line is that for all the arguments favoring more expenditures on road construction at the expense of public transportation, the same end result would be arrived at with far less effort if we simply burn piles of money on the steps of Capitol Hill. Appreciating the challenges and implications of having now arrived at the peak of oil production does lead to the obvious conclusion (political ideologies in opposition notwithstanding) that we are going to have to move away from an automobile-centric society.

In the years to come, we simply will not have enough oil/gasoline to power the number of automobiles we own in this country under similar or growing levels of usage when we add to that astounding number the many millions more new automobiles that will be added to the roadways of other nations. We could meet that demand, of course. We’d simply have to do away with a great many other necessities and products (see my last post for a brief list) dependent on oil, since there won’t be enough fossil fuels to go around to meet all the demand everywhere all the time for everyone. That’s Peak Oil!

As I’ve taken great pains to emphasize, we’re not running out of oil any time soon. But depletion and an inexorable decline in production which no alternative or unconventional resources can make up for means there’s going to be less available for everyone and everything. Those dominoes will continue to tumble until one day, likely several decades into the future, it will no longer be feasible to continue extracting oil or using. Too much effort and too much expense for too little reward is what we face. Start planning now is the smart choice, because once we’ve solicited all the input available—no easy or quick task in itself—we’re going to have a lot of work ahead of us putting those plans into action, with the myriad modifications and adaptations that will surely be needed.

We’ll need to be smarter about the new choices we make, too. Reliance on (or hope that) the electric vehicle is the answer to the transportation aspect of Peak Oil’s impact is all fine and well in the abstract. But as has been pointed out by others (here and here), if we’re just expecting that fancy new electric Mercedes and BMWs and Ford pick-up trucks and Honda SUVs and Chevy Volts will just simply replace the ones we drive now, we’re in for another rude awakening. An enormous conversion of infrastructure will be required, for one thing. And for another (topics for upcoming posts here), if the strategies we design to cope with fossil fuel depletion do not also include plans for where and how we live, we’re just digging another deep hole for ourselves.

As objectionable as this will be to many, “smart growth” and “sustainable living” practices are going to warrant much greater levels of attention than they have to date. If ideological principles cause one to blanche at the thought of our federal government “dictating” how and where people live by controlling urban sprawl, the message is a simple one: Get used to it. This is not about a desire of the government to impose its will or make choices for others. It will instead be another courageous recognition that great changes will and must take place, and that there must be a national mechanism for guiding the choices and actions of local governments and private industry to address those looming realities.

Given that certain segments of the media (and the political and social groups that align themselves with that media’s particular ideology) seem convinced that President Obama does not believe we’re an “exceptional” nation (the convenient omission of facts and context debunking that meme are neatly summed up here and here), here’s our chance to prove him “wrong.” Let’s do so by leading the charge into the 21st century with a new vision about how prosperous and successful nations adjust to the new realities about energy supply and usage. It will take one hell of a village to make this happen in any event.

Why not us?

Sources:

[1] http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/7980-the-peak-oil-crisis-the-future-of-government.html; The Peak Oil Crisis: The Future of Government By Tom Whipple
[2] http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/12/01/growing-conservative-strength-puts-transit-improvements-in-doubt/; Growing Conservative Strength Puts Transit Improvements in Doubt by Yonah Freemark

“[B]y 2050 another 130 million people are projected to be living in the United States; by 2100 the Census Bureau’s high estimate is more than 1 billion. Providing infrastructure and transportation for this expanding population will generate a long list of required equipment and materials….”[1]

That’s a lot of energy demand and usage under the best of supply conditions! When many other nations are dealing with similar population growths, how on earth (literally) are we going to provide?

That question is troubling enough. How do we provide when the supply of oil that has so far supported our rising populations and ever-increasing demand is no longer as plentiful, inexpensive, or easily obtainable?

World oil production has been flat at best since the middle part of this decade. Even when oil was zooming up to nearly $150.00 per barrel just a few short years ago, oil production didn’t increase. As yourself: why? Why wouldn’t nations allegedly up to their eyeballs in plentiful reserves not ramp up production so as to generate untold billions and billions in additional income? Hello! Just having those plentiful reserves isn’t enough. If they are too difficult or too costly to extract, or if the quality is poor, we could have a gazillion barrels of oil in reserves and not a drop of it would help. Those are the present-day facts about a good deal of our oil supplies. It’s not going to get any better.

“[C]onventional oil reserves are being depleted throughout the world at twice the rate of their replacement, historically slow annual capacity declines from major oil fields are being replaced by rapid declines from significantly smaller new developments, and finally marginal new reserves such as arctic and deep water oil accumulations require inordinate new technology advancements and massive funding in order to be brought on-stream in adequate volumes as affordable costs.” [2]

It’s true that the possibility exists that the tipping point when oil production begins its unavoidable decline may yet be many years away, [see this for a good summary of the current state of oil production] but are we really willing to wager that something will come along to save the day when it’s time to deal with those challenges on a day-to-day basis? Are we willing to even place bets on exactly when that might be? Doing nothing seems like a monumental—and monumentally foolish—strategy.

“’We are confronted with a society built on high-quality energy, dense forms of energy, fossil fuels especially,’” says [Boston University] ecological economist Cutler Cleveland. ‘Could you have the same standard of living with renewables? I don’t think we really know. Things might have to change very fundamentally….’
“[R]enewables’ handicaps do not bode well for speeding up the next energy transition. Fossil fuels ‘were phenomenally attractive,’ yet it still took 50 to 70 years to bring them into widespread use, says [systems analyst Arnulf Grübler of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)]. That’s because, no matter how attractive a fuel might be, it takes time to create the infrastructure for extracting and transporting the resource, converting it into a usable form, and conveying it to the end user. It also takes time for inventors to develop enduse technologies—such as steam engines, internal combustion engines, and gas turbines—and for consumers to adopt them and create demand. Renewables ‘will be slower because they’re less attractive,” says Grübler. “They don’t offer new services; they just cost more.’” [3]

Not exactly an ideal solution, especially when we consider how little research funding we currently provide (which will likely become less as a shortsighted Congress is already suggesting). It’s estimated that fossil fuels (oil in particular) plays a role in the production of more than 90% of all industrial goods, and a similar percentage in supplying fuel for all forms of transportation. There is no denying that our economic way of life is supported by what has long been a ready supply of oil. That’s going to change. Pretending it won’t is just dumb.

Doing nothing, or waiting for some “better” time to deal with that problem will result in one certain outcome: we’ll have fewer options available to actually deal with the problems of decreasing supply.

