"Crude is passé"

May 31, 2008 6:48 PM

Eight reasons you'll rejoice when we hit $8-a-gallon gasoline.
posted by jbickers (156 comments total)

I say bring it on. But internal-combustion engines will always be cool.
posted by dawson at 6:53 PM on May 31, 2008

Reason 3. Wither the Middle East's clout
This region that's contributed little to modern civilization exercises inordinate sway over the world because of its one significant contribution -- crude extraction.

What an ignoramus.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:59 PM on May 31, 2008 [44 favorites has favorites]

Funny you should mention this. I just got back from the UK, where gas already is $8 a gallon.

Life goes on. People take transit. They drive much smaller cars. They even . . . walk. No, really, they do.

Of course, if you believe the breathless, apocalyptic rhetoric of the U.S. media, once gas goes much above $5 a gallon, civilization will collapse and people will be eating each other in the streets. Or some shit like that.
posted by jason's_planet at 7:03 PM on May 31, 2008 [9 favorites has favorites]

This individual struck me as someone who could probably afford $8 per gallon, and has no clue as to how this will devastate our country ... and many, if not most, of those who are not very affluent.

There will be NO rejoicing...
posted by HuronBob at 7:05 PM on May 31, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Wither the Middle East's clout:
This region that's contributed little to modern civilization ....

Wait ...

what the fuck?
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 7:05 PM on May 31, 2008

It seems KokuRyu beat me to it. But, still.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 7:06 PM on May 31, 2008

THANK GOD, I AM ALLERGIC TO MONEY
posted by spiderwire at 7:08 PM on May 31, 2008 [9 favorites has favorites]

As cool as it would be to see a shift in the way we consume energy and the types of energy we consume to something more sustainable, I'd also like to continue eating and living.
posted by Fizz at 7:08 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Yeah, not sure I can follow the subtle racism (or whatever that was) or the ignoring of individual quality of life.
posted by luftmensch at 7:09 PM on May 31, 2008

Devastate, HuronBob? What do you see happening?
posted by WPW at 7:09 PM on May 31, 2008

I feel like it could be struggle and improvement in the face of adversity, or maybe just a scorched earth scenario as the oil machine is kept running to extract every last drop of oil/profit.

This guy is a bit of a tool, though:

On a similar note, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently gained a platform on the world stage because of their nations' sudden oil wealth. Without it, they would face the difficult task of building fair and just economies and societies on some other basis.

The extent to which Iran or Venezuela are building fair and just economies and societies on an oil basis can be debated, but schadenfreude about them hypothetically not being able to have fairness and justice is a dick move.

and also a tool for:

The existence of weapons of mass destruction aside, the present Iraq War could be the first of many sparked by competition for oil supplies.

Because, come on, buddy, everyone's admitted there were no weapons by now.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 7:12 PM on May 31, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Devastate, HuronBob? What do you see happening?

1. The costs of inelastic goods like gas (and therefore shipping), heating oil, and basic petroleum products rises slowly yet inexorably, putting pressure on the parts of the economy that can least afford it and leading to inflation and price shocks. Investment capital flees to Europe and other countries, where the population density is much higher and the infrastructure is less dependent on trucking for distribution.

2. Godzilla attacks
posted by spiderwire at 7:13 PM on May 31, 2008 [19 favorites has favorites]

KokuRyu, I agree with the ignoramus on that point, "modern civilization" being, say, 19th century onward.

But as for this pronouncement:

"if they were unable to buy off the temporary allegiance of their people with vast oil revenues?"

is the typical blithe corporate media mouthpiece ignorance of the unjust distribution of resource rents. I'm no fan of Chavez in the particular, but from my general vantage point, I prefer seeing his terrorization of the Venezuelan upper class vs. the upper classes' monopolization of rents and comcomitant exploitation of the working class that was going on prior to Chavez's appearance.

$8 gas is going to / would drive ground rents -- ie. apartment rents and home values -- UP in the city centers close to employment and DOWN in the outlying areas far from employment.
posted by tachikaze at 7:13 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

What has the middle east contributed to modern civilization, besides energy? I'm really asking this -- if it was bridges and aqueducts, let's hear it.
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 7:14 PM on May 31, 2008

This individual struck me as someone who could probably afford $8 per gallon
the thing is, many people can't afford $3 a gallon, and tags, title, insurance. So in a sense, those of us who can, are rather elitist. It's not the only anecdote I could point to, but I saw a lady, at least 70 and probably much older, walking hunched over in the hot sun carrying a bag of groceries today. Not a 'bum', just, apparently a lady who can't afford a car. But who cares? We have credit cards and shit. Again, I say again, bring these prices on, and stop trying to scare me with them.
posted by dawson at 7:15 PM on May 31, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

You know what I think is going to turn out to have been really shortsighted in terms of the oil collapse? The abandonment of rail lines and Rails to Trails. I'm all for trails, but if we want to keep an industrial society I really think we're going to need to admit that the overgrown highway system was a huge mistake and rebuild the rails.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 7:21 PM on May 31, 2008 [7 favorites has favorites]

What has the middle east contributed to modern civilization, besides energy?

Mathematics (and the number zero!), literature, pretty much anything from ancient Greece, religious tolerance as a concept, and on and on.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:23 PM on May 31, 2008 [5 favorites has favorites]

My car runs on broken dreams, I think I'll be fine.
posted by hellojed at 7:24 PM on May 31, 2008 [10 favorites has favorites]

It's good to see all those giant cars and trucks being unloaded by people who didn't need them in the first place, but they're going to be bought up by the people least able to afford their appetites. The increase in food prices has already begun, and the worst is still to come.

We should have avoided this by investing in alternative energy research thirty years ago, which is when it became obvious that oil dependence is a national-security issue.

I'm with Tim on the bike paths. Every time some community rejoices the opening of a new one, I mourn the loss of the rail line it replaces.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:25 PM on May 31, 2008

"if they were unable to buy off the temporary allegiance of their people with vast oil revenues....

Oh, oh, oh... I know this one!

They'd switch to printing fake money and distribute it as "economic stimulus checks" to keep the citizens from revolting!
posted by rokusan at 7:26 PM on May 31, 2008 [23 favorites has favorites]

Luckily my burro only drinks 2 gallons of gas per day.
posted by mattbucher at 7:28 PM on May 31, 2008

What has the middle east contributed to modern civilization, besides energy?

http://www.humanities-interactive.org/ancient/mideast/mideast_essay.htm

The things discussed on this site are of these are pretty important to modern civilization, I'd say.

And I'm not mentioning the number of Middle Eastern individuals who have made important contributions, because I hope we're not going to start argue about whether or not Middle Eastern people have contributed anything to modern society.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 7:28 PM on May 31, 2008

People take transit. They drive much smaller cars. They even . . . walk. No, really, they do.

I don't want to be one of Those Guys, but in the UK, transit exists. And distances are all smaller.

Carpooling, though. Even $4/gal is costing more than my anti-social tendencies are worth.
posted by DU at 7:30 PM on May 31, 2008

I mean the guy is a complete idiot. I dont know what 'marketwatch.com' is but he must know somebody to be writing articles for them. His main argument supporting 'everything is going to be all right' is "Shouldn't we be technologically advanced enough here in the 21st Century to quit siphoning off [oil]?" I dont know asshole, shouldnt we be advanced enough to cure cancer, live on the moon, and have mini fusion generators in each of our garages? The rapid miniaturization of digital processors has no bearing on technological progress generally. Secondly, he entirely misses the scope of the problem. Economic growth just is energy output. They are identical. A stark drop in global wattage production would be endemically disastrous.
posted by norabarnacl3 at 7:32 PM on May 31, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

I have to admit, I often dream of the day when most cars are electric and I won't be able to hear the freeway near my house.

I know electric cars are somewhat imperfect, but the noise factor in the cities should decrease quite a bit when/if they become widespread. This thought makes me smile.
posted by Deep Dish at 7:35 PM on May 31, 2008

Every time some community rejoices the opening of a new one, I mourn the loss of the rail line it replaces.

Huh. My bicycle commute route follows along an active rail line.
posted by YoBananaBoy at 7:37 PM on May 31, 2008

I'm looking forward to saying “I told you so” in a really smug way. Look, I've already started—fancy quotation marks and all.
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:37 PM on May 31, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

Really though, I wouldn't be too surprised if finding a new source of energy becomes the new Manhattan Project or Apollo Program and we come up with something that will fix the problem... generally I think people have too much faith in technology, but I somehow believe in this one.
posted by Deep Dish at 7:53 PM on May 31, 2008

I have to admit, I often dream of the day when most cars are electric and I won't be able to hear the freeway near my house.

Speaking with the experience of one who lives in a city with electric buses, I can tell you it sucks when it leads to pedestrians not noticing vehicles and losing the resultant argument.
posted by rodgerd at 7:55 PM on May 31, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

I'm sorry, jbickers, but this is a bit of a crappy post... mostly because the guy has little idea of what he's talking about.

1. RIP for the internal-combustion engine
They may contain computer chips, but the power source for today's cars is little different than that which drove the first Model T 100 years ago. That we're still harnessed to this antiquated technology is testament to Big Oil's influence in Washington and success in squelching advances in fuel efficiency and alternative energy.

Given our achievement in getting a giant mainframe's computing power into a handheld device in just a few decades, we should be able to do likewise with these dirty, little rolling power plants that served us well but are overdue for the scrap heap of history.

First, use of "Big Oil" (Exxon-Mobil controls less than 5% of the world's oil.) Second, "the oil industry is keeping the car that runs on water locked up in Area 51" conspiracy (there's little doubt that automotive companies have suppressed competition, but not to the extent that he implies). Third, ENERGY DOES NOT FOLLOW MOORE"S LAW, MORON.

2. ... The most groundbreaking discoveries might still be 25 or more years off, but we won't see massive public and corporate funding of research initiatives until escalating oil costs threaten our national security and global stability -- a time that's fast approaching.

And in that intervening 25 year period, gas stays at $8 a gallon?

3. Wither the Middle East's clout

This region that's contributed little to modern civilization exercises inordinate sway over the world because of its one significant contribution -- crude extraction. Aside from ensuring Israel's security, the U.S. would have virtually no strategic or business interest in this volatile, desolate region were it not for oil -- and its radical element wouldn't be able to demonize us as the exploiters of its people.

