If gas was $100 a gallon, I'd have an electric car and hopefully only one car. The real changes would come from society at large. I hope employers would get serious about telecommuting, for as many employees as possible. Maybe they'd get more serious about using satellite offices.
I'd use electronic means to communicate more and more and I assume others would as well. It would have to bridge the gap of distance that separates us. I'd probably get to know my neighbors a lot better as well. I'd go local for more than food. I'd have no choice.
Then let the gas prices rise! So far, we're up to $4/gal here.
Telecommuting FTW! I know I'd hate my job less if I could telecommute full-time. My equipment at home is better than what I have to work on at the office.
Would electricity costs be relative enough for an electric car to still make sense? What about goods and products that you buy that's shipped on the massive fleet of trucks?
A sudden surge to $100 a gallon gas destroys civilization.
The sails in the picture are being winched in. Normally, they fly like a kite, about 200 m above the ship, and tow it forwards. The winds are much stronger up there. It also looks like the kite has been partially furled - the picture on Wikipedia looks much bigger:
I'm referring actually to the transportation system within the United States and the "last mile" effort required to deliver goods. As fanciful as it is to think that rails is the replacement, it's not. It's a supplement to the system.
How was this downmodded? An incredible rise in gasoline prices would surely have a profoundly major upward effect on energy pricing. The entire economic structure of American society would be utterly destroyed.
Technology isn't so great if people cannot afford or even get access to food. A more productive exercise would be to imagine that we simply had to half our personal energy use. Merely shifting away from gasoline is not the answer.
Basically we'd almost all starve to death. Transporting food would become uneconomical. Hell, harvesting food would become uneconomical. The trickle of food which got into urban areas would sell for insanely high prices. The rich would still be able to afford it for a while, but with the whole economy collapsing and widescale starvation the rich wouldn't stay that way for long. Rural folks might be able to survive for a while, until the looters came pouring out of the cities and into the countryside (on foot, presumably) looking for food.
Eventually we'd be able to re-establish some kind of civilization (pseudo-steampunk?) with a severely reduced population, but there'd be all sorts of bad stuff to happen in between now and then.
Since there were so many scaremongering articles in the news lately, I thought about the same problem recently.
I guess I should be worried, but honestly my first thought is always "finally we'll get rid of those pesky cars". I hate cars so much (swallowing their exhausts every day cycling to work), that I think my joy over car-free cities will outweigh most downsides of the expensive energy.
Personally I don't need a car, I could probably do without a fridge, and I don't really need long distance travel very much. Heating could be a problem.
If you'll forgive me, that's a very metropolitan attitude. For huge swathes of the country (including, umm, the bits that provide all the produce to the stores so you can shop whenever you feel like and don't need the means to transport large loads yourself) motor vehicles (including pick-up trucks and other "gas guzzlers") are pretty much essential.
It's all very well to be smug about how high gas prices hurt yuppies in SUVs, but they hurt lots of regular working folks too.
I realize that trucks, and industrial machinery will still be necessary, but I can't imagine that the car avalanche is necessary that is polluting our cities every day.
I am sorry, but most people could easily switch to public transport or cycling for their daily commute, and they would be healthier for it. That goes for European cities anyway - maybe in the US you are out of luck without a car.
Also, where I live there is a tax reduction for living outside of the city. Obviously that has to go away. If you decide to live outside the city, why shouldn't you have to pay for it.
Please list who am I hurting with my stance on cars, I would honestly be interested and would like to take it into consideration.
Horses are quite inefficient; in fact, all animals are. The only reason it's cheaper to ride a bicycle someplace than a motorcycle is because of the lesser weight and speeds; if you created electricity with a human-powered generator like [this](http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen.html), you'd actually burn more energy in extra food than you would by getting the same amount of electricity from a gasoline-powered generator.
...which, of course, isn't a direct concern since many people bicycle for their health anyway. But it is a concern when it comes to more equine suggestions.
Because they bought costly to operate and maintain things bigger than they needed. A few years later they became even more costly, and suddenly they feel like they can't afford it. Tradesmen are one thing (but can't they write off fuel purchases as a business expense? (I'm not entirely certain about this.)), but most of the people tooling around in their SUVs aren't tradesmen, and, like I said, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. They made a bad decision and now have to deal with the consequences.
Ermm, have you ever even set foot outside of a city? You do know that people live outside cities, right? You know there are these things called small towns, and farms? Can your smug little mind even comprehend that there are people who drive pickup trucks (NOT SUVs) and other vehicles because that's what's necessary where they live?
Carry on living in your self-absorbed little world, and wonder why the price of food goes up when the people who grow it and transport it to you have to pay more for fuel.
Ermm, I grew up in suburbia and do know that people live outside cities. I also know that the price of goods and services I appreciate are impacted by the price of fuel.
I don't know what that has to do with what I said, though: people who bought bigger vehicles than they needed are now finding out what a bad investment they were. On the other hand, farmers and tradesmen can and do pass the cost of fuel on to consumers. That may suck for me, but it is what it is. I don't blame them for it.
I'm pretty sure that the suburbanites commuting in big cars they don't need form the majority of complainers. And, as I've said, I have a hard time feeling much pity for them.
(To put it another way: get off your high horse about people up on high horses. I'm not one of them.)
So move to a city, it's not so difficult. Besides, I have lived in smaller towns, too, and I still never needed a car.
Edit: as mentioned elsewhere, of course cars are necessary for transportation of goods. But the majority of car travel is very unlikely to be necessary.
> but can't they write off fuel purchases as a business expense?