“Until we get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession, government is the only remaining booster rocket. If anything, we need more government spending and lower taxes on the middle class. This means bigger deficits, at least for the time being. Even worse, budget-deficit mania will slow future growth if it forces government to cut the things that fuel growth  – education,  basic R&D, child health, improved infrastructure.
“No smart family would choose to balance the family budget over borrowing money to send the kids to college. The same logic holds for the nation as a whole. If certain government spending generates higher future productivity, we’d be nuts not to make the investment just to avoid a larger deficit.” [4]

With so much of our individual and commercial livelihood dependent on a vital and finite resource on the verge of an irreversible decline (at least in terms of affordable prices and in sufficient quantities to meet ever-increasing demand), we’ve got a big problem ahead of us. Global warming won’t help (despite the Right’s intentional unwillingness to recognize that problem—a purely political calculation that is destined to lead to unimaginable difficulties), and an economy already straining to remain upright both serve to create a convergence of challenges about which we are at present woefully uninformed and ill-prepared for. Toss declining supplies of affordable oil into that pot and we’re brewing some kind of nasty future for ourselves.

Exactly how quickly does our leadership think it’s going to take to transition away from fossil fuels? How long do most of us think that will take?

For those narrow-minded and shortsighted public personalities denouncing Big Government in all its facets, they’re creating an environment in which government will be the only entity left standing and capable of managing what will surely be an upheaval of historic proportions … with no guarantees that it will succeed. (When media personalities on the Right are denouncing Republicans for not being conservative enough because they supported legislation eliminating incandescent light bulbs as one means to conserve energy [5], it’s a demonstration of narrow-minded ignorance about our energy future that’s difficult to fathom. Are these people incapable of understanding anything about the future? Is there some genetic defect that prevents them from considering consequences beyond the end of the month?}

Acting on an oddly-based belief that all of this evidence (facts are so damned annoying at times!) leads to some happy outcome completely divorced from reality is a mind-numbingly dangerous strategy to follow at the expense of hundreds of millions of people.

We need to be better.

That admonition applies not just to the media and political personalities too many of us depend on for guidance. If we don’t step up and start recognizing how much of our everyday lives depend in small or large part on having oil and gas at the ready 24/7, and then considering how much of that 24/7 is going to be altered when those same supplies either become exorbitantly more expensive and/or (likely both) not as readily available any longer, then we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves. Is that a roll of the dice we should be considering?

Take a moment to reflect on how many products you own in your own home that were produced either directly from fossil fuels or were transported or otherwise supplied using fossil fuels in the distribution process. Is there anything not attributable to oil? How long and how much effort and how many changes and how much of our production facilities and how much of our infrastructure and how much of our transportation services are going to have to be adapted to a world where oil is no longer at the ready as it has been for more than 100 years? How do implement the new facilities, which will themselves no doubt demand a considerable amount of energy in their creation and distribution, when there’s even less efficient, inexpensive, and available fossil fuels to power all of that?

Even in the midst of the hardships and burdens the vast majority of us are being obliged to endure daily as our economy stumbles along—which surely cloud our abilities to take on even more burdens—we need to become better educated about the challenges that loom in the much-too-soon future, and we need to become at least a bit smarter about the contributions we make to solving the problems. The evidence from recent polling seems quite clear that a too-large percentage of Americans have their facts completely wrong about President Obama’s legislative accomplishments (here, here, and here), and that lack of understanding will be of no help to any of us as we undertake the massive challenge of revising … well, just about everything!

If we either remain uninformed or mislead by the facts and the options we’ll have to rely on, or if we make decisions based not on reason and consideration of the realities confronting us (daunting as they will be), then we should expect very little in the way of solutions or success.

“Is America ready for the 21st century? The answer is no.” [6]

We need to find a better answer, and we should start working on that right about now.

Sources:

[1] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/alperowitz_et_al/single; The Cleveland Model By Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard & Thad Williamson – TIM ROBINSON

[2] http://www.emirates247.com/news/region/saudi-oil-analyst-disputes-high-supply-theory-2010-11-10-1.315931; Saudi oil analyst disputes high supply theory

[3] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/329/5993/780; Do We Have the Energy for the Next Transition? Richard A. Kerr

[4] http://robertreich.org/post/1549020696; Why We Should Beware Budget-Deficit Mania by Robert Reich

[5] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45059.html; Right burns over Upton light bulb law By: Robin Bravender

[6] http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2627; America’s Aging Infrastructure: What to Fix, and Who Will Pay? Erwann Michel-Kerjan, managing director of Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center.

“I don’t think people quite understand how fundamental transportation is to the economy and their standard of living.” [1]

“Some might also wonder why a shortage of oil should automatically trigger a collapse. It turns out that, in an industrialized economy, a drop in oil consumption precipitates a proportional drop in overall economic activity. Oil is the feedstock used to make the vast majority of transportation fuels—which are used to move products and deliver services throughout the economy. In the US in particular, there is a very strong correlation between GDP and motor vehicle miles traveled. Thus, the US economy can be said to run on oil, in a rather direct and immediate way: less oil implies a smaller economy. At what point does the economy shrink so much that it can no longer meet its own maintenance requirements? In order to continue functioning, all sorts of infrastructure, plant and equipment must be maintained and replaced in a timely manner, or it stops functioning. Once that point is reached, economic activity becomes constrained not just by the availability of transportation fuels, but also by the availability of serviceable equipment.” [2]

“The United States is saddled with a rapidly decaying and woefully underfunded transportation system that will undermine its status in the global economy unless Congress and the public embrace innovative reforms, a bipartisan panel of experts concludes in a report released [several weeks ago].
“U.S. investment in preservation and development of transportation infrastructure lags so far behind that of China, Russia and European nations that it will lead to ‘a steady erosion of the social and economic foundations for American prosperity in the long run.” [3]

This is real life; this is what happens when you put on blinders and decide that a political ideology already proven not to work will nonetheless work magic this time. If they do what they’ve always done, we’ll get more of what we’ve already gotten … hello!

Spending the kinds of money being tossed about for transportation infrastructure modernization is mind-boggling. As one recent report suggests, an additional $134 billion to $262 billion must be spent per year through 2035 to rebuild and improve roads, rail and air transportation systems. [4] Coupled with even larger investments needed to modernize our entire infrastructure, and it becomes terrifying. Talk about bad options or bad options! There are few short-term upsides to the choices we’re confronted with, but that’s the key issue: this is not about what’s best for us only right now. Difficult decisions or difficult decisions are the choices on the table.

But what is the option? Where do we wind up ten, twenty, fifty years down the road? Do we leave our children and grandchildren with potentially burdensome debt but in an economic environment that meets their needs and gives them hope and chance for an even better future, or do we send them into the world relatively debt-free but confronted with decay and decline and little hope as far as the eye can see?