In the near term, breaking our dependence on Middle Eastern oil may well require the acceptance of drilling in the Alaskan wilderness -- with the understanding that costly environmental protections could easily be built into the price of $8 gas.

Aside from the bigotry and complete lack of historical perspective noted above, reserves in Alaska, largely theoretical outside the North Slope, can in no way substitute for the volume of oil from the Middle East.

4. Deflating oil potentates

On a similar note, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently gained a platform on the world stage because of their nations' sudden oil wealth. Without it, they would face the difficult task of building fair and just economies and societies on some other basis.

How far would their message resonate -- and how long would they even stay in power -- if they were unable to buy off the temporary allegiance of their people with vast oil revenues?


This is the same line as "When the oil runs out, the Saudis will be pounding sand!" Which may well be true, in the long term - but in the meantime they hold the major share of a resource that is becoming scarcer, and earning more money from it. When the US is giving the Saudis $100 billion dollar deals in weapons, the real power lies with the seller of oil, not the buyer.

And if the oil starts to run short at home, world history suggests that the people flock to a stronger, more viscous leader - not a more democratic one.


And that's just on the first page.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 7:56 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

At some point "You're going to finally get your flying car" will kick in, right?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:57 PM on May 31, 2008

There's sunshine falling all the time, providing more energy per square foot than we will need for a long, long time, and all we have to do is figure out good ways to harness it. Moreover, there are plenty of interesting technologies that do so, and they are getting absolutely and relatively cheaper all the time. Politics and greed keep us hooked on oil, not necessity.
posted by owhydididoit at 7:59 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The guy's a douche, but as I mentioned to another group a few days ago, you can tell gas still isn't expensive enough to change the status quo because you can still easily find:

1) People commuting in giant vehicles that get crappy mileage. Alone.

2) I sit in the ferry line here on my occasional mainland trip. There are people who sit in line for the half hour to hour plus it takes the ferry to arrive with their engine idling the entire time.

3) Parents drive every day to and from schools around here to pick up their kids when there is perfectly adequate bus service.

4) People still run into stores and leave their car idling outside, sometimes for tens of minutes.

Rails to trails: I think in all of the rails-to-trails deals, the railroad company reserves the right to put the spur back into service if they ever want/need to, don't they?
posted by maxwelton at 8:06 PM on May 31, 2008

I have to admit, I often dream of the day when most cars are electric and I won't be able to hear the freeway near my house.

The problem with this is, we switch all the cars to electricity, then we're short on electricity. Where does electricity come from? Not oil, actually - primarily, in order, coal, natural gas, and nuclear, in this country. Natural gas runs out a while after oil, and coal might be good for a long while but not long enough that it wouldn't be silly to switch to another fossil fuel after we just got fucked on fossil oil, and of course has environmental issues, and nuclear has its own issues as well as significantly limited fuel depending on what kind of reactor you're building. Renewables don't make all that much power. In any case there'd need to be investments in generating and transmission capacity to charge up all these cars, and massive ones if you wanted to do it renewably. So if everyone starts driving electric cars there's an electricity crunch.

All in all with our economic structure I think someone figures out "Hey there's (25/50/100) years of coal," and we do a repeat of 100 years of oil. Maybe ITER works and we're actually able to go to fusion before the coal runs out.

Here is an interesting if outdated graph on the energy inputs and outputs of the U.S. Note that electricity generation and transportation waste more energy than is used, as there are inherent efficiency limits to various methods of producing motive energy from heat and in the case of electric, electric energy from motive energy.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:07 PM on May 31, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

I'm really hesitant to write this because I honestly want to play devil's advocate here and argue a position I don't agree with, but I know some folks here can't separate the person from the argument.

That said, with respect to point 3, perhaps the author of the linked essay is asking, "What have they done lately?" Certainly modern civilization owes a debt to Islamic mathematicians who lived 1200 years ago, and to middle eastern societies which flourished thousands of years ago. But how many important scientific papers have been published in the last century from scholars in the region? What inventions in that time? What new fields of study?

Recast the sentence to read, "This region that's made few modern contributions..." Does the author have a point? Is the region's importance exaggerated because of oil?

Again, just playing devil's advocate.
posted by sdodd at 8:12 PM on May 31, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

The problem with this is, we switch all the cars to electricity, then we're short on electricity.

Obviously we would generate more electricity. That would happen through either nuclear or solar; $8 a gallon gas for any length of time and I suspect that there would be some serious, serious effort to figuring out how to make feasible a giant solar collecting field in the Mojave.
posted by Justinian at 8:13 PM on May 31, 2008

Personally, I'm fine (not happy, but not devastated) with the idea of $8/gallon gas. But then, I chose to (and was in a position to be able to choose to) make some compromises in terms of where I lived, what I drove, and so on, that has minimized the impact rising gas prices has had on my life. In the short run, it has meant living a less "luxurious" life than many of my peers -- smaller house, smaller car, etc. In the long run, it makes my lifestyle less sensitive to energy prices; gasoline and natural gas would have to up a long way before I will need to cut back on my driving or stop heating my house.

Societally, not everyone is in a position to make those choices. My sympathy for the person who chose to live in a 6000 square foot house way out in the suburbs, and drive three large SUVs, is limited -- they had other options and made a choice to maximize short term pleasures at the expense of the long term. Those lower on the economic ladder -- who never came close to having the option of the 6000sqft house with the granite countertops -- are being really hard-hit by current gas prices, and will be devastated by $8/gallon gas.

There is a long and very expensive series of public and personal investments that we as a society will need to make -- everything from rebuilding and rethinking public transit, to reconfiguring zoning and building code regulations, to investing in energy efficiency research, to rethinking what are luxuries and what are necessities. Combine those long-term projects with short term support for those at the lower end of the economic scale, and things are not gloom-and-doom. But if we try to continue the head-in-the-sand approach of the last couple of decades, I am not optimistic about the result.
posted by Forktine at 8:17 PM on May 31, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

4. Deflating oil potentates

Can we take someone seriously who believes that doubling the price of a commodity deflates those who produce that same commodity?
posted by Brian B. at 8:20 PM on May 31, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

Electric cars are certainly quieter, but a lot of the highway sound is tire noise.
posted by netbros at 8:20 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

That list is pretty useless.

Right off the bat, he missed the true 'top benefit' of gas at $8/gallon:

#1: There will be fewer idiots in giant SUVs pulling out in front of me while yakking on their cell phones.

My wife and I have been driving cars that get 35mpg or so since 1975. If everybody else did, gas would still be 80¢ a gallon. (Which - remember? - was what we were paying during the second Clinton administration.)
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 8:23 PM on May 31, 2008

He had me interested until this:

7. Restoration of financial discipline
Far too many Americans live beyond their means and nowhere is that more apparent than with our car payments. Enabled by eager lenders, many middle-income families carry two monthly payments of $400 or more on $20,000-plus vehicles that consume upwards of $15,000 of their annual take-home pay factoring in insurance, maintenance and gas. The sting of forking over $100 per fill-up would force all of us to look hard at how much of our precious income we blow on a transport vehicle that sits idle most of the time...

Gee, I wonder what other great things could come out of making things more expensive for people? Hey, if we make food really expensive, maybe people will lose weight! If we make clothes more expensive, maybe I can see more naked chicks!

Or maybe people will go hungry. Or without jobs, because they can't afford to reach their workplaces because there's no alternate transport available. Or without health care, because they can't afford it. Or without child care, etc etc.

Jackass, ho!

Moreover:

spur demand for the less-costly and more fuel-efficient small sedans and hatchbacks that Europeans have been driving for decades.

Well, that's just ducky. You know we can make the cars more fuel efficient without raising gas prices, right? Europeans aren't smarter than Americans in this regard. Just more desperate.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:24 PM on May 31, 2008

I suspect that there would be some serious, serious effort to figuring out how to make feasible a giant solar collecting field in the Mojave.

It's feasible, but there will be significant costs to all that leading to a crunch in electricity prices. Not only do we not have enough solar panels right now to be very significant in the statistics, we don't have enough solar panel factories to make enough solar panels to become very significant in the statistics. (Anecdote: I once saw a project presentation involving the grassroots production of solar cells using basically glass with transparent conductor, metal, white paint, pomegranate juice, and an oven, but these were very low efficiency/output - the idea was you could ship the tricky parts like the transparent conductor glass out to undeveloped parts and they could make solar cells themselves to charge batteries and suchlike, which is sort of the other/default option, to try to adapt to a very low power society compared to what we are now. That probably doesn't end well...)
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:31 PM on May 31, 2008

They all laughed when I started my dinosaur farm, but in ten million years, I'll be the one laughing!
posted by Citizen Premier at 8:31 PM on May 31, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

Just one perspective on the question of modern contributions to science from Islamic societies: Taner Edis, interviewed by Salon on the publication of his book, "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam." Asked about the current state of science in the Islamic world, he called it dismal, saying, "Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There's very little contribution coming from Muslim lands."
posted by sdodd at 8:31 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

"Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There's very little contribution coming from Muslim lands."

While I'm engineering, rather than basic science, I call bullshit from personal experience.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:34 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

$8/gallon gas is a perfectly feasible price.

Upper management just needs to share the wealth more equitably with employees. There's only so many millions one needs to be paid to live absurdly well.

The problem isn't with gas and food costing to much.

The problem is with grotesque income disparity.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:35 PM on May 31, 2008 [14 favorites has favorites]

To say there are no "Muslim scientists" is patently wrong. It may, however, be quite fair to say there are no scientists of great value in the mid-East, and particularly in the theocratic nations.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:37 PM on May 31, 2008

M.C. Lo-Carb!: "What has the middle east contributed to modern civilization, besides energy? I'm really asking this -- if it was bridges and aqueducts, let's hear it."

Hard liquor. Al-Cohol, ie, al-ġuḥl or الغول. Raise your glass!
posted by meehawl at 8:38 PM on May 31, 2008

I suspect that there would be some serious, serious effort to figuring out how to make feasible a giant solar collecting field in the Mojave.

Anyone that thinks this a great idea needs to understand exactly how difficult it is to transport electricity over long distances. Trust me, you won't power New York with a colossal solar array in California. This is a great exercise for Physics 101 students ("OMG, we can solve all of our energy problems!"), but it just don't work in the real world.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:39 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

It may, however, be quite fair to say there are no scientists of great value in the mid-East, and particularly in the theocratic nations.

That's because most of them have already moved to the U.S.

