Ending the reign of oil
The Guardian also ran an editorial a few days ago which pulls together nicely climate change and the end of cheap oil. It reads in part:
The underlying message is that higher oil prices are here to stay … the biggest optimist cannot ignore the fact that the annual average increase in demand for oil was around 1m barrels per day from the 1970s - until 2004, when the average increase shot up to 2.5m barrels a day. According to the International Monetary Fund’s forecasts, total global demand will rise from around 82m barrels a day now to nearly 140m a day by 2030 … the increased demand will presumably be met by much higher prices…
Yet higher prices that curb demand in industrialised nations will wreak havoc in less developed nations, especially non-oil producers in sub-Saharan Africa, where increases in fuel costs affect economies to a greater degree. Juggling demand and price against the role of oil as a cause of global warming … is a huge quandary for the world’s leaders.
Michael O’Leary, the ebullient head of Ryanair, hit one nail on the head when he told those concerned about climate change: “Sell your car and walk.” That advice would have made Mr O’Leary a national villain in the United States, where the right to cheap gas is assumed to be a clause of the constitution. For one reason or another, the reign of oil must come to an end.
There seem to be only two parties in New Zealand who accept that the reign of oil is, inevitably, coming to an end and that we must prepare for that now. All the rest have their heads in the sand…
June 26th, 2005 at 12:33 am
fwog heres the thing, we lazy as well as dumb, its too cold to walk fwog, bad enough we gotta buy a young car, you should hear Pete Hodg taking a wicked pounding fwog, on TV with Simon Dallow, Nick Smith, about carbon discredits fwog, we don’t give the Russians money fwog .. i think we heading for nuclear power real soon dudes best not to worry about nature amphibians you get it on tv you know that attborough movie and stuff
June 26th, 2005 at 7:38 am
Frog, this brings up a very big problem. When I first moved to Austin, I purchased a 400 dollar bike. I figured that I’d bike to school and that’d be the end of it. Instead, I rode it, I believe, once. Then I collapsed from heat exhaustion and dehydration. I had to be taken to the hospital - because I was uninsured, that cost me about 2000 dollars. So that’s about a $2500 bike there. I would have continued to ride it, maybe, but there were two problems - riding a bike is dangerous with all these damn cars running around. And, secondly, bikes are goddamn insecure. Over here in Austin (The home of 6-time tour de france winner Lance Armstrong!) pretty much all you see attached to every bike-rack are bicycle frames, with the front and back wheels, handlebars, and seat removed.
That’s what happened to me - although my vandal only got off with the seat. Granted, I might not be able to stop a pro carjacker, but they’re going to go for easy prey, and I can at least keep out young thugs.
Now, telling you this - I DID move so that I walked to school — when my lease was up. I’m trapped in my lease now, and my job is 40 miles away - and it’s the only job I can get. I’m not going to move to it because it’s contract work and it’s going to be over with in a month, and I don’t know where I’m going to be working.
In order for me to “sell my car and walk” there needs to be some significant changes in the way society is structured before I can even think about it.
First, you can’t lock people into 6 month leases. People don’t have 6 month jobs anymore. It would be great if employers provided their own housing for employees but that would both give the large corporations too much authoritarial control over the life and conduct of the employee as well as price the small employer out of the market.
I literally would not be able to afford to feed myself and pay rent without a car. That’s true for about 90% of America.
We could carpool, take public transportation (where there is public transportation - which is not anywhere near my job.)
But walking is only an option for the super-rich with super-stable jobs, and biking is only safe enough to do in places where the distances are far enough away that biking becomes impractical.
This may be simpler in New Zealand, but if you want to encourage eco-friendly transportation, you have to solve a whole bunch of other problems first - including crime, lease reform, public zoning, and bring back job security.
So if people get resentful when people tell them to “sell the car and walk” it’s because it sounds a hell of a lot like “Let them eat cake.”
June 26th, 2005 at 9:30 am
“Let them eat cake.�
What would you rather have “Let them fry”?
At the end of the day, a society and those in it must take responsibility for their actions. If the governing classes won’t then the walking worried, as you seem to be, need to.
Move to a better place. They exist even within the US.
And the irony of O’Leary, guru of super cheap flights (hence leveraging up demand for flights) didn’t escape me !