“The United States can’t compete successfully in the 21st century with a 20th century transportation infrastructure—especially when its chief trading partners, including not only the advanced economies of Western Europe and Southeast Asia but also rapidly developing countries like China, are making significant investments in cutting-edge transportation technologies and systems. Transportation efficiency has a direct impact on Americans’ standard of living and on the cost of goods and services delivered by U.S. firms and businesses.” [5]

The knee-jerk reaction to raising any fees, notably the 18.4 cent (per gallon) federal gas tax, which has not been raised since 1993, hamstrings any efforts to legitimately address these challenges. A sense of entitlement—that we shouldn’t have to pay for public services—is rapidly becoming not just an enormous impediment to resolving our difficulties. We also run the risk that our fears of national decline will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and with no one to blame but ourselves.

“We would also note that while other nations are effectively rebuilding and improving transportation infrastructure (think China, France, India and other competitors), we are consumed with debates about the proper role of our national government, all the while avoiding the tough decisions that would give us the resources to do the same. [6]

You don’t have to be a math whiz to understand that inflation and increased fuel mileage over the years (and thus less spending at the pump) have dramatically reduced the sufficiency of the gas tax as a source for highway construction and maintenance funds. The sad truth is that Americans don’t want to pay for much, and that’s a sure recipe for all kinds of disasters, but our attention span is short and our memories about other consequences are just as short.

One proposal repeatedly floated about only to be instantly shot down is a one or two cent (cent, as in penny!) increase in that per gallon gas tax. Two or three cents would be fabulous, but we can’t get Congressional leaders to even consider a one freaking penny increase to help pay for road maintenance and repair … one penny per gallon! Let’s take a look at how this breaks down in the real world of facts:

Estimated miles traveled per year by the average driver is 15,000

Average miles per gallon is 15 – 20 miles per gallon. Let’s lowball and say it’s only 15 mpg

15,000 miles per year divided by 52 weeks = 290 miles; let’s say 300 miles per week

300 miles per week divided by 15 miles per gallon = 20 gallons of gas used per week, or about $60.00 per week at current prices, or about $3000.00 per year

20 gallons of gas per week with a one freaking cent gas tax increase = 20 cents per week, times 52 weeks means that the average driver paying $10.40 more per year to help alleviate an urgent need … ten freaking dollars per year!

And we have leaders and organizations and media personalities telling us that raising this tax is as calamitous as anything we’ve ever seen. This begs the obvious and unfortunate question:

How irresponsible, clueless, and short-sighted is this?

“The fact is that failure to adequately maintain and invest in our transportation systems means not only gridlocked roads and deteriorating bridges in the near term, but a steady erosion of the social and economic foundations for American prosperity in the long run. Avoiding this outcome means government, and ultimately taxpayers, need to be willing to invest more in transportation, not just for one year or a few, but on a sustained basis over time….Policymakers and the public will need to understand that investments in transportation infrastructure—provided these investments are wisely chosen and effectively implemented—will have long-term benefits that more than justify their near-term costs.” [7]

“[O]ur transportation infrastructure also is the foundation upon which virtually every major industry sector depends. Many industries could not exist without the wise infrastructure investments our nation has made in the past. These industries include tourism, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, agriculture and forestry, mining, retailing, wholesaling and many others that are essential to our economic vitality and quality of life. Dependent industries provide more than 78.6 million American jobs with a total payroll in excess of $2.8 trillion, illustrating just how much we have at stake when we underfund our transportation efforts.” [8]

As my favorite political blogger, Steve Benen, so dryly noted: “We are, by the way, talking about projects that create jobs, spur economic development, relieve traffic congestion, and help the environment, all while offering the promise of transforming American transportation in the 21st century.” [9]

Not that that matters….

Whether or not we manage to restore some semblance of prosperity in the near (or even not-so-near) future will depend in no small part on the courage and wisdom we ask our leaders to demonstrate—with our support—in making wise investment decisions with an eye to the future, difficult as those choices may be. Not making those decisions has the potential to be catastrophic.

We have to encourage and even insist on a vision for our future that takes into account legitimate concerns on both sides of these investment issues but also moves beyond them in recognition of the fact that in a near-future powered by less fossil fuel resources, changes will have to be made in how we address these challenges. Throwing more money at public roads is not the sole option, nor can it be.

“Name one attribute America’s most successful cities have in common. The ‘it’ factor often overlooked – but necessary for success – is transit. Successful cities all across the nation have made the choice to make public transit a priority – and that decision pays off.
“According to the American Public Transit Association, for every $1 cities invest in public transportation, they generate $4 in economic returns. Economically viable cities make funding transit a priority because they can generate multiple, positive economic outcomes with a single investment:
“Developers are attracted to transit areas. If a city wants to revitalize a blighted area or dictate where high-density growth and expansion occur, one of the smartest things it can do is invest in transit.” [10]

For all the (many of which are legitimate) arguments against investing in high speed rail, the reality that almost none of those opponents bother to consider is that in a world with ever-declining oil production, increasing world-wide demand, and more complex geopolitical and geological challenges, our insistence on remaining an automobile-based nation evidencing our greatness and independence is at best extremely foolish. We are simply not going to have same level of fossil fuels we now depend on for transportation. That’s just the reality, and we ignore it or stubbornly insist otherwise at our peril. Alternative forms of transit—expensive or not—are going to play a critical role for us in the future, both personally and commercially. Stomping our feet and demanding otherwise is nice, but not going to get you much.

“In the United States, high-speed rail remains roadkill for Republicans who, in playing to anti-big-government voters, reflexively say states cannot afford it rather than reflect on how mass transit and speedy corridor trains will wean us off oil and improve quality of life for generations to come.” [11]

We, and our leaders, need to be wiser and far less shortsighted than we tend to be.

Sources:

[1] http://www.infrastructurist.com/2010/10/22/new-report-shows-states-want-to-cut-infrastructure-spending/; New Report Shows States Want to Cut Infrastructure Spending by Eric Jaffe (quoting Byron Schlomach, director of the Center for Economic Prosperity at the Goldwater Institute in Arizona)

[2] http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/11/peak-oil-is-history.html; Peak Oil is History

[3]http://millercenter.org/policy/transportation [link to PDF]; Report from the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virgina: Well Within Reach – America’s New Transportation Agenda – David R. Goode National Transportation Policy Conference (Norman Y. Mineta and Samuel K. Skinner, Conference Co-Chairs, Jeffrey N. Shane, Conference Director) issued October, 2010

[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/04/AR2010100402269.html; Failing U.S. transportation system will imperil prosperity, report finds By Ashley Halsey III

[5] Miller Center Report (above) p.26

[6] http://www.amconmag.com/cpt/2010/10/19/how-to-finance-the-next-six-year-transportation-authorization-a-taxing-issue/; How to Finance the Next Six-Year Transportation Authorization: A Taxing Issue – October 19, 2010 by Glen Bottoms

[7] Miller Center Report (above) p. 27

[8] http://www.hntb.com/point-of-view/think5-investing-in-our-economic-future; Investing in our economic future

[9] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_11/026518.php; SO MUCH FOR HIGH-SPEED RAIL…..