I have an excellent doctor that is Iranian by way of the University of Alabama. Roll Tide!
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:42 PM on May 31, 2008

I'll support Cool Papa Bell's statement. If there was no generating capacity located within NYC, the lines connecting NYC to the rest of the world would melt trying to bring enough in.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:42 PM on May 31, 2008

Absolutely impossible, but the ideal solution would be to have gas be priced differently depending on use and income. So rich people using an SUV to commute to work would pay more than a farmer hauling his crops to town, and there would be a clear economic burden for using gas extravagantly without similarly impacting people who use more gas out of necessity.

I think that if the price of gas goes up tp $8, what will happen immediately is that the price of food will double or triple. Well-off people will continue to eat whatever the hell they want, but for the less well off they will be forced to turn to cheaper and cheaper food, which probably means even worse nutrition and more filler. At $8/gallon, people with 20-30 mile commutes (not that uncommon in rural areas) will be spending an hour or more of their pay on gas each day.
posted by Deathalicious at 8:50 PM on May 31, 2008

/me dreams...
<Pick Reason to Flag>
-Obnoxiously Stupid SLOE-

It would be nice to provide incentive for shifts toward less pollution and consuming less of a scarce resource. Rapidly jacking up the cost of transit is probably sub-optimal in terms of outcomes. While it's kind of aligned with the environmental requirement, I'm also quite wary of the effect that this will have on increasing searches for alternative carbon. Tar sands, methane hydrate, gasification, coal generated hydrogen etc. are all poised to take a bad environmental situation and make it a disaster.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 8:55 PM on May 31, 2008

Kirth Gerson writes "Every time some community rejoices the opening of a new one, I mourn the loss of the rail line it replaces."

At least when it becomes a foot path it can be turned back into a rail line, what is worse is when they turn rail lines into housing.
posted by Mitheral at 8:57 PM on May 31, 2008

I certainly concur that for some people it's clearly not expensive enough. We bicycled to the grocery store tonight for our weekly shopping, with large saddlebags on both bikes. As we were locking up, I noticed a huge, new SUV idling in front of the store with someone waiting in the passenger seat, and I realized with utter disgust that simply because they didn't want find a parking space in the lot and walk 200 feet to the store, they were throwing away more gas than we had conserved by bicycling.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:00 PM on May 31, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

for the last 60 years, our society has been moving away from its problems, which has often meant moving away from its jobs, its business districts and its other institutions - the america of 1940 didn't have people driving cars 20 to 30 miles to work - it didn't have produce from thousands of miles away or toys transported from halfway across the world

we already have a model for what a less energy intensive america would be like - the america we used to have - add to that our new technologies and what we've learned and we have a fairly decent solution - although it's one that's going to require a lot of adjustment and a lot of hardship on those who have moved too far and indulged too much - instead of a stock market crash, we'll have a suburb crash

the current housing market woes are going to be made even worse by high gas

it won't be too bad if we make the necessary adjustments - unfortunately, right now, i see people still doing the same damn things they've been doing all along, pretending that they won't go broke as they do so
posted by pyramid termite at 9:01 PM on May 31, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

I have to admit, I often dream of the day when most cars are electric and I won't be able to hear the freeway near my house.

Well, this is as good a place as any to say it. What the fuck, motorcycles? What do people without TiVo do when a motorcycle drives by while they're watching TV (television is important business!)? It's a sad life that I don't even want to contemplate. Damn motorcycles.

This region that's contributed little to modern civilization

It's already been said, but yes, algebra and the concept of zero. Kind of useful in modern civilization, one finds. But also?

"Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There's very little contribution coming from Muslim lands."

Good thing being a scientist isn't the only way to be useful in modern civilization! Hey, you know what, good thing being useful isn't a measure of whether we deserve to live or be happy, as well!

I have an excellent doctor that is Iranian by way of the University of Alabama.

Hey, my doctor's Iranian too now that I think of it! But he's not excellent, and I'm trying to ditch him. Anybody know a good doctor in SE Portland?
posted by birdie birdington at 9:04 PM on May 31, 2008

Trust me, you won't power New York with a colossal solar array in California.

Papa Bell: I understand power transission just fine. I just live in Los Angeles and don't give a flying fig how New York powers itself. We could use the sun. New York can build some nuclear plants or something.
posted by Justinian at 9:08 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

But how many important scientific papers have been published in the last century from scholars in the region? What inventions in that time? What new fields of study?

I apologize for citing wikipedia, but the list is simply too long to reproduce here.

That's one nation in the area we're going over with our incredibly large brush. I will concede that I'm certain a number of those people never lived in Iran and many of them now live elsewhere, and acknowledge that the Middle East doesn't stack up to other areas in terms of innovation.

However, the broad claim that Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, the Palestinian territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen have not made contributions to modern society is utterly absurd and a questionable point of discussion in the first place.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 9:12 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

we don't have enough solar panel factories to make enough solar panels to become very significant in the statistics.

you speak of "factories" . . . I am not aware of this term so I guess it is no surprise "we" have a present lack of them.

Trust me, you won't power New York with a colossal solar array in California

yeah, well, how about California, with its 20% of GDP then?

If there was no generating capacity located within NYC, the lines connecting NYC to the rest of the world would melt trying to bring enough in.

How many MW of generation does NYC have vs. its import from the eastern grid? I do remember the Great Blackout of the 1970s that took out the entire eastern seaboard, including NYC.

http://www.humanities-interactive.org/ancient/mideast/mideast_essay.htm

The things discussed on this site are of these are pretty important to modern civilization, I'd say.

The URL's got "ancient" in it. Try again.

because I hope we're not going to start argue about whether or not Middle Eastern people have contributed anything to modern society.

The question has nothing to do about "Middle Eastern people" as a class and everything to do eg. Middle Eastern states as a class of society.

The question interests me since I am reasonably well-read and can't identify much of anything *modern* M.E. society has contributed directly to the *modern* world. And I say this as a person who is generally reflexively defensive of ME people and wary of the Likudniks.
posted by tachikaze at 9:17 PM on May 31, 2008

Well. I'll hold onto my 1988 Cadillac DeVille for juuuuuuuust a little while longer.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:52 PM on May 31, 2008

Calvin's dad has been calling for this for 15 years.
posted by sdrawkcab at 10:08 PM on May 31, 2008 [24 favorites has favorites]

"I know some folks here can't separate the person from the argument."

Fuck those assholes.
posted by Eideteker at 10:12 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Great find, sdrawkcab
posted by crawl at 10:23 PM on May 31, 2008

you speak of "factories" . . . I am not aware of this term so I guess it is no surprise "we" have a present lack of them.

???

A factory? Short for manufactory, where things are manufactured?

How many MW of generation does NYC have vs. its import from the eastern grid?

I used to know this or have it available when I worked at a power plant for a few months. It's interestingly hard to look up info on the power generating infrastructure online, a lot of which is that there's a lot of corporate shenanigans going on and these things change hands all the time, the owners merge, or so on. (Another example of shenanigans, there was some sort of manipulation going on where the plant and/or the land I worked at was, if I remember the convolutions correctly, bought by the company I worked for, sold to some other company that basically existed for the purpose of shenanigans, and then leased back to the company I worked for in some fashion that ensured financial advantages for all corporate persons, probably at taxpayer cost at some point.)

As a partial answer, the two big NYC plants are Ravenswood, where I worked (specifically, the northernmost smokestack), ~2.5 GW, and Astoria, ~1.8 GW, both pretty close to each other in Queens. The 14th St. Station is 600 MW plus steam cogen in Manhattan. I believe those are the major ones. The NYISO which is a sort of quasi-governmental/non-profit organization that serves to manage the NYS power market is predicting ~8 GW loads in NYC this week. There are also sundry peaking units throughout NYC including at the plants I mentioned which are operated under peak load conditions or when generating capacity is urgently needed for any other reason.

All these capacity and load numbers are actually moving targets. The load has a very wide range depending on all sorts of things like the day of the week, time of the day, and very importantly the temperature, and the capacity numbers change to a lesser degree, mostly with temperature as they are heat engines and operate at a lower efficiency in the hot summer (naturally, when they're needed most) but if I remember right to some degree also with other factors.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 10:26 PM on May 31, 2008

So if everyone starts driving electric cars there's an electricity crunch.

Now, the thing is.... I didn't really didn't say everyone would drive an electric car - though my statement was made breezily and without detail.. If electric cars become exceedingly common, most of us won't be driving. We will need delivery vehicles, transit, ambulances, police cars, and probably some expensive taxis - I don't know that a lot of people will actually drive them..

But I feel the need to inject some optimism into this discussion.

Social and political changes can help us if the technological changes don't. I suspect a real energy crunch will make the future look like the past - with electric streetcars, cold water flats, high-density housing, lots of bike traffic, not much meat in the diet; my grandparents lived like this and lots of places in the world do right now... This is going to mean a change in priorities, but its not the most uncomfortable situation nor is it foreign to the USA or Western civilization in general. People in World War 2 lived with rationing, and some studies have shown it made people healthier (I am thinking of the UK here). I wish people would stop making like the world will end when gas is expensive. I think this is the point of the article.

With that said, I am not convinced the scenario I outline above will need to happen

I don't have an engineering, maths, or sciences background and don't generally understand materials for that audience; but I can think of a few solar companies doing interesting work on solar projects - they do other work like creating lcd's. I suspect they make money off the lcd's and the solar stuff benefits with R&D money; I've been impressed enough to put some of my meager savings in these companies, they look sustainable financially if not in other ways.

Also, I am familiar with a process (in so much that I know it exists, not that I understand any of the logistics or (in)efficiencies) whereby coal is used to make gas; which was employed orginally in places like Nazi Germany and developed/used more frequently in South Africa. I know nothing of this process, but it uses familiar products, and a creates a needed output - so the world is not completely out-of-options on the fossil fuel front, and the old ways are not really as seriously out-of-date as they may look. Coal isn't a good choice the way it is usually deployed, but it provides some research options... I can say this honestly, even when I understand the "clean coal" models I have heard about so far to be a scam.

Then there is ethanol. Corn as ethanol is of course, stupid and it has taken food out of the mouths of people; the use of corn in ethanol is an agricultural subsidy illegal under most free trade schemes. Better options abound - Hemp is hard to harvest because its damn sticky and tall but it creates a hell-of-a-lot of biomass and grows without much care... roadside grasses needs to be cut for safety anyway and can create ethanol. Hybrid poplars (which grow very large in a short time), and standing trees left badly damaged/destroyed by forest fires can also be put into ethanol. We can make ethanol with lots of things - doing it with food probably isn't smart. There is hope here.