Sure, but writing off expenses against profit only gains you the amount you'd have paid in tax on that amount, and not the actual amount itself. Writing off expenses doesn't make it a zero-sum game, it just puts 20-30% back in your pocket.
And I don't like country music. But if I were to sit around hoping that country music ceased to exist and that all the people who currently enjoy country music would be forced to no longer listen to it, that would make me a dick.
It's hardly the same thing, since country music is not polluting the environment, making other people sick, taking lots of space and so on. If you don't like country music, you can easily avoid it.
$100/gallon gas would do a lot more than slow down commuting. It would make air travel prohibitively expensive (thousands or tens of thousands to fly anywhere - fuel is already the biggest cost at any airline with $100/barrel oil). Shipping would also be seriously impacted; the 20% savings on a radio made in China would be offset by transportation costs. $4 winter strawberries from Chile would be no more. That, and global recession. Personally, sounds to me like some good and some bad.
Oh, they might buy a smaller car, but they aren't going to start walking 3 miles to the store.
Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid. However, riding 3 miles on your bike is trivial. You'll be there in 15 minutes. I do this about twice a week, and driving wouldn't be any faster than biking.
I think the reason people don't consider biking is because bikes in america are weird. Everyone wants to get a very cool mountain bike. Then it rides poorly on the street, and it can't carry anything, so they assume bikes are useless. I noticed that when I was in Tokyo, every bike on the street was of the useful variety. They all had chain guards, fenders, and racks, which makes casual riding an enjoyable experience. Maybe if you could go to a bike shop and see bikes like this, people would use them for grocery shopping.
In the US, it appears that most people think bikes are a fun thing to ride to kill time on the weekend. I wish we could change that perception somehow.
> Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid.
What is stupid about that? Every day at lunch a group of 4 of us go on a three mile walk. Most days we stroll and it takes an hour.
If I had my own cart I could certainly do that once a week.
OK, so no more meat every day, but I could still have eggs every day and milk some days. And I still wouldn't need to use any refrigeration. And since I live within 3 miles of several farms and have a bike, I could make a few milk/meat trips a week. I would probably be drinking sheep's milk and eating mutton more, because that is what is close, but that still sounds fine.
To clarify, it's ridiculous to just make a conjecture like this and build a case around it. The same thing could be done for anything else, not just gas and the current state of the economy. If the foundation of the article is this wild, then any of its conclusions are just as off-base and pointless.
1. How do you know that the foundation of this article is wild?
2. Have you read the article? It's a thought experiment. It's meant to provoke thought and discussion. He's asking people to consider and share what they would do if gas hit a price where business as usual was clearly untenable and there would be no choice but to change consumption patterns.
America would look a lot like it did during the Great Depression. People wouldn't travel much, more things would be produced locally because shipping would be expensive, people would live closer together (both in proximity and density), people would eat local produce because out-of-season foods would be expensive to ship, etc. Things like digital content, electronics, etc would seem extremely cheap ($500 for iPod touch or 5 gallons of gas), while other things like wine, strawberries, air travel, etc would be extravagant luxuries. It wouldn't be like the poverty of the great depression, but a lot of things we take for granted now would get very, very expensive.
On the other hand, the high shipping costs would make local labor a lot more economical for manufacturing, maintenance, etc.
People traveled a lot during the Great Depression. That's when hobos, okies, migrant workers, and Route 66 entered popular culture. Much of California was settled during the 1930s, as emigrants from the dust-bowl states moved to the Central Valley and LA areas. One of the fastest-growing professions was "gas station attendant", and the Depression years featured the consolidation of the auto industry.
> Things like [..] electronics, etc would seem extremely cheap ($500 for iPod touch or 5 gallons of gas)
Almost certainly not, unfortunately. That iPod Touch would be significantly more expensive due to the shipping costs and the massively increased production costs. Anything that contains plastic would be far more expensive (since we'd be looking at a circa $3000 barrel of oil).
Just for posterity, and so I can look this back up in a year's time, but.. I predict an oil price crash by this time next year. If we're not under $50/barrel by summer 2009, I'd be surprised.
I can't cite any great insights here, but I've tended to notice that when everyone jumps on the bandwagon of saying something bad is going to happen, some price is going to rise forever, or the like, the opposite tends to occur within a certain timeframe. It's now happening with property prices (and I remember the bulls just one year ago..) and it'll happen with oil. Same happens with memory prices too.
That's hard to say. One can make the argument for a price crash as speculators have flooded into the oil and commodities markets and bid up prices. There is a lot of fear of peak <insert finite natural resource>. Once people got tired of it, prices would drop.
On the other hand, oil is a finite natural resource that has been pumped out of the ground for decades at an increasing rate. Only severely retarded politicians don't believe in peak oil or believe that oil is an infinite resource (they also believe in ghosts, so there). Thanks to China, India, and other countries deciding they want some basic level of civilization, the rate of increase in the rate of increase of demand means oil supplies and proven reserves are going down fast. That means there might not be a price crash and in a few years we will look at $6/gallon for gasoline as the good ole days.
Everything is finite. It all depends on /how/ finite things are. Technological advances, increases in efficiency, and the influence of competing technologies (electric, hydrogen, liquid propane gas, and so forth) will all have a role to play.
It is typically very hard to accept that these things can have a big effect, but that doesn't mean they won't (nor, of course, that they must, but the odds are better that they will). The price of oil will be as "immaterial" within 50 years as the prices of horses or gas lamps were immaterial in 1940 compared to 1890.
I'd use electronic means to communicate more and more and I assume others would as well. It would have to bridge the gap of distance that separates us. I'd probably get to know my neighbors a lot better as well. I'd go local for more than food. I'd have no choice.