[10] http://transportation.nationaljournal.com/2010/10/talkin-about-a-railvolution.php; Talkin’ About A Rail-Volution? By Fawn Johnson; (Response by Tom Madigan: The ‘It’ Factor Of Successful Cities)

[11] http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/10/30/us_needs_to_get_on_track_for_high_speed_rail/; US needs to get on track for high-speed rail By Derrick Z. Jackson

Ray LaHood, the Secretary for the Department of Transportation, recently noted on his own blog that in the course of his meetings with city officials at last week’s U.S. Conference of Mayors, their primary concern was about transportation (and infrastructure).

These are the elected men and women closest to everyday life for Americans and the ones most directly responsible for ensuring our citizens and industries are properly provided for. They recognize that the only way for this nation to remain competitive—thus helping to ensure a decent standard of living for all us us—is to focus attention, resources, and money on improving the quality (and modes) of transportation while maintaining a solid infrastructure. They also are quite clear in recognizing that guidance, support, and planning must originate at a higher level than city or town government.

Perhaps it’s time we all recognize what they clearly already know: we don’t have valid or viable options other than to spend more money on the fundamentals of our industrialized society. Howl all you want about debt and deficits and all the rest—however legitimate those concerns may be in their own right—we’ll put people back to work and chart a better course for our future in a world of declining fossil fuel resources not by cutting back or doing as little as possible.

Hypocritical “Pledges” that a third grade math student can see mean nothing and an uninvolved federal government are definitely not the solutions. There are no easy or inexpensive or quick fixes, and the sooner this is understood and accepted, the sooner we all begin the heavy lifting needed to deal with the challenges of a post-peak oil world and an infrastructure desperately in need of revitalization.

It’s time to stop pretending that we don’t still have fundamental problems requiring long-term national commitments and efforts. We might also consider suggesting to our political “leaders” as well that they—and we—could profit from perspective and understanding that extends beyond later next week. We’re past the point of tolerating the idiotic political sound bite that appeases only the uninformed. Our leaders need to lead. Pandering cannot continue to be a strategy, although I hold out little hope that that will change any time soon.

“Whether it is massive investment in new fuels or massive investment in redesigning cities, it is likely that governments will need to take a role in preparing for peak oil if they wish to avoid major economic dislocations.” [1]

“The nation’s ports, inland waterways, drinking water and wastewater systems — you name it — are hurting to one degree or another.
“Ignoring these problems imperils public safety, diminishes our economic competitiveness, is penny-wise and pound-foolish, and results in tremendous missed opportunities to create new jobs on a vast scale. [2]

And with the onset of Peak Oil, the need to revitalize the framework from which our production arises is all the more critical, especially when we come to recognize that in a future with limited fossil fuel availability, a repaired and/or revised infrastructure not dependent on fossil fuel resources for maintenance will be a key determinant in measuring progress and success—as will a transportation system not as utterly dependent on fossil fuels as what we now utilize. The time to develop the infrastructure and upgrade the modes of transportation we’ll need in a post-peak oil economy is now.

As it is, we’re looking at years (decades) of effort and expenditures. Compressing all of those responsibilities and requirements into a much shorter time frame resulting from a legitimate supply and demand crisis some years down the road is insane and quite likely impossible. We can’t afford to wait for that moment.

“Tomorrow’s energy contracts won’t be won by the country with yesterday’s energy grid.” [3]

“Other nations around the globe have continued to act on the calculus that state-of-the art transportation infrastructure — the connective tissue of a nation — is critical to moving goods, ideas and workers quickly and efficiently. In the United States, however, we seem to have forgotten.” [4]

We need to start remembering what those other nations already know.

Sources:

[1] https://www.tai.org.au/index.php?q=node%2F19&pubid=788&act=display – Running on empty? The peak oil debate; Policy Brief No.16, September 2010 by Dr David Ingles and Dr Richard Denniss

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/opinion/16herbert.html?ref=opinion February 16, 2010, What’s Wrong With Us? By BOB HERBERT

[3] http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/02/klein-the-case-for-investing-in-infrastructure.html – If You Build It … Now’s the time to invest in infrastructure by Ezra Klein

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opinion/17herbert.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1258455637-lZ9f+84UVVV0xzhkak7qzg – What the Future May Hold By BOB HERBERT

It’s difficult to ignore the insane workings of Washington these days, or the nearly-incomprehensible levels of narrow-mindedness and outright stupidity exhibited by some political “leaders” and pseudo-political celebrities. Have we all become that gullible and apathetic that the nonsense routinely spouted by these same public figures really doesn’t matter (or worse, that we actually find their hypocrisy acceptable)? Some of the positions taken are beyond shameful, but the prevailing actions and beliefs suggest that as long as you can get away with it, keep doing it.

Somewhere, it seems, a blood oath has been taken that if a proposed solution or policy is not absolutely perfect or risk-and harm-free for every single constituency, it will simply be shouted down, especially if it’s proposed from “the other side.” Almost no one, it seems, appears to understand that policies and proposals affect all of us well beyond the two week time frame everyone seems to labor under. It appears that Peak Oil and global warming suffer treatment no different. No one is willing to recognize the fact that whatever adaptive measures will be needed in a future with limited fossil fuel availability, those changes are going to cost us all … a lot, and they won’t be fixed or in place by early next week.

Our leaders are so afraid to upset even the smallest or weirdest constituency that they’re paralyzing the governing process. By constantly making the perfect the enemy of the good and/or practicing blatant obstructionism for the sake of blatant obstructionism, we run the real risk of making this country ungovernable in issues that matter most. (Hell of a victory!) The failure to appreciate the long-term consequences of these behaviors is just going to make things so much more difficult for all of us. Why? More importantly, why are we allowing this to happen?

The incredible short-sightedness expressed in some comments and positions staked out by leading Republican and conservative Democrat candidates and commentators, and the cowardice of far too many Democrats—specifically as they relate here to public transportation—are beyond troubling. (I could write forever about shortsightedness and insanity on matters of general politics!) It’s not the first time I’ve raised similar issues (here), but in light of upcoming elections, there is an increased sense of urgency and a need to help others think critically about the stakes involved.