Our societies can change, and it won't be all bad; and I am not sure all of our alternative energy options have been explored.
posted by Deep Dish at 10:36 PM on May 31, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Shouldn't we be technologically advanced enough here in the 21st Century to quit siphoning off the pus of the Earth?

I suppose then that the gold of wedding rings is the puke of supernovas.

By its very definition, oil is crude.

The message is mostly accurate, but still I have that urge to attach this deliverer of the message to the exhaust pipe of a SUV.
posted by stirfry at 10:44 PM on May 31, 2008

KokuRyu, I agree with the ignoramus on that point, "modern civilization" being, say, 19th century onward.

There is something that really bothers me about this statement: it's a very neo-liberal, determinist point of view, and basically colonialist. If you don't speak or read Arabic or Persian, how will you ever know what you don't know? You could start with Al Quds University in Jerusalem as a central place of Arab learning.

Speaking of neo-colonialism, Orientalism by Edward Said is a major work that has come out of the Arab/Islamic world recently. Arab and Islamic thought played an important role in the struggle against colonialism after WWII.

It must also be said that Arab and Islamic societies have been traditionally multicultural and cosmopolitan.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:46 PM on May 31, 2008

3. Wither the Middle East's clout

Or, how I learned to stop worrying, love goat farming, and died of old age in my 30s.

Seriously. Oil wealth in the Middle East has benefited the autocratic elites, and with rare exception that influx of cash has not been used to build a strong middle class. Once that wealth is gone, the Middle East will loose clout, yes, but only because large swaths of the region will come to resemble Africa. Depraved, famished, and completely without hope.
posted by wfrgms at 10:57 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

That guy, Al Gebra, had a lot of influence on current state of affairs. And a positive influence it has been.

some high school students may differ with the definition of "positive".
posted by stirfry at 10:58 PM on May 31, 2008

how about we let everyone who isn't performing physical labor WORK THE FUCK AT HOME??

Starting with my software development job.
posted by drjimmy11 at 11:30 PM on May 31, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

robot made of meat: I'm also quite wary of the effect that this will have on increasing searches for alternative carbon. Tar sands, methane hydrate, gasification, coal generated hydrogen etc. are all poised to take a bad environmental situation and make it a disaster.

Yup. Expensive oil drives production away from relatively benign easy to produce crude to things like the Albertan oil sands and coal gasification. Methane hydrate and oil shale are still on the horizon. Expensive oil leads to high carbon and highly polluting sources. Take coal, there's plenty of coal. But coal is dirty stuff, and, as it turns out that's where most of the geologically sequestered carbon ended up. You don't want to be putting all that back in the atmosphere in one shot.
posted by bumpkin at 11:42 PM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

A British friend who has emmigrated to the US was complaining because his British car got 50 miles to the gallon, and his American car (same make, suposedly same line of that make) gets about 35, and that's suposed to be good.

Why, oh, why wouldn't Americans want 50 miles to the gallon even when gas was $2/gallon? I mean, that's still a lot of money.
posted by jb at 11:58 PM on May 31, 2008

At least someone is trying industrial solar power.
posted by adamvasco at 12:21 AM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I knew this FPP was ControversyFilter when I saw it was datelined San Fransisco. What? Like SF isn't the WHQ of ControversyFilter?

In Bentonville, AR, they're already thinking different about high energy prices.

"... "When our grocery suppliers bring price increases, we don't just accept them," says Pamela Kohn, Wal-Mart's general merchandise manager for perishables. To be sure, Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) isn't the only retailer working to cut fat from the food chain, but as the largest grocer - Wal-Mart's food and consumables revenue is nearly $100 billion - it has a disproportionate amount of leverage. Here's how the retailer is throwing its weight around.

Shrink the goods. Ever wonder why that cereal box is only two-thirds full? Foodmakers love big boxes because they serve as billboards on store shelves. Wal-Mart has been working to change that by promising suppliers that their shelf space won't shrink even if their boxes do. As a result, some of its vendors have reengineered their packaging. General Mills' (GIS, Fortune 500) Hamburger Helper is now made with denser pasta shapes, allowing the same amount of food to fit into a 20% smaller box at the same price. The change has saved 890,000 pounds of paper fiber and eliminated 500 trucks from the road, giving General Mills a cushion to absorb some of the rising costs.

Cut out the middleman. Wal-Mart typically buys its brand-name coffee from a supplier, which buys from a cooperative of growers, which works with a roaster - which means "there are a whole bunch of people muddled in the middle," says Wal-Mart spokeswoman Tara Raddohl. In April the chain began buying directly from a cooperative of Brazilian coffee farmers for its Sam's Choice brand, cutting three or four steps out of the supply chain. ..."

Who'd a thunk you could take 500 semis off the road just by re-engineering Hamburger Helper?
posted by paulsc at 12:21 AM on June 1, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

This is not helping Middle East produce people who contribute to a modern society. Of course if the USA really tried to negotiate a peace settlement with all the players in the middle east then the price of oil would not rise as there would be stability. No permanent solution here as running on empty is still running on empty, but at least a breathing space.
posted by adamvasco at 12:35 AM on June 1, 2008

A British friend who has emmigrated to the US was complaining because his British car got 50 miles to the gallon, and his American car (same make, suposedly same line of that make) gets about 35, and that's suposed to be good.

I'm willing to bet a few dollars (which is what, 20 pence at the current exchange rate?) that his UK car got 50 miles per Imperial gallon, and he isn't converting to US gallons when he is comparing numbers. His US car may get 35 miles per US gallon, but it gets a much more impressive-sounding 42 miles per imperial gallon. Or, just to keep things confusing, you could say that his UK car got 42 miles per US gallon, or 5.65 liters per 100km.

Cars in the UK do tend to get better fuel economy than cars in the US, because they are generally lighter and have smaller engines (often fuel-efficient diesel engines at that). But people so often forget to convert between US and Imperial gallons that the fuel efficiency advantages of UK vehicles can easily be exaggerated.
posted by Forktine at 12:35 AM on June 1, 2008

Hamburger Helper is now made with denser pasta shapes, allowing the same amount of food to fit into a 20% smaller box at the same price. The change has saved 890,000 pounds of paper fiber and eliminated 500 trucks from the road

This is why the low-hanging fruit for the environment are not in the household. For about the same effort as it takes to convince me to recycle a few hundred pounds of paper in a year, a small adjustment to a product I've never bought in my entire life -- Hamburger Helper, of all things -- saves more paper than I will probably use in decades, if not my entire life. Probably almost every product out there, and almost every industrial process, has those same savings to be made, once energy prices rise enough to make it economically viable to dig out those inefficiencies.
posted by Forktine at 12:41 AM on June 1, 2008 [11 favorites has favorites]

its easy when you make a million semi trips every few days.
posted by OldReliable at 12:59 AM on June 1, 2008

(often fuel-efficient diesel engines at that)

diesel fuel also has 12% more energy content than regular gas.
posted by tachikaze at 1:12 AM on June 1, 2008

#9 The mob will have to grab torches and pitchforks instead of molotov cocktails when going after glib pundits.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:13 AM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

why wouldn't Americans want 50 miles to the gallon even when gas was $2/gallon? I mean, that's still a lot of money

1000 miles per month is the average.

50mpg @ $2/gal = $40/mo.

20mpg = $100/mo, $60 difference, which is dwarfed by the payment and insurance diffs between a 50mpg gas sipper and a 20mpg road warrior.
posted by tachikaze at 1:17 AM on June 1, 2008

There is something that really bothers me about this statement: it's a very neo-liberal, determinist point of view

more like techno-centric, at least in my case. Japan gave us -- and I mean me -- the Walkman. Germany, the BMW. Finland, xylitol.

But Africa, S. and C. America, Australia, etc. etc. are in the same boat as the M.E. Standout cultures are extraordinary and its interesting to view the historical underpinnings of that. cf. James Burke.
posted by tachikaze at 1:26 AM on June 1, 2008

Societally, not everyone is in a position to make those choices. My sympathy for the person who chose to live in a 6000 square foot house way out in the suburbs, and drive three large SUVs, is limited -- they had other options and made a choice to maximize short term pleasures at the expense of the long term.

How about you save your sympathy for the rural poor - who certainly don't have 6000 square foot houses and can barely afford to get to work as it is?

How about you save your sympathy for the people who can't afford food NOW? Bread is almost $5 a loaf in the San Francisco Bay Area! Everything in the store is going up exponentially. I'm certainly shopping differently than I did last year...and I don't even have a car!

How about you save your sympathy for those who rely on public transportation, which will get worse before it gets better because still too many buses run on gasoline?

It's so nice to take pleasure in the destruction of the status quo, until you realize that there are people who don't live in your urban center, who must drive, and who can barely afford to eat now. There are some incredibly tough times on the horizon, and your ill concealed glee is just ghastly.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 2:02 AM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

1. RIP for the internal-combustion engine

Call me when 80% of the engines are eletric, then you'll declare ICE death

2. Economic stimulus :Necessity being the mother of invention

Being the motivator, not the mother. Human ingenuity, investment in scientific research, risk taking are the mothers.

3.This region that's contributed little

This man ins both one of the causes and the results of the poltics of governing by ignorance. Did you know the poles are swapping and the penguins are now north?

4. Deflating oil potentates

Again, call me when people no longer use hydrocarbon to produce plastic and fertilizers! Yes Brittany, gasoline isn't the one only product of oil.

5. Mass-transit development

That's the one I am really wishing for, but not really liking. Take a look at London and its Tube, they'd be stuck with out it. Yet, Tube's prices become quite influential in everyday life without very significant savings for regular users.

6. An antidote to sprawl

An and incentive for higher buildings. I remember seeing a picture of some Hong Kong high density 20+ floors neighbourhoods and that didn't look that enjoyable either.
posted by elpapacito at 3:02 AM on June 1, 2008

I'm in Sweden, where the price is already $9 a gallon, and a recent report claimed it would have to double to $18 a gallon if we wanted to reach the carbon dioxide emission goals for 2020.

