CNN Gas gripes, Katrina & More About Oil
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 08.29.05
Following MSNBC's lead (we wrote about it in a previous post titled: "The Effect Of High Oil Prices On People", check it out for more context) CNN has created a page where people can share their experience on how the rising price of oil has affected them. As Grist points out, there is inspiring stuff in there. People describe how they dropped the SUV, started carpooling, removed extra-weight fom their vehicle or bought a hybrid. One person cut back on food, but at least it was soft-drinks so it's a healthy choice. Seeing these reactions from average people (instead of war chants and lynching oil company executives) shows that people are willing to change, and they in fact know what to change. They just needed the right incentive, which in this case is money.
To put things in perspective, we could say that with the end of the "cheap as dirt" gas prices era, the US is finally joining most of the rest of the world (see gas prices from around the world here). Some people in the media will claim that these high prices are only temporary and that if only we could drill more wildlife refuges and invade more countries, things would go back to "normal". We do not subscribe to that theory and believe that peak oil (if you are not familiar with the concept, check out this primer) is real and unavoidable, and that desperate measures (destroying more pristine wildlife, waging more wars) to delay it are futile in the end. The best way to deal with it is to adapt and to change, not to bury our collective heads in the sand and keep doing business as usual. Even if we found lots of oil today, without some deep changes in the way we do things, we would only be pushing back the decline in oil production (which would mean that supply would become inferior to the ever-growing demand) a few years and we would be hit as hard then as if nothing had happened. It's the change and adaptation part that is important, not finding a few more million barrels of oil (unless you are an oil executive, maybe - but lets not count on them to save us when things go bad).
To bring back this post to more concrete and immediate matters, we want to point that hurricane Katrina will have a big impact on oil prices in the near future (unless, against all expectations, when we wake up tomorrow we see that none of the predictions made about Katrina were correct). Have a look at this map, this Reuters article and visit The Oil Drum for the latest news. You can also monitor oil prices at Bloomberg.
P.S. We write this on Sunday. We hope everyone will be okay in Louisiana tomorrow.
Price is one thing, lack of availability is what gets people's attention for real. Long lines at gas stations is what finally drove people to buy high mileage cars during the last shortage (oil embargo). Once this is widely reported on local TV news people will be selling used high mileage cars for double the blue book value. Its happened before and will happen again.
Um, what is that a picture of? Is that oil rig being constructed or is it falling into the sea? You guys often post ambiguous pictures without any sort of caption. Any way you could start captioning your pics?
Jesse, that oil rig was damaged by one of the previous hurricanes this year (I don't remember which one). The explanation I remember was there was a problem with the ballasts or something.
I posted it to give an idea of the kind of things that could happen in the gulf of mexico and around Louisiana. Sorry if it was not clear.
What we need are cheap, full-spectrum solar cells.
Imagine being able to get most of the 1,000 per square meter that the sun throws down, instead of the measly 100 watts m2 we get now.
Then we'd need to convince the Guvmint to subsidize civilian solar the way it's subsidized oil for the past seven decades...hmmm...
Photovoltaics are presently way too expensive to be practical...not to mention that, as mentioned above, a square meter of PV only powers a light bulb. A 2'x4' panel ran about $70, last I heard, and that doesn't include hooking it up to anything. Solar hot water is great stuff, and i highly recommend it. It's far more sensible to harness sunlight for heat than for electricity.
That's why I said we need cheap full-spectrum solar cells.
Good luck finding panels for cheap anyway. Other nations are seeing the writing on the wall with oil and coal, and are buying up PV cells like they are candy. The other reason is a lack of viable silicon supply for manufacture of PV cells.
Cost is an issue... but arent we talking about the environment here? We keep buring fuel the way we do, and our world as we know it will eventually die.