Well over half of the world’s oil consumption is devoted to transportation, as is certainly the case here in the United States. What person in his or her right mind truthfully thinks that that can continue for many more years? It’s hard to fathom that these politicians and candidates simply do not get it, and thus feel no sense of responsibility to speak out about the energy challenges we will face because oil production is pretty close to (or already at) its peak.

For those of us who care deeply about our future, the futures of our children, the prospects for this wonderful country, and who understand how much change and challenge we will be facing in the near-years to come in the face of declining oil production, this lunacy is beyond frustrating. We’re bartering away our prospects for success, prosperity, and well-being in the decades to come because no one has the courage or wisdom to appreciate that a broader and bigger vision is needed apart from and beyond the politics of the day.

Almost no one seems capable of stepping back and articulating an intelligent strategy for the future that doesn’t quickly descend into lame-ass political gamesmanship. The Party of No is bound and determined to make certain that no worthwhile Democratic policy is passed for no other reason than it’s being proposed by a President they are irrationally incapable of accepting. And Democrats now appear to be afraid of their own shadows and won’t risk articulating a stand on positions unless all 300 million+ Americans are on board first. What’s going on?

This ongoing farce of “I’m always right and you’re always wrong” is why we elect politicians?! I thought the theory was that we would send to Washington men and women who were blessed with a commitment to doing what’s right for everyone, and who could step aside from the partisan short term considerations and help articulate for all of us plans to encourage our growth and well-being in the face of whatever challenges come our way. (Hard to shake the idealist in me.) Instead, I fear that we’ve become a complacent nation allowing ourselves to soon be governed by a cabal of loud, short-sighted, dim-witted, narrow-minded hypocrites whose primary function seems to be a determination to pander to the lowest common denominator of the least-intelligent citizens who elect them, with an ample supply of knucklehead candidates standing in the wings. Are we so cowardly, so timid in the face of our fears and worries and concerns, that we have abandoned all sense of responsibility or rational thought? I’m pretty sure that’s not how we’ve done things in the past.

If someone doesn’t fix the problem today or by early next week at the latest, we’ll just toss them out and try another group for a couple more weeks. Have we all lost our minds?! At what point do we decide that our understandable fears and concerns and frustrations simply do not lend themselves to easy resolution, prompt resolution, or resolution in ways we’ve all come to believe and expect will do the trick? When are the grown-ups going to show up?

Lashing out and “punishing” those who couldn’t fix everything in 24 hours may serve some visceral need, but the issues we are confronting and will be facing soon enough require a modicum of intelligent planning, mixed with a healthy recognition and respect for the fact that none of these needed changes and adaptations will be free, easy, or quick. Changes will either be forced upon us, or we can create the parameters for progress under new rules by considering the many opportunities we will have, even in the midst of this oppressive downturn.

The truth is that times have changed, and the hopes or expectations that business-as-usual is just around the corner are false ones making our tasks and challenges that much more difficult. This Great Recession and the difficulties we’ll soon be confronted with by declining fossil fuel production (and let’s not forget the climate issues) mandate that we approach these problems differently. The issues cannot be positioned as right-or left-wing matters. All of us will be affected, and obviously many already have been. Climate change, our economic woes, and diminishing oil production worry not at all about the politics of those who will be impacted.

And as for Peak Oil and its impact on business and transportation specifically:

“Intent on demonstrating their resistance to virtually all of President Obama’s policy objectives, Republicans nationwide have staked out an anti-rail position that they hope will stand out as the fiscally reasonable choice when they present themselves in this fall’s elections….

“If Republican-led state governments are unwilling to commit to spending their own dollars on these projects, they simply will not be built. Since intercity rail projects are long-term investments, even if the federal government has already agreed to sponsor some investments, the takeover of a governor’s mansion by an anti-rail Republican could mean putting a full-stop in infrastructure development. As New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s announcement last week of a work stoppage on the ARC tunnel project shows, this could affect even projects that have already entered the construction phase. [1]

How idiotic! When the time comes to deal with the myriad transportation-related problems Peak Oil will have created—when there is no other choice but for all of us to make far greater use of public transit options than we do now—we’ll be years and years behind in developing the networks and infrastructure needed. The result: even more hardship for even more citizens—with fewer financial and energy resources available to institute the vast changes which will then be required. Now there’s a sound strategy!

Notwithstanding the tin foil hat wearers who seem to think that oil bubbles up from the core of the Earth in endless quantities and supply, the hard truth is that oil production has been at a plateau for several years now, and it is not going to get better! We’re done! Yes, we will still have billions of barrels available to us for many years to come. I do not dispute that. The occasional “giant” oil field may still be found—the type of field which if produced to its maximum may buy us literally a few more months or a couple of years of oil at most—and we may develop more technologies to assist in producing oil from the shale and tar sand deposits around the world, (or to develop acceptable alternative forms of energy), but it is all and will all be: more expensive and time-consuming to extract, of poorer quality and thus more dependent on more and costlier refining, subject to more international restrictions and political complications than ever before, and quite simply much more difficult to find and access. In the end, these pursuits will change almost nothing, but they will certainly exacerbate a situation that will be more complex and disruptive than most of us can envision—a thought that provides me with absolutely no comfort.

And all the while Planet Earth’s citizens are demanding more and more oil. The math simply does not work. Put any kind of spin you want on it, cherry-pick whatever short term facts suit your fancy, but the truth is the truth, and facts are facts. Oil production is not likely to going to get much better than it is now and has been for several years, and once the decline “officially” begins, we’re all going to have to make sacrifices and change our ways of living.

“Prof. William Rees of UBC, co-inventor of the ecological footprint concept, maintains that we are, as a species, already in ‘ecological overshoot’ mode. Ecological overshoot is the point at which human activities are draining down more resources from the planet than the planet can resupply.

“In Rees’s estimation, we are ‘draining down’ the planet’s ‘capital’” now. Even more depressing, he also maintains that if every person on the planet enjoyed the same consumption levels as North Americans, it would take six planets to supply them.” [2]

These are not stats created out of thin air! The Right in particular owes it to the people of this nation to start paying attention to facts instead of the nonsense that they continue to permit their most extreme partisans to spout. The leaders and pretenders have a responsibility to educate, not pander. Denying the truth for selfish political considerations certainly won’t help them much in the future when some serious finger-pointing starts taking place. But why worry about the future, right? Something is bound to save the day. Good luck with that approach.

If we want to continue to have the freedom to travel about as we now do, if we want our industries to continue to produce as they do (or once did), if we want to maintain some semblance of the lifestyles we now live (and for all of my continuing optimism, I’m not at all optimistic that any of this will actually remain possible on the scope it now does), then our transportation options are going to change. Whether we’d prefer that or not will be irrelevant. Peak Oil simply will not care.