$8 a gallon? That would be like a dream for us, living here in this old water tank on a rubbish tip.
posted by martinrebas at 3:08 AM on June 1, 2008

Italy, gas at $8,80 a gallon and climbing (I hope y'all appreciate the double conversion, we say it's 1,50 €/lt, you imperial system users, you), diesel too (actually, diesel surpassed gas prices for I think the first time ever). Still not end times, people complain, but none really stops buying gas or gas-guzzling cars, or SUVs just for the hell of it, and you don't really see many more bycicles around. Let's wait and see till it gets to €2,50/lt (which would be $14,70/gal, or 65,3miles * furlong squared/stone*fortnight), my guess is we're going to be there come next Christmas. The trick is, everything is transported by truck, and prices (food, mostly) are going up accordingly.
posted by _dario at 3:50 AM on June 1, 2008

Rails to trails: I think in all of the rails-to-trails deals, the railroad company reserves the right to put the spur back into service if they ever want/need to, don't they?

Yes, this is exactly the case.
posted by fixedgear at 3:57 AM on June 1, 2008

My bicycle commute route follows along an active rail line.

That is exceptionally fine. Emphasis on exceptionally. Most of the bike paths in my area use all of a former railroad right-of-way.

I think in all of the rails-to-trails deals, the railroad company reserves the right to put the spur back into service if they ever want/need to, don't they?

What railroad company? Most of them are long gone. The ones that remain are not interested in passenger service. Passenger rail in the US is usually subsidized by a government.

At least when it becomes a foot path it can be turned back into a rail line, what is worse is when they turn rail lines into housing.

That may be the case if the railroad actually bought the land, and if title then transferred to some entity sympathetic to reconversion. This is not always so. Here is a legal case. Also, the building of passenger rail lines through residential areas has always faced stiff opposition from the residents, and would certainly face the same in the future. See the proposed extension of the MBTA Red Line (a subway!) through Arlington and Lexington, MA in the 1970s, opposition to which echoed similar (but less successful) opposition to a street railway 80 years earlier. Converting bike paths back to rail lines would make a lot of property owners unhappy. It's the literal embodiment of NIMBY. Even if the right-of-way is now owned by some government body, that body is going to have to go against the wishes of those abutters.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:03 AM on June 1, 2008

Inhabitat � TRANSPORTATION TUESDAY: VW’s 235mpg car
eyp. top speed 75 miles per hour...but what a savings on gas!
posted by Postroad at 4:10 AM on June 1, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Given our achievement in getting a giant mainframe's computing power into a handheld device in just a few decades, we should be able to do likewise with [car engines]

Crude oil commentary about as sophisticated as the old If Microsoft made cars joke, only less funny.
posted by sfenders at 4:19 AM on June 1, 2008

The reason the internal combustion engine has survived for more than a century is not because of some shadowy conspiracy between "Big Oil" and the government. It has survived for two reasons: 1) the internal combustion engine is a ridiculously useful piece of technology, because 2) gasoline is a ridiculously rich source of energy.

I currently drive a 4-cylinder compact. At 60mph, it cranks about 3500rpm, and I get about 28mpg. Doing a little math, that means that it completes 392,000 cylinder compressions in burning a single gallon of gas, and during that time I've gone 28 miles. Each cylinder compression uses the merest breath of gas, 1/392000 of a gallon, a few drops at best. Yet this smelly liquid is capable of moving me and my nearly half-ton of car farther than most people can walk in a day. Until someone comes up with an energy source that can deliver that much energy to an engine that efficient, internal combustion engines will continue to burn gasoline. It's a steal, even at $8/gal.
posted by valkyryn at 4:47 AM on June 1, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Interesting to see we have the trifecta of oil crisis rejection comments in this thread.
We have deep dish stating no technical qualifications, but a belief technology will save us.
Cool Papa Bell states that renewables are pointless because they do not solve one element of the problem (in this case solar won't work for NYC) and elpapacito calls doom that plastics/fertilizer will also fail without cheap oil.
I get frustrated with these sort of comments. The lack of oil to support future growth in today's economy (peak oil) is a real problem, but it explicitly acknowledges plenty of oil remains - as much as we have used so far - so it will be widely and relatively cheaply available for high value uses like plastics (fertiliser is largely from natural gas).
It does say there will be major economic ructions, as the economy changes from one where year on year growth is the norm to one where tiny growth via efficiencies and contractions are much more likely. Make no mistake, this change will be very significant, and for some financial businesses, and SUV makers etc. drastic.
But there will be enough food (although more expensive) in the developed world, and you will be able to buy all the cheap polyester suits you want.
Sadly, renewables, in which I have been a believer all my life, haven't yet grown to being a reasonable alternative, and no amount of wishing will make it so in the short term. The world uses 85million barrels of oil A DAY, which is an extraordinary number.
I initially sat down to write a peak oil debunking article a couple of years ago, until I saw just how much consumption has grown in the last decade, and the flimsy rate of new discoveries. If we want to keep an economy growing as it has up till now on cheap oil we are screwed.
If we want to transfer to renewables, we are also screwed. To make an analogy it is like saying you can fill your swimming pool in two days with your garden hose, so an empty ocean should just take a little more. Renewables are that scale of magnitude away from providing an alternative in terms of grosss energy replacement.
That said, if renewables can scale massively, they may just be able to supply the growth of energy needed in the system to maintain a growing economy, but unfortunately the total oil output is likely to decline, making the void renewables need to fill a growing one.
Renewables are a poor replacement for the energy rich fossil fuels, and sure, solar won't power New York City, but unless there is a huge increase in the investment in renewables we will face an ongoing contractioning economy, reversing the trend to better lives that has seen something like a billion people climb out of poverty in the last few generations.
The longer we try and deny the urgency of the problem, and throw up our hands because there is no easy answer (or overstate the problem), the more suffering will occur as the gap between our energy inputs required, and those we can source without oil, widens.
posted by bystander at 5:04 AM on June 1, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Anyone that thinks this a great idea needs to understand exactly how difficult it is to transport electricity over long distances.

Sneakernet. Charge up batteries and hand them off bucket-brigade style.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:08 AM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Bread is almost $5 a loaf in the San Francisco Bay Area!

it's 1.79 where i shop in the midwest
posted by pyramid termite at 5:17 AM on June 1, 2008

It's not the only anecdote I could point to, but I saw a lady, at least 70 and probably much older, walking hunched over in the hot sun carrying a bag of groceries today. Not a 'bum', just, apparently a lady who can't afford a car.

LOL Americans.

This happens all the time round these parts.
posted by dydecker at 5:56 AM on June 1, 2008

This is the kind of guy you hate to meet at a BBQ.
posted by odinsdream at 6:52 AM on June 1, 2008

Eight reasons you'll rejoice when we hit $8-a-gallon gasoline.

Hm, this should be difficult:

1. I can walk to the central business district of town
2. I can catch a bus to ditto from the bus stop 3 min away
3. I can catch a train etc from 5 min away
4. I can cycle there in 15 min (and do every day)
5. There will be fewer cars to annoy me on my morning & evening bike ride
6. The rent I can charge my tenants will increase as living further out becomes less viable
7. The value of my house ditto
8. I can buy a fucking huge overpowered car for a song from dickheads who live in mcmansions on the outskirts of the city when they declare bankruptcy, then sideswipe them when they ride their bicycles to work, in revenge.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:58 AM on June 1, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

How about you save your sympathy for the rural poor - who certainly don't have 6000 square foot houses and can barely afford to get to work as it is?

How about you save your sympathy for the people who can't afford food NOW? Bread is almost $5 a loaf in the San Francisco Bay Area! Everything in the store is going up exponentially. I'm certainly shopping differently than I did last year...and I don't even have a car!

How about you save your sympathy for those who rely on public transportation, which will get worse before it gets better because still too many buses run on gasoline?

It's so nice to take pleasure in the destruction of the status quo, until you realize that there are people who don't live in your urban center, who must drive, and who can barely afford to eat now. There are some incredibly tough times on the horizon, and your ill concealed glee is just ghastly.

I'm glad to see that misreading remains a central sport here, unaffected by higher gas prices. In my very next sentence, I wrote:

Those lower on the economic ladder -- who never came close to having the option of the 6000sqft house with the granite countertops -- are being really hard-hit by current gas prices, and will be devastated by $8/gallon gas.

We are in complete agreement here -- the misallocation of public resources and the embarrassingly skewed distribution of income across our society mean that those at the lower end of the economic spectrum are being hammered really hard already, and have no way to cope if gas goes to $8. My sympathy is limited for the people with enough resources to have made some really bad choices -- the people buying the huge-ass houses out in the far stretches of the urban landscape that I drive past on the way into every metropolitan area I've visited in the US.

But my entire point was that just because there is a certain pleasure to be taken in watching someone who chose to maximize momentary pleasure and consumption get the bill for it, there is no pleasure at all in watching that impact on people who never had the resources and options to make alternative choices, or who have been making the best choices available all along. And hence, I wrote that we need to radically rethink our public investments in infrastructure and research, while finding ways to support those being hit hard by these rising prices. Already, with gas just above $4/gallon, many people are choosing between transportation and food, transportation and medical care, transportation and child care. Those are not acceptable trade-offs.

But at the same time, there are some real societal costs to artificially cheap energy (such as having no incentive to remove waste, like in the Hamburger Helper example) -- the answer here is not to remove fuel taxes and invade a few more oil-rich nations, open ANWR for drilling, etc. We need to have high prices (to discourage wasteful consumption) combined with smart public policies and humane support for the have-nots. (Gee, can you tell I'm not the Bush administration's number one supporter?) This isn't rocket science, but it is also an approach that hasn't been on the table in the US for at least a couple of decades, if ever.

So here we are in 2008 talking about how to begin a process that should have started in 1972, and instead the hardest part of thinking about this is the question to how to compensate for the poor decisions of the past three decades (such as encouraging the building of 6000 square foot housing tracts in exurban areas). You can change policies overnight, but changing the built environment is slow and is extraordinarily expensive. Combine those poor infrastructural decisions with the near-total removal of the social safety net (my local food banks are under incredible pressure, and are receiving almost no public support, for example), and you have a recipe for intense suffering by many people.
posted by Forktine at 7:02 AM on June 1, 2008

Bread is almost $5 a loaf in the San Francisco Bay Area!

Store-bought bread is ridiculously overpriced, and, depending on the brand, even potentially unhealthy. Hydrogenated oils are practically a poison. Buy a bread machine and make your own bread for about 35 cents a loaf. Our last bread machine lasted for 500 loaves before we had to replace it. We saved about $1600 over the life (and cost) of the $100 machine. There's some gas money for you.
posted by eratus at 7:08 AM on June 1, 2008

The Light Fantastic quotes Forktine Societally, not everyone is in a position to make those choices. My sympathy for the person who chose to live in a 6000 square foot house way out in the suburbs, and drive three large SUVs, is limited -- they had other options and made a choice to maximize short term pleasures at the expense of the long term.