June 26th, 2005 at 9:38 am
a) Cheap flights wont last forever, they will cease, and with it NZ’s tourism industry
b) America suburbian society, sustained by vehicular transport, will be totally rogered. That will be the ugliest casualty of oil price escalation, and heck only knows how that mess will be resolved
c) NZ is fairly unlikely to go nuclear, as NZ’s total electricity demand is too small to make effective use of cost effective nuclear generation. Security of supply in a country with 5GW demand with 1GW nukes is too hard to manage.
NZ can survive the coming mess, but we’ve already thrown away 30 years of advance notice, how much longer before we act…?
June 26th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Fastbike:
1) Moving to a better place usually means moving. Moving is expensive. You need at least enough money to pay for rent until you have a job lined up.
For some of us, that’s not an option.
There are some better places in the United States - places where it is concievable to not have a car and get to work. The only one I can think of, offhand, is New York City. And while I would love to work there, I can’t afford to live there.
Again, being eco-friendly is easier when you’re rich - or at least middle class. Then again, everything is easier when you’re rich. I believe the best environmentally friendly policies are those which help establish and maintain a middle class of workers, who, if they wished, could afford to live in New York or a similar situation if they so wished.
I suppose the biggest problem then, is how to get money and get out.
I’m going to start selling off stuff soon. That means I’m going to have to tell my girlfriend that our future together - if she doesn’t feel like moving - looks bleak, and I am not looking forward to that.
If you’re wondering why I’m so hopped up on this - My friend John bought and drove a motorcycle because it was just much more fuel efficient than his truck. It was a motorcycle that eventually killed him. So if my priorities seem a little skewed on this end…
June 26th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
you dudes sure that its uneconomic to do fission or fusion or whatever,
a 10 Gwatt one, big bugger for long time, like you know american companies already buying in to power here ..better we borrow money like bulgaria .. maybe two big 10MW how much would it cost do yo say brian biko we send the ash to australia maybe where the bad snakes are, somewhere else backyard .. jeanette and fwog can forgat iot we diont do torches and horses and bikes and parsnips
June 27th, 2005 at 6:36 am
Fastbike - Brian
I did the moving thing. From Pasadena to NZ… and I had some exceptionally steady work in the USA too. Now I work for a startup. The deal in the USA is that a bicycle and its rider are regarded (in much of the country) as a target… that’s if their existence is acknowledged at all. I gave up pushbikes when I got married and got responsibilities. You find the risks don’t balance that welll anymore.
The best you can do IF you have steady work, is to locate somewhere that minimizes your commute. In Pasadena I was no more than an 10 minute ride to work… and I tried, always, to have an efficient car. I was lucky to have a damned stable job. The USA is going to be in DEEP poo when the excrement finally impacts the rotating ventilation device… and it isn’t even beginning to prepare. NZ has options but it isn’t really beginning to prepare either. Talking the problems to death is not related to preparation.
Brian - I’ve never met a girl who was willing to move out of the country. Particularly an American girl. I wound up marrying a Russian girl instead. Not that they are more willing to move out of the USA, but they are more willing to move out of Russia
Maybe it’s just me. I haven’t regretted the move, but if you’re less than 45 you might consider Oz. Warmer.
I’d not noticed that there was a big drive in the green movement to build nukes. Even a safe nuke (like the ones the US Navy puts in its ships) generates waste that isn’t, and NZ doesn’t have a place to put it any more than anyone else does. Moreover, building a nuke on a fault invites Murphy in for tea… and NZ has plenty of faults.
The economics (except for the waste) are however manageable. The Chinese have been working hard on their prototype pebble bed reactors. They should be cheap enough and Oz is planning to open up the Uranium mining industry now, because demand is growing.
NZ is in the roaring 40’s with a surfeit of wind. It has access to geothermal power. It has enough farm capacity to build biofuel systems. It has ample hydro and a lot of sunshine. There is NO excuse for NZ building nukes.
respectfully
BJ
June 27th, 2005 at 1:21 pm
ah yes: ‘except’ *fwip* out of the model it goes… yay now we don’t have to think about it
I’m not a huge fan of hydro dams but certainly there is no excuse for not relying more on wind and solar. Geothermal also, as we already do.