And as much as we Americans feel entitled to whatever quantities of fossil fuel we could possibly want or need because … well, just because we’re Americans, another hard truth is that that strategy won’t be working for us much longer. It will not matter if you like that or not; or prefer/demand it to be different; or you just hope I’m wrong. Peak Oil is Peak Oil, and the mounting evidence about diminishing long-term production capabilities is beyond rational debate. You are free to continue to listen to those who have some bizarre vested interest in skewing the truths about oil production, but do so at your own future risk. We’ll all suffer that much more. Thanks!

Are we really going to permit ourselves to remain complacent and even ignorant about the truth? Besides buying time and avoidance, what exactly is that accomplishing?

I’m already clearly on record here as stating that I’m no different than most: I do not want to give up our family’s “toys”, our luxury autos, our 50-miles-away beach home, and all the other trappings my incredible wife’s successes and skills have provided us. I can’t say I particularly enjoy contemplating these matters. Would we prefer being enlightened, involved, and at least marginally prepared, or is ignoring the problem really the best way to handle the energy challenges we’ll all soon be facing?

It’s not going to matter if you’d prefer using your car instead of public transportation, or that it’s too cold or too hot to walk to public transit, or that the bags you have to carry are too heavy, or that public transit isn’t close by or as convenient or as pleasant or any other perfectly legitimate objection. Peak Oil will not care, and your cars will sit in the garage and we’ll all be scratching our heads wondering how we get from here to there because politicians and business leaders in 2009 and 2010 were too shortsighted and narrow-minded to understand what we needed to prepare for, and because we stupidly bought what they were selling mostly because we couldn’t be bothered. We bear our fair share of responsibility for this. It’s not enough to blame others for not telling us that the math of supply and demand wasn’t going to continue working in our favor.

We love our automobiles … all (nearly) three hundred million of them. But 99% of them run on gasoline, and we’re soon going to be paying ever higher amounts for that privilege, assuming we have gas available to us as regularly and as easily as we now do (which we won’t somewhere down the line). That’s going to change … maybe not in 2010 or 2012 or 2016, but what’s most essential to understand is that it’s going to change long, long before we have taken anywhere near enough steps to figure out and implement necessary alternatives. Public transportation for the masses is inevitable, and the ardent deniers of that—those who oppose public funding for transportation initiatives—are going to be the ones primarily responsible for the difficulties we’ll be facing in the years to come. They can’t bear all responsibility, however. The facts are available to all of us, and those who prefer to remain blissfully ignorant about the challenges and consequences will have no one to blame but the face in the mirror when suddenly, or not-so-suddenly, we can’t just hop into our car and run ten errands today … either because gas is now off-the-charts expensive or because it’s not available as it used to be, and we weren’t bright enough when we had the chance to start making different commitments about our future. Those are the facts we will be facing much sooner than we’re prepared to.

It would be nice if this problem lent itself to a quick fix and at minimal cost, but the truth is that no alternatives fit that bill, and we’re already too far behind as it is in developing alternatives sources of energy and modes of transit. It’s also a hard truth that we will for the foreseeable future still need to get from here to there, and the public transportation alternatives are going to be the only viable ones—even though they will surely not serve as the ideal solution for all people in all instances. We can pout and stomp our feet and blame liberals and all the rest, but none of that will get us from here to there. Yes, it’s an expensive and long-term commitment; yes, it will be inconvenient—perhaps greatly so; yes, it will entail more changes to our ways of living and producing than we could possibly imagine tolerating. Deal with it. And while you’re at it, get used to the fact that a hands-off approach by government is not the answer. The problems will be too big and too wide-spread to leave it to “the marketplace” to fix on its own.

If we fail to recognize that we will much too soon be playing by a different set of rules governing our economy, industry, and lifestyles, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves; but that’s of absolutely no solace whatsoever. We still won’t be able to get from here to there.

Peak Oil is not a great mystery. If you have a reservoir of water and 1000 people make use of it every day for all their needs, the reservoir is slowly but surely going to be depleted when only smaller bodies of water are now being found (if at all) and those finds are not matching the amount of water being used or are not nearly as plentiful as the big, easy to find and now-depleting reservoirs have been. If 2000 people are now looking to make use of that reservoir and they have even more needs, it will deplete faster. Because the other reservoirs are also suffering the same fate in varying stages, problems are inevitable. Some are going to have to do without and/or change what they need.

Why does anyone think that the applicable math for, and the rules of, fossil fuels are any different?

We’ve been using more than oil we’ve been finding for nearly 3 decades now, and hundreds of millions more people are now demanding their fair share. Whatever unconventional sources or alternatives we’re relying on technology to provide can’t keep up the pace. The math just isn’t that complicated! Is there some vast conspiracy out there where gazillions of barrels of oil are being kept hidden because … because … why?

One recent article criticized Amtrak service through rural parts of New England, complaining (legitimately, to be sure) about the infrequent and unavailable rail services where and when needed (complete with an unnecessary, snarky jab at the Kennedy family of all things—the conservative strategy in a nutshell: use emotional buzz words when you don’t really have a meaningful point to make. I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that part of the Right’s ongoing strategy is to count on its followers not appreciating or understanding the facts.)

Well … duh! That level of inefficient service is true right now! The whole point of these types of long-term (and to be sure, very costly) investments are to make a huge difference in the future when it will be almost mandatory that we use other modes of transit, but these funding delays and criticisms (again making the perfect the enemy of the good) will create even worse hardships later on, because we will not be able to make the time- and money-sucking changes on such short notice. By all means let’s continue to kick the can down the street. We’ll keep doing so until we fall off a cliff.

Fear, ignorance, or avoidance are certainly some options we have at our disposal.

How about opportunity? This is a great nation, with a great citizenry, and a history of rising to challenges that have felled lesser peoples. Peak Oil could certainly cripple us in the years to come, but another option is that we have the chance right now to collectively move ourselves forward and re-make our society and ways of living and being. It won’t happen quickly, it won’t happen easily, it won’t happen without sacrifice, it most certainly won’t be free, and it is not going to happen by washing our hands of responsibility to recognize the challenges and then fashion different solutions than the ones that used to work in the good ‘ole days. This is an “all in” proposition, and that means dealing with the facts and setting aside the bluster and nonsense of partisan stupidity.

Waiting for perfect solutions guarantees waiting for perfect solutions.

The opportunity to envision new ways of living and producing and then rising above the political nonsense that so poisons our everyday lives is one we have every reason to embrace. What rule says that a future not dependent on fossil fuels is a lesser future?

We’re damned if we spend money, and damned if we don’t. Although it’s clear that spending money has its own inherent consequences, doing nothing or less just doesn’t seem to be the wisest course of action. Standing pat isn’t a solution at all.