The Light Fantastic writes "How about you save your sympathy for the rural poor - who certainly don't have 6000 square foot houses and can barely afford to get to work as it is?
"How about you save your sympathy for the people who can't afford food NOW? Bread is almost $5 a loaf in the San Francisco Bay Area! Everything in the store is going up exponentially. I'm certainly shopping differently than I did last year...and I don't even have a car!"

Did you miss the "limited" in that statement or the rest of Forktine's paragraph:

Forktine writes "Those lower on the economic ladder -- who never came close to having the option of the 6000sqft house with the granite countertops -- are being really hard-hit by current gas prices, and will be devastated by $8/gallon gas."

Kirth Gerson writes "Converting bike paths back to rail lines would make a lot of property owners unhappy. It's the literal embodiment of NIMBY. Even if the right-of-way is now owned by some government body, that body is going to have to go against the wishes of those abutters."

Sure it's going to be unpopular though I wonder if the reaction in Europe would be any different than the US. I know there is more acceptance for goverment in general in Canada to make these unpopular decsions than the US. See the legal fight over the Arbutus corridor where the City of Vancouver sued CP rail to retain a decommissioned rail right of way as a transport corridor[PDF].
posted by Mitheral at 7:17 AM on June 1, 2008

The world uses 85million barrels of oil A DAY, which is an extraordinary number.

The USA military is the single biggest consumer of oil.

So there's one way oil consumption could be radically decreased.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:38 AM on June 1, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Somebody needs to make a big, flywheeled forty-seater commuter bike and put it on the rail-to-trails.
posted by owhydididoit at 8:25 AM on June 1, 2008

On the one hand, I hate to see this article gaining more traction, because it's so stupid. On the other hand, since I'm late to the Metafilter comments party, it's nice to be able to just cut-and-paste what I wrote on Digg:

1. Although "We're getting rid of the internal combustion engine because we've found something better" would be great, "We're getting rid of the internal combustion engine because it doesn't work any more and we need something else" would be a disaster. Necessity is the mother of invention, but it's nice when that necessity isn't quite so sudden and desperate.

2. It's true that, when something stops working, economic activity is necessary to fix or replace it, but redirecting economic activity that could otherwise be put to more productive use is not a good thing. There's a reason why this line of thinking is known as the "Broken Window Fallacy", not the "Broken Window Really Good Idea".

3, 4. When gas hits $18 a gallon because there's no crude oil left in Venezuela or the Middle East, that will deflate a lot of dictators. When gas hits $8 a gallon because there's still lots of crude oil left but demand is growing rapidly while supply peaks, that will just make a lot of wealthy dictators even wealthier.

5, 6. Mass transit is nice - it's like subsidized roads that poor people get to use too - but mass transit would have been even nicer if we'd built it early enough that our cities had developed with enough density to support it efficiently, instead of urban sprawl. The urban sprawl isn't going away, because it's *already there*. The cat is out of the bag. Even if future development is dense and well-serviced by mass transit, there's still going to be a lot of pre-existing suburbia that will always be wasteful to live in at $8 a gallon, but even more disasterous to abandon and let decay.

7. "People used to buy inefficiently large vehicles, but now they'll have to stop that to avoid becoming poor!" Super. If you hate inefficiency for abstract aesthetic reasons, this might be a positive thing, but if you just hate inefficiency because you worry that it can eventually lead to poverty, then watching "eventually" arrive is awful.

8. "Easing global tensions"? The last time international trade suddenly became more difficult, mostly because a temporary financial crisis panicked governments into protectionism, we called the results "The Great Depression" and "World War II". At least in those cases, because the crippling of trade was artificial, it eventually ended. What happens if the crippling of trade is due to the economics of transportation and the laws of physics? Let's hope that coal-powered container ships turn out to be affordable to operate...
posted by roystgnr at 9:01 AM on June 1, 2008

Gasoline will be rationed before a certain point, with defense employers getting them first. What needs to happen immediately is that we need to uncap all height restrictions on buildings and reduce the problem dimensionally. This was not just about the cost of gas either, but global warming and future generations.
posted by Brian B. at 9:04 AM on June 1, 2008

"it's nice to be able to just cut-and-paste what I wrote on Digg"..

heh...for who?
posted by HuronBob at 9:18 AM on June 1, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

roystgnr writes "The urban sprawl isn't going away, because it's *already there*. The cat is out of the bag. Even if future development is dense and well-serviced by mass transit, there's still going to be a lot of pre-existing suburbia that will always be wasteful to live in at $8 a gallon, but even more disasterous to abandon and let decay."

Be interesting to see if a) the ex-urban areas see a decline like small towns have seen in the last few decades and b) whether small towns have a resurgence under a more steady state economy.
posted by Mitheral at 10:05 AM on June 1, 2008

$8 gas is going to / would drive ground rents -- ie. apartment rents and home values -- UP in the city centers close to employment and DOWN in the outlying areas far from employment.

Thank God! The value of our (near transit, in the city) house will finally have a fighting chance v. the 45-min-away megamansions.

Oh wait. Our school system is still utter crap. Never mind.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:17 AM on June 1, 2008

General Mills' Hamburger Helper is now made with denser pasta shapes, allowing the same amount of food to fit into a 20% smaller box at the same price. The change has saved 890,000 pounds of paper fiber and eliminated 500 trucks from the road, giving General Mills a cushion to absorb some of the rising costs.
...
Who'd a thunk you could take 500 semis off the road just by re-engineering Hamburger Helper?

Ok, I'll call bullshit. 500 trucks at 30'x8'x10' per truck is 1.2 million cubic feet of hamburger helper. If this is a 20% savings, then we're talking about 6 million cubic feet of hamburger helper as a rough number for HH consumption. Let's say they only make a delivery a week, so that's 6M cu. ft. per week. So my share is 0.02 cubic feet per week, if we restrict this to America. Doesn't sound like much, but that's 35 cubic inches of dried HH, roughly 10 mouthfuls of cooked HH for every man, woman, and child every day. And we're ignoring all those generic brands. Eat up!

Or I could be wrong, and this single statistic is the undiscovered reason for Obesity in America.
posted by Killick at 10:56 AM on June 1, 2008

I'll support Cool Papa Bell's statement. If there was no generating capacity located within NYC, the lines connecting NYC to the rest of the world would melt trying to bring enough in.

What? You don't have to use AC to transport the juice, you know (sexy interior shot for the power geeks).

Though it would be a lot more reasonable to base the energy production on the local environment instead of the current one-power-source-to-rule-them-all mentality. Geothermal works great when you're sitting on a volcano in Iceland... but doesn't do New York a whole lot of good.

I think the best bets, regionally, are:

• Pacific Northwest: wind, hydro
• Southwest: wind, solar
• Midwest: wind, solar
• South: giant fucking capacitors to capture all the goddamned lightning... and maybe hydro and solar
• Northeast: hydro, wind

The Midwest and Southwest have a huge advantage already: shitloads of land. Where land is more expensive (generally, where population densities are high, like the coasts) you'll have to get creative. Shit, if I had unlimited resources and political capital, I'd line the Eastern seaboard of the United States from Maine down to the Florida Keys with giant wind turbines. Space 'em 5 miles apart, build a lighthouse in the center of them, heck... you could throw in a radar and call it the Strategic Atlantic Defense Network or something. Make it a big public works project to keep all the recession-weary jobless folks busy.

You probably wouldn't want to do this on the west coast, though. Wind turbines don't like earthquakes.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 11:04 AM on June 1, 2008

Oh wait. Our school system is still utter crap. Never mind.

Any change might come too late if your kids are already in school, but it seems obvious that home values and relative affluence do drive school quality to a large extent, particularly if local schools are funded by property taxes, right?
posted by spiderwire at 11:07 AM on June 1, 2008

Ok, I'll call bullshit. 500 trucks at 30'x8'x10' per truck is 1.2 million cubic feet of hamburger helper. If this is a 20% savings, then we're talking about 6 million cubic feet of hamburger helper as a rough number for HH consumption. Let's say they only make a delivery a week, so that's 6M cu. ft. per week.

It seems highly likely to me that the estimate of savings is quarterly or even annually, and probably shorthand for 500 total deliveries each quarter/year. The only real question is how many total shipments of HH are made each quarter/year in total truckloads; if the number is ~2500, then a 20% reduction would mean 500 "trucks" overall. Nationally (or internationally?), that's a very plausible number.
posted by spiderwire at 11:16 AM on June 1, 2008

What? You don't have to use AC to transport the juice, you know (sexy interior shot for the power geeks).
AC or DC, the line still has a max. capacity. Of course the NYC lines "melting" was hyperbole as in real life protective circuits would trip if that amount of power were flowing through them.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:16 AM on June 1, 2008

Space based solar energy. The advantages being 24 hour solar radiation. Then there's harvesting the wind in the jet stream, calculated to be over 300 miles an hour in places. My personal favorite of course.
posted by Brian B. at 11:32 AM on June 1, 2008

Brian B. has obviously never played Sim City.
posted by odinsdream at 11:41 AM on June 1, 2008

Killick writes "Ok, I'll call bullshit. 500 trucks at 30'x8'x10' per truck is 1.2 million cubic feet of hamburger helper. "

A) those trucks aren't always going to be full.

B) packaging, both the individual boxes and the boxes they are in, plus the pallets the boxes are on take up a bit of the volume.

C) trucks are never filled right to the roof, you need space to get a pallet lifted up off the floor with a jack out of the truck and there is a certain amount of space taken up by the door header that takes away from the overall height.

D) the packages are going to have a little dead air space at the top.

E) marketing types probably came up with this figure, who the heck knows what they mean by "truck". Could be anything from 20' container thru a 24' van body or standard 28' semi trailer up to a 53' semi. Probably smaller rather than larger.
posted by Mitheral at 11:44 AM on June 1, 2008

God, imagine the energy savings if all wasteful packaging were eliminated.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:55 AM on June 1, 2008

DU: I don't want to be one of Those Guys, but in the UK, transit exists. And distances are all smaller.