Choices.

Sources:

[1] http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/09/22/republican-wave-could-spell-trouble-for-high-speed-rail-projects-from-coast-to-coast/; Republican Wave Could Spell Trouble for High-Speed Rail Projects from Coast to Coast by Yonah Freemark – September 22nd, 2010

[2] http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/09/23/GetOutofCars/; How to Get People Out of Their Cars – Rule 3 for sustainable communities: Locate commercial services, frequent transit and schools within a five-minute walk. By By Patrick M. Condon, 23 September 2010.

Summer is full upon us here in the U.S., and that means for many of us the joys of summer vacations. Hiking, camping, biking, visiting, beaching … all the favorable-weather options are available to us. Just this past weekend my wife and I had the pleasure of hosting family from both out-of-state and from the opposite end of Massachusetts. I’m flying out at the end of the week to visit my daughter as she prepares for school. A lot of things to enjoy and a lot to look forward to during these warm summer days!

My wife and I have not yet taken our “vacation”. Our summer plans tend to be somewhat fluid. As I noted way back when in my introduction to this blog, we are very fortunate. We own an exquisite (at least to us), spacious summer home a hundred yards or so from the Atlantic Ocean. We vacation here and enjoy every blessed minute of it! In normal driving conditions, it takes us fifty minutes or so to go door-to-door from our suburban Boston home to the “beach house”, which is where I am as I write this. What a treat for us!

Summer vacation usually means grabbing as much time as we can here—work and young adult schedules permitting. That means frequent travel along the Route 128/Interstate 95 corridor … most times with more than one vehicle; most times more than once or twice a week.

As a strong proponent of Peak Oil, I have decidedly mixed feelings about this, as I have mentioned before (Kurt Cobb wrote a sensible piece touching on a related theme just a few days ago). I love this lifestyle, and I approach my task of disseminating information about our soon-to-be-curtailed availability of fossil fuel supply with more than my fair share of selfish trepidation. We do not yet own hybrid vehicles, and so we spend more than our fair share of time filling the gas tanks of my wife’s German import and my Japanese SUV in order to make many trips to and from our summer home from Memorial Day through mid-October. I balance that guilt with the acknowledgment (rationalization?) that I work from home, and that my wife’s office is about 6000 feet from our home, so we actually spend no more on gas than most other families.

Once gas prices begin their inevitable climb up, whether that’s later this year, next year, or a couple more years down the road, and with a simultaneous curtailment in how much fossil fuel will remain available to us to meet all of demands and expectations and needs, my rationalizations may not matter much.

With that in mind yesterday, for the first time in the 6 summers that we’ve owned this home, I used public transportation to make most of the journey from home to here at the beach house. My daughter drove me a couple of miles to a commuter rail stop which took me into Boston’s North Station, where I then—some fifteen minutes after my arrival—boarded a different rail line to take me to the North Shore. I then hailed a cab to take me the three miles or so from the train station to our summer place. (I’ve already informed my wife that I will soon take public transportation door to door, just to see what that’s like. That will add two bus trips and a decent amount of walking at the beginning and end of my trip, along with two separate subway rides. I’m expecting at least an additional hour of travel each way, but no more than a few more dollars in fares.)

The one way trip yesterday cost me about $20.00, and took me two hours and ten minutes door to door. Compare that to less than $10.00 of gas and less than 60 minutes of travel time when I drive. More expensive certainly, and clearly more time-consuming, but all in all it was a pleasant enough experience, and surprisingly scenic in several places along the way. It was nice to be able to read and engage in some computer work while traveling … not an option when I’m barreling along at 65 miles per hour on Route 128.

I’m expecting to have to do much more of this in the years to come if we intend (as we most certainly do) to keep this as a second home (and eventually as our primary residence, or so we hope.) At the very least, this kind of travel will become a not-inconsiderable inconvenience for us. I’ll expect no one to shed any tears for us, and rightfully so.

All of this got me thinking about what other families normally do during the summer for their vacations. My thoughts then almost immediately turned to one of our nation’s more popular destinations: Walt Disney World in Florida. We have vacationed there on a couple of occasions, as have hundreds of millions of others just like us. It’s a deservedly popular tourist attraction.

Then, as I find myself doing more frequently these days, I started to wonder how Peak Oil is going to impose itself on the subject at hand. Truth be told, not much will escape the consequences of declining oil availability.

Just for the heck of it, I started an internet search for facts about Disney World—to get some kind of idea about the place. (I make no promises that the following stats are the most current ones.)

“Approximately 46 million people visit Walt Disney World – including Disney’s Magic Kingdom Park, Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park and Downtown Disney Area – annually.” [1]

“A Cast of Thousands . . . around 62,000 to be more precise. That’s how many people it takes to create the magic at the Vacation Kingdom. Not surprisingly, Walt Disney World Resort is the largest single-site employer in the United States
“Suds ‘R Us . . . If you were to wash and dry one load of laundry every day for 52 years, you’d clean as much as the folks at Walt Disney World Laundry do in a single day. The cast members there launder an average of 285,000 pounds each day. In addition, between 30,000 and 32,000 garments are dry-cleaned daily.
“Who’s Still Thirsty? . . . More than 75 million Cokes are consumed each year at Walt Disney World Resort along with 13 million bottles of water. Guests also gobble 10 million hamburgers, 6 million hot dogs, 9 million pounds of French fries and more than 300,000 pounds of popcorn
“Room Roulette . . . If you wanted to stay in all the guestrooms in all of the hotels and resorts currently open on Walt Disney World property (at a rate of one per night), it would take more than 68 years.” [2]

“There are 46,172 parking spaces at the Walt Disney World theme parks, water parks and Downtown Disney. That does not include the parking lots at the resort.” [3]

The point? That’s a lot of tourists traveling a lot of miles, buying a lot of airplane tickets, renting a lot of vehicles, and consuming lots of fossil fuels for transportation (to say nothing of the energy expenditures to do all the laundry, transport and prepare all the food, maintain all the rooms, etc., etc. A lot of dollars are spent while visiting Disney World.)

What happens when the $3.19 per gallon of gas that we now pay for premium gas is $4.09 per gallon? $5.29? $7.79? When the now incredibly inexpensive $200.00 round trip air fares from Boston becomes $380.00? $660.00? I have no illusions that we’ll see those prices in the next few years, but I can’t say that I’d be terribly surprised if that happens sooner than I expect.

Those higher prices will stand alone … they won’t be rising along with a commensurate increase in incomes. Incomes will be what they will be in the years to come while fossil fuel prices climb ever-higher, simply because we are not going to have enough to meet all the world-wide demand by the billions of people who either want to maintain their convenient and occasionally extravagant lifestyles, or who aspire to reach those goals themselves.

Something is going to have to give.

And when those gas prices begin that climb, how many families are going to make the decision that a trip to Disney World, or Las Vegas, or Myrtle Beach, or our astonishing National Parks, or to Europe, or to the Caribbean, or [insert preferred vacation spot here] are no longer in the cards? What happens to the countless millions who depend on those tourist dollars? How many dominoes tumble in all the industries affected by or existing because of tourism? Difficult to wrap your mind around all of that, isn’t it?

What kinds of personal lifestyle changes will each of us have to then embrace when we start thinking about the family vacation in July or August?

Something to think about, perhaps? It is definitely not too soon to do so. We’ll be thankful for having taken the time to consider these issues well in advance. Being blind-sided is not nearly as much fun as it might seem.

{Note to my readers: I’m heading down South later this week to help my daughter set up for her senior year of college, so this will likely be my only post until the middle of next week. This month, I’ll also be heading to New York for a few days to move our other daughter into her new digs for college year # 2, my wife and I will be taking some vacation time throughout the month, and we’re celebrating our anniversary at the end of August, so postings will be sporadic until after Labor Day. Thanks for your patience and interest!}

Sources:

[1] http://www.orlando-florida.net/press-releases/50-things-you-dont-know-about-disney-world.htm

[2] http://corporate.disney.go.com/media/news/Fact_WDW_Fun_Facts_08_06.pdf

[3] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_parking_spots_are_in_Walt_Disney_World

Last month, I came across a interesting article showing the production breakdown of a barrel (approximately 45 gallons) of oil.

I found it a bit surprising that only 4 gallons, or approximately 11 %, from every barrel of oil is typically produced as aviation fuel.

As Dave Jackson noted in another recent article:

“A-1 jet fuel, a high grade, moisture free kerosene, competes directly with the production of diesel. A refiner has a certain amount of leeway when extracting fuels from each barrel of crude oil. By and large, however, a choice must be made between kerosene or diesel.”

Jackson then asked pretty much the same question I have: What happens when there isn’t enough crude oil to satisfy the full demands of freight transportation and the airline industry? Can’t satisfy them both once oil production begins its continual decline, so what happens? As it stands now and if my math is correct, airlines use somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion barrels of oil each year. That cannot continue in the face of Peak Oil.

What decisions are the various transportation industries—freight and aviation in particular—going to be faced with when the worldwide supply of oil cannot ever match demand again? Who decides which of those two will have priority? It’s unlikely that only one industry will have all of its demand met, so that means both industries will suffer reductions in what is available to them. Then what?

As other writers have duly noted, once Peak Oil’s impact is being felt immediately and daily by the transportation industry, the foods and goods and services we’ve grown accustomed to having on hand 24/7/365 … won’t be. We’re going to have to start making do without some of those products and services we like to enjoy or use whenever the mood strikes, and if we’re being deprived, somewhere along the supply and distribution chain there will be employment and production cutbacks. We all now know what happens when people start losing their jobs and industries stop making or supplying goods and services.

A broader question as it affects aviation: what happens to air travel in general? Once Peak Oil is in full swing, we clearly cannot assume that that same eleven percent of each barrel of oil will still be devoted to producing aviation fuel. What then?

One obvious outcome is that the then more restricted air travel will become more expensive. I’m no economics whiz, but when supply decreases and demand remains steady, prices increase. So get ready for more expensive air travel as well as higher crude oil prices. For many, that means no more air travel. Then what? I’m fairly confident that airlines aren’t going to survive if their increasing costs for fuel lead to fewer passengers (who are obliged to pay much higher fares), and on and on the dominoes tumble.

When the price of a barrel of oil shot up to nearly $150.00 two short years ago, Brad Plumer—in a terrific New Republic article well worth reading—noted that nearly 25 airlines bit the dust just in 2008, almost four times the average. Should we expect anything different the next go-‘round?

On a more personal note, what will families do? As the parent of two daughters currently in college, I recognize first-hand the concerns any parent has when their graduating children decide to take jobs far from home. The emotional pull of wanting the best for your child while nonetheless wanting them close by has a powerful influence on our well-being. What happens if my daughter accepts a job in Portland, Oregon and in the not-too-distant future, the several dozen reasonably priced daily flights currently available out of Boston’s Logan Airport are reduced to just a handful, and the acceptable $550 flight through Dallas suddenly become a $1700 flight with multiple connecting stops en route, and an 8 hour trip is suddenly a two day adventure?

I am well aware that my daughter’s employment and location choices won’t depend one iota on what dear-old-Dad would prefer, but if my daughter does make the choice to live in a locale that is now an airplane ride away and a few years down the road I no longer have that as a feasible option to see her, dear-old-Dad is not going to be a happy camper. (I will let my daughter speak for herself on this subject!)

What happens to business meetings, to governmental business, to international negotiations, to sports travel, to family visits, and a host of other lifestyle and industry needs when we have less aviation fuel competing for our business and personal demands? What happens then?

Who decides which of the limited and now much more expensive flights have priority? Are your business meetings in Chicago more important than the Boston Red Sox seven-game road trip, or a fact-finding mission by several U.S. Congressional leaders, or seeing your parents? We cannot possibly hope to sustain the same level of air service when aviation fuel has doubled or tripled in price, and when perhaps only 4% or 5% of each barrel of a smaller supply of oil is now produced as aviation fuel because somewhere along the line, someone will have decreed that that is the most we can expect from each barrel because of countless other priorities.

To its great credit, Britain recently turned down construction of a 3rd runway at Heathrow Airport in favor of committing that same amount of funding to high speed rail, as noted here. Perhaps more insightful than most, the decision-makers likely recognized the pointlessness of committing billions to a service that will likely exist in a greatly-diminished capacity a few short years from now.

As Brad Plumer also noted in his 2008 essay:

“Small towns will be especially vulnerable to losing scheduled air service. That’s already happened to nearly 30 U.S. cities in the past year, from Wilmington, Delaware (population 72,000) to Boulder City, Nevada (14,000). Hagerstown, Maryland, lost all commercial air service recently, rendering its new $61.8 million, 7,000-foot runway useless.”

It won’t end there. What are the ripple effects to communities and regions when airports shut down, or flights are offered on a greatly restricted or reduced basis? What of the people accustomed to relying on those services? What happens then?

Technology is not close to finding adequate alternatives sufficient to meet current and projected demand increases, so what happens? And biofuels, for all their promise, are not close to being deemed an appropriate substitute.

So we can either start making plans, considering alternative forms of transportation, making a greater commitment to seeking alternative sources of energy, or try to come up with last-minute solutions to deal with the problems Peak Oil is going to force upon us.

Hint: That strategy is not likely to work