Mitheral touches on this. The _reason_ for these differences was the high cost of transportation when the UK urbanized. Now that transportation will start costing us again, you will see the market adapt in North America to create more density / more transit. We're already seeing it to some extent. Are any US cities experiencing a downtown condo boom like Vancouver [nyt] or Toronto? although that's being caused by housing bubble prices as much as it is fuel costs.
posted by Popular Ethics at 12:07 PM on June 1, 2008

HuronBob writes "heh...for who?"

Ouch! I think you've just discovered a loophole for getting around the "no negative favorites" feature in Metafilter's rating system...

But, your opinion noted, I still think my offhand comments on Digg stand up to critical examination better than Pummer's editorial on MarketWatch, the relative quality of those two audiences notwithstanding.

Mitheral writes "Be interesting to see if a) the ex-urban areas see a decline like small towns have seen in the last few decades and b) whether small towns have a resurgence under a more steady state economy."

There's nothing (except occasionally zoning laws) which would make it impossible for ex-urban areas to begin to function like small towns, with most needs met internally. People would just have less convenient access to local farms and more convenient access to a local city. But that's just what *could* happen; if there's an economic decline which leads to violence and underfunded schooling which leads to more flight which leads to more decline, then what "could" happen has little to do with what will happen.

We're not going to get to a steady-state economy soon (if ever), and in the meantime any economic resurgence still isn't going to look like the small town America in our memories (much less the one in our fantasies). Factories haven't been moved overseas just because transportation has become much cheaper. American factories depend on cheap transportation of their inputs and their products too. What hurt the "one factory town" in America was that corporations discovered the sweet spot overseas between "countries that are so industrialized that everyone can demand a high wage" and "countries that aren't stable and industrialized enough to build a productive factory in". By the time development starts to push a country into the former category, there's always been someplace new climbing out of the latter. Moving the cheap production from Japan to Taiwan to Malaysia, etc. probably can't go on forever, but it won't end until we run out of countries or until the dollar crashes. Running out of cheap oil just hurts everybody who wants to ship goods, American producers included.
posted by roystgnr at 12:45 PM on June 1, 2008

Popular Ethics writes Are any US cities experiencing a downtown condo boom like Vancouver [nyt] or Toronto?

Well, I do see a condo boom right outside. That might just be a coincidence. ;-)
posted by roystgnr at 12:50 PM on June 1, 2008

spiderwire, the Fortune article said the change would "eliminate 500 trucks from the road," not cut down on the number of deliveries. As Mitheral said, marketing types probably came up with this figure. And then they fed it to a credulous and innumerate reporter, who has passed it on to us without asking the kinds of questions she should have: What do you mean? What kind of truck? How did you arrive at that figure?

It would be nice to think that WalMart has our best interests in mind, and that there was no attempt to mislead in their claims. I guess I'm jaded. I purposely picked a smaller truck than the one I imagined, and limited the deliveries to one a week -- in other words I lowballed the estimate, and to me their claim still does not seem even remotely plausible.

Making decisions about energy is complicated. Is it better in terms of overall energy use and carbon footprint to trade your car for a more efficient one? This kind of decision requires scrutiny of the assumptions you are making, and a willingness to make reasonable estimates. And they are fundamentally quantitative decisions.

It may or may not be true that "the low-hanging fruit for the environment are not in the household." I don't know. But you can bet your ass that corporations are going to be trying to greenwash what they do in the next few decades, and a little skepticism and a 4-function calculator are pretty useful sensemaking tools.
posted by Killick at 12:54 PM on June 1, 2008

His US car may get 35 miles per US gallon, but it gets a much more impressive-sounding 42 miles per imperial gallon. Or, just to keep things confusing, you could say that his UK car got 42 miles per US gallon, or 5.65 liters per 100km.

Thanks for the clarification - I had wondered if they were the same. (I knew pints were bigger in the UK.)

But still - 42 miles/US gallon is better than 35, by quite a bit. Why don't Americans want to save money? He did point out that his US car would go much faster and had more horsepower, but since he doesn't do illegal drag racing, he really didn't care - the UK model would easily drive the speed limits in the US, and still get 7 more miles to the gallon.
posted by jb at 1:29 PM on June 1, 2008

Reason 3. Wither the Middle East's clout
This region that's contributed little to modern civilization exercises inordinate sway over the world because of its one significant contribution -- crude extraction.
</strong

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham
posted by yoyo_nyc at 1:40 PM on June 1, 2008

As I see it, electricity generation isn't an issue - contrary to "be realistic" wisdom, we have as much available as we can ever want, we just don't like paying for it. Won't even consider paying for it. Available options because they're massively expensive to scale easily. Too expensive, that is, compared to cheap oil and $1/gal gas.
But that world is changing.

NYC has plenty of options for massive electricity generation nearby. But NYC isn't really in need - NYC probably consumes less oil per capita than anywhere in the USA. NYC will likely weather the storm as well as any, and better than most.
posted by -harlequin- at 2:40 PM on June 1, 2008

The really brilliant thing about Western capitalism and globalization is that, so long as there's oil in the ground and the bulk of the true cost can be externalized, somebody's going to buy it and burn it. Consumption won't change, the market will just shift towards richer buyers. Average Joe not being able to afford a gallon is just another sign of the rich getting richer, but you can bet that the have's won't be the ones sucking the exhaust pipe. The true cost of oil production will still be externalized on to the poor and worldwide consumption will continue to burn it at the same rates, but maybe with diminished growth. In any event, Average Joe American just won't be the recipient of the utility of that burn any more.

That is to say, when high price is the result of high demand, then, duh, somebody's buying it at that price. The author doesn't paint a very clear picture of how the current situation could possibly lead to low demand, other than some vague science-will-save-us hand waving. Sure, we might be saved by science ex machina, or we might actually have to make real sacrifice and make really hard decisions about the realities of our economic system.
posted by Skwirl at 2:43 PM on June 1, 2008

Papa Bell: I understand power transission just fine. I just live in Los Angeles and don't give a flying fig how New York powers itself. We could use the sun. New York can build some nuclear plants or something.

yeah, well, how about California, with its 20% of GDP then?

My point is that the "giant Mojave solar collector" is often bandied about as the magic energy bullet that would solve all of our problems. And it would be just that -- magic.

Cool Papa Bell states that renewables are pointless because they do not solve one element of the problem

Please point me to where I said that renewables are pointless, jackass. I said that one particular, famous idea was pointless, not all of them.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:17 PM on June 1, 2008

The only semi-viable serious way to supplement our energy needs in the short and mid-term future is more drilling for oil off our shores, and more nuclear. Solar, wind, and hydro = drops in a very big bucket. Moreover, the bucket needs to be getting bigger (as well as more efficient). A nation of 400 million is going to use more than one of 300.
posted by BrooklynCouch at 4:26 PM on June 1, 2008

(oh, any maybe cleaner coal, too).
posted by BrooklynCouch at 4:27 PM on June 1, 2008

What is a renewable? I hope you don't mean ethanol, which increases the price of food, and is starting to cause little problems here in the US, and food-riot-scale problems in the developing world.
posted by BrooklynCouch at 4:40 PM on June 1, 2008

Right now it's not about our energy needs, just about our transportation needs. The only place where you'll see new oil power plants being constructed will be in SimCity games and historical documentaries, but coal alone would be enough to take up the slack. In the short and mid-term our biggest problems are going to be "how fast can we get mass transit and pluggable hybrids" for our commutes and "how cheap can we make synthetic fuels" for our trucks.

Of course, in the long run, even the coal and uranium are limited. In the 22nd century, either cheap fusion will let us live like kings, cheap solar will let us live responsibly, or cheap nothing will let us solve those food-riot problems with long pork.
posted by roystgnr at 5:21 PM on June 1, 2008

The theoretical potential is clear. Algae can be grown in open ponds or sealed in clear tubes, and it can produce far more oil per acre than soybeans, a source of oil for biodiesel. Algae can also clean up waste by processing nitrogen from wastewater and carbon dioxide from power plants. What's more, it can be grown on marginal lands useless for ordinary crops, and it can use water from salt aquifers that is not useful for drinking or agriculture. "Algae have the potential to produce a huge amount of oil," says Kathe Andrews-Cramer, the technical lead researcher for biofuels and bioenergy programs at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM. "We could replace certainly all of our diesel fuel with algal-derived oils, and possibly replace a lot more than that."
posted by Brian B. at 5:22 PM on June 1, 2008

The singular problem with relying on coal, seabed methane, and petroleum for our energy needs is that they all release carbon back into the atmosphere. Burning dinosaurs for energy is going to give us a dinosaur environment.

Calling solar, wind and hydro a "drop in the bucket" is rather false. A Dept. of Energy report calculates wind power alone could deliver 20% of the USA's electricity needs. That's no mere drop in the bucket.

Efficient solar conversion would provide all the electrical needs; indeed, with perfect conversion there'd be 300x more energy available than consumed. Even with inefficient 10% conversion, only 1% of the land mass would be required to provide all the US's electricity needs. Again, that's no mere drop in the bucket.

Hydro, same deal. There's virtually unlimited energy available through tidal wave action.

Geothermal, too, can provide a wholloping amount of energy. Not only the ordinary sort of geothermal, using shallow drilling; but deep drilling that taps the mantle heat.

Additionally and importantly, we can go a helluva long way toward becoming much, much more efficient in our use of energy. Getting rid of wall warts and standby mode on electronics alone would result in a huge energy savings. There's a helluva lot that can be done.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:35 PM on June 1, 2008

Coal accounts for up to 25% of mercury levels in the air you're breathing.

Coal-fired power is a very, very poor idea.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:38 PM on June 1, 2008

FFF, how you're right, but I don't think it will happen in the next 25 years.
posted by BrooklynCouch at 5:38 PM on June 1, 2008

Don't think what will happen?
posted by five fresh fish at 6:02 PM on June 1, 2008

I doubt that solar or wind will ramp up to be more than a tiny source of energy for the US.
posted by BrooklynCouch at 6:15 PM on June 1, 2008

(hope, not "how")
posted by BrooklynCouch at 6:19 PM on June 1, 2008

only 1% of the land mass would be required to provide all the US's electricity needs. Again, that's no mere drop in the bucket.

That little word "only" seems out of place here: 1% of the land area of the United States is roughly twice as much of the land as is presently covered with highways.
posted by sfenders at 6:27 PM on June 1, 2008

Sunlight in the USA has an energy density of 2.09 to 5.96 kWh/m²/day. The average home consumes about 24kW/day; the average home's roof, then, can provide for all its electrical needs — and that's before implementing power conserving measures like LED lighting, eliminating wall warts, using EnergyStar appliances, and eliminating standby mode.

Recent solar advances have attained >40% efficiency. This will surely be commoditized within years, not decades. Solar can be expected to become a significant player in the energy game.

As an aside for all, 66% inefficient grid. And, sweet mercury-damaged jesus baby, look at the amount of coal that's being burned! That shit, and a lot more heavy metals (cadmium, lead, etc) are going right into your children, folks.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:42 PM on June 1, 2008

Regarding 1% solar:

Residential and commercial rooftop space in the U.S. could accommodate up to 710,000 MW of solar electric power (if all rooftops were fully utilized, taking into account proper orientation of buildings, shading from trees, HVAC equipment, and other solar access factors). For comparison, total electricity-generating capacity in the U.S.
today is about 950,000 MW.

So, once again, efficient solar appears to be a very viable option.

If there's a limiting factor, it's in the manufacturing of solar cells. AFAIK doing so is itself an energy-intensive process that consumes vast amounts of fresh water and creates some fairly serious waste problems.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:49 PM on June 1, 2008

And, finally, just so ya's all know, I'm no expert on all this. All I've been doing is hitting Google for some basic information. I can not fathom why you nay-sayers are not capable of doing the same. The DOE and a number of research institutes have made a wealth of information available to you. It's pretty clear they're certain alternative energy sources are a viable solution.

At the very least, give us some web links to back up your claims.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:51 PM on June 1, 2008

Once in a while, I like to check out solarbuzz to see how the solar power industry is doing. It's such an appealing idea getting electric power from sunlight, I'm always hopeful that some day it will live up to all the promises. At present, their price indices indicate that it costs about twice as much as the average US retail price of electricity for power from the solar "industrial system" operating in a sunny climate, and about 8 times as much for a home rooftop system in a cloudy northern climate. Until either electricity prices go way up, or photovoltaics prices go way down, it is not likely to amount to more than "a drop in the bucket." I'm sure at least one of those things will happen eventually, but it's not quite there yet, except perhaps in Hawaii where they pay near $0.30/kWh.

For most of the world, I suspect that money for solar electric power is still more appropriately spent on research rather than installation at this point. I haven't been keeping track of all those new thin-film production efforts, perhaps one of them will change everything. For now it seems like there are many more cost-effective things to do for immediate results.
posted by sfenders at 7:50 PM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

As I see it, electricity generation isn't an issue - contrary to "be realistic" wisdom,

Nonsense. In 2006 summer generation capacity was ~906 GW. Peak demand was ~789 GW. Looking at this image again, you can see that petroleum energy use (very little of which is used for electricity) is on an order of magnitude comparable to electrical energy use. So, if you want to reduce petroleum usage by substituting electricity, you need a lot more than the 100 GW of spare capacity.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:31 PM on June 1, 2008

Please point me to where I said that renewables are pointless, jackass. I said that one particular, famous idea was pointless, not all of them.

Apologies to CPB for mis-characterizing your comment. I tarred you with the brush I try to reserve for people who oppose renewables because they won't solve all 100% of the problem.

FFF, the barrier to solar is, I think, in the distributed capital requirements. Our society is set up to fund large concentrated projects with a single owner (like a coal power station) where the single owners can be vocal advocates of their agendas. Roof top solar competes with power stations, so is opposed by them, is not currently price competitive (although maybe in a few years...) with coal generation. This means convincing people to pay for more than they currently have to, and just doesn't work.
If higher oil prices drive sufficient demand for electricity to raise its price to make solar competitive, then maybe, but I suspect there will be more mercury spewing coal plants first.
In some ways the solar guys shoot themselves in the foot by promising $1 per watt some time soon (see Nanosolar for example).
Where I live there were subsidies to install solar PV to bring it down to about $3 per watt, which is not quite economical at today's prices. So why do it if a system a third of the price is around the corner?
posted by bystander at 8:35 PM on June 1, 2008

As an aside for all, 66% inefficient grid.

Thermodynamic efficiency, my man. It could be better but it's not as bad as it sounds, or it is a bad, but nature flat-out requires a lot of that inefficiency. A prime mover (gas or steam turbine) operating at 1300 Kelvin (overly high estimate for either) at room temperature ambient can transform as a hard scientific limit 77% of the heat energy in to motive power out. You haven't even made any electricity yet and you're already 23% inefficient, if your turbine was perfect, which it isn't. Then you need to spin the generator, which loses a percent. Now you need another few percent to run all the machinery in the plant. The plant I was at spent about half a percent of the generator output just to run the biggest load, the pump that fed natural gas to the turbine.

In practice, you won't even be starting with anything near that 77% efficiency. Combined cycle plants, which run a gas turbine and then run a steam turbine with the waste heat, are at ~60% overall efficiency.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 9:21 PM on June 1, 2008

I, for one, will welcome our moonshining overlords.
posted by bartleby at 7:13 AM on June 2, 2008

Recent solar advances have attained >40% efficiency. This will surely be commoditized within years, not decades. Solar can be expected to become a significant player in the energy game.

As an aside for all, 66% inefficient grid. And, sweet mercury-damaged jesus baby, look at the amount of coal that's being burned! That shit, and a lot more heavy metals (cadmium, lead, etc) are going right into your children, folks.

TheOnlyCoolTim, et al., I think the point fff was making is that solar power isn't grid-dependent, so if that 66% stat is correct (I've heard lower, but -- arguendo), solar has the instant advantage of "triple" efficiency when it's generated on-site. In other words, it's potentially decentralized, which makes for lower transmission costs, less loss of overall power in transmission, as well as a more resilient and less costly-to-maintain energy transmission infrastructure. (Long-distance lines getting knocked over in storms, worries about terrorist attacks on the grid, the useless NE power grid that blows out all the time and causes mass blackouts, etc.)

Solar power has a pretty unique advantage in that you can generate the power close to where it's needed, say in dense urban areas. There's also a lot to be said for taking rural areas off-grid rather than running lines out to the middle of nowhere that only serve a few residents (I speak from personal experience here). There's also a lot to be said about having to transport coal and other hydrocarbon-based fuels too the plants and about having to site them out in the middle of nowhere (where they're inefficient to service) because of concerns about particulate emissions, etc.

Everyone seems to be obsessed with teh massive solar farm type solutions, but I've never understood that. Siting is pretty important for wind power or hydro power (I mean, obviously), and coal and nuclear plants are large by nature, but neither's necessarily the case for solar, so why do it? I've always felt that a big part of the reason for these "a gajillion-acre solar superpanel!" projects was (a) our weird desire to have impressive-looking, Manhattan Project / Apollo Program / Hoover Dam style public works projects, or (b) a general assumption that macro-scale electricity generation has to come from "power plants." In the case of solar panels, those are arguably some very flawed assumptions.

It'd be more efficient to take all of those panels and put them on rooftops near the city center; it might be more logistically complicated, but you also wouldn't have to drive out to the middle of the desert to perform maintenance, and you also wouldn't have to send the power you generated across a hundred miles of cable. It'd be right there where you needed it most. Rooftop eminent domain FTW! This is, in any event, a factor that should play more significantly that it does.


Also, returning to my earlier point: we must guard against Godzilla attacks, people. Godzilla is attracted by nuclear energy and he destroys power lines. Godzilla does not care about solar panels because he is not a hippie. Solar power is a crucial strategic component of any proactive Godzilla defense plan.
posted by spiderwire at 10:01 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

solar power isn't grid-dependent

Ah, different meanings of "grid."

In the sense that the centralized plants are part of the power grid, the grid has that huge inefficiency number.

You're using "grid" to refer to the transmission and distribution grid, which by the chart linked only loses 3%. There's more inefficiency in the DC->AC inverter that you need to hook up your solar panels to your house wiring, and there'd still be some inefficiency even if we just had to shift DC voltages and distribute power that way, which isn't something houses are generally set up for these days. (Though I think centralized home DC power wiring/supply in addition to AC and an attempt at greater standardization of equipment voltages might be a place to get more efficiency compared to having 20 little AC->DC converters.)

Of course, the loss in an inverter is in a sense less important because it's only solar rather than fossil power that's being lost, but a 66% gain is definitely the wrong number to use.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 10:31 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Blah, I mean, the 3x gain you calculated from 66%.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 10:32 AM on June 2, 2008

I keep having these postscripts like an idiot, but I meant to note that the local generation with less loss is indeed a big advantage of solar, just that it's not as overwhelmingly enormous as you think.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 10:40 AM on June 2, 2008

There's no big advantage to centralizing power plants using solar-electric panels (although being able to turn a lot of panels with a few small sun-tracking motors is nice), but for solar-thermal systems (which is what comes to mind when I think "solar power plant"), home use is impractical and economies of scale are important.

Solar-thermal systems may be obsoleted by cheaper more efficient solar-panel materials science breakthroughs eventually, but for now they make some economic sense. And most importantly, the array of mirrors which you focus on a tower full of molten salt can, in an emergency, be redirected to aim at Godzilla.
posted by roystgnr at 10:56 AM on June 2, 2008

I would imagine the engineering could be done such that space-based solar also has the potential for anti-monster use.

We must close the monster gap.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:15 AM on June 2, 2008

Blah, I mean, the 3x gain you calculated from 66%.

Yeah. Like I said, I've only heard lower -- that number seemed way high for me, but I didn't want to muddy up the argument. The transmission loss is situational, but I've personally never heard any estimate higher than ~30% loss, and I've also heard it's getting better in some places.

Nevertheless, transmission efficiency is an advantage of local power generation (and again, there's more to it than just raw numbers, e.g. resilience against terrorist monster attack) that's worth taking into account.
posted by spiderwire at 11:36 AM on June 2, 2008

World's biggest solar farm at centre of Portugal's ambitious energy plan
· Clean-tech revolution in country without oil or gas
· Project also includes wave and wind power
posted by adamvasco at 5:58 AM on June 6, 2008

At the very time we need public transit most, its funding is being cut across the country. This is crazy. As gas prices rise, transit should become a central priority in infrastructure spending.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:14 PM on June 6, 2008

I thought the advantage in large scale solar plants was reduced energy expenditure in terms of installation costs. Not having to shore up the roof structure for added weight, roll out a truck with an installation expert, etc...
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:12 PM on June 6, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]