The Party's Over.

Poststructural Pub
1

News sources are predicting that gas prices for automobiles will reach as high as maybe $3 p/gal this next summer, in California. I’m reading a book about the history of energy/oil consumption. There’s only 50 years worth of oil left in the earth’s reservoirs, and with China’s comsumption of oil just getting started, it’s hard to imagine that 50 years is left…all subject to change depending on factors like this that may not have been considered. There’s no telling where all this is going…I think our better days are numbered, we’ve enjoyed somewhat carelessly for years, now we may have to learn to adjust to the consequences, unless some miracle happens.

SYNOPSIS:

When Mike Bowlin, Chairman of ARCO, said in 1999 that “We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil,” he was voicing a truth that many others in the petroleum industry knew but dared not utter. Over the past few years, evidence has mounted that global oil production is nearing its historic peak.

Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. During the past two centuries, people in industrial nations accustomed themselves to a regime in which more fossil-fuel energy was available each year, and the global population grew quickly to take advantage of this energy windfall. Industrial nations also came to rely on an economic system built on the assumption that growth is normal and necessary, and that it can go on forever.

When oil production peaks, those assumptions will come crashing down.

As we move from a historic interval of energy growth to one of energy decline, we are entering uncharted territory. It takes some effort to adjust one’s mental frame of reference to this new reality.

–SYNOPSIS continued here.

2

I’ve been hearing about this for years. I wonder what kind of world our grandchildren will be left with.

3

I have to take this stuff with a grain of salt. In college in the late seventies, I worked with a professor who developed a computer model that showed that even with conservation, maximum exploration, solar energy, wind energy, etc, the world would run out of oil by the year 2000.

4

Aaaaaaahhhhh,

Lorenzo, ya worry too much! Everyone knows there’s plenty of oil to go around, we just have to convince everyone to share. he he heee eh? :imp: :laughing:

5

Yea, I probably worry too much.

The future, in 50 years, doesn’t look good to me. 50 doesn’t look good to me either. In a few years the US population will be dominated by people in their 50’s (and born in the 50’s), and frankly that age group seems scarey to me…50 ways to leave your lover and everything. And to think I’ll be 50 in a couple years and probably paying $50 each time I fill up the tank, with some other 50 yr. old probably taking my $50 dollar bill (there won’t be anything but $50 bills in circulation anymore), and 50 cars ahead of me to get their fill. And a 50/50% chance things will actually be worse than I’m describing too. The only thing that could be worse, I guess, is if it costs $50.50 to fill up the tank. :smiley:

6

If it makes you feel any better, Lorenzo, it’d cost you probably over 50 Euro to fill your tank in Ireland right now… No-one actually fills their tanks, though, because it’s too expensive, so it’s probably more by now. (Last time anyone I know did was 5 or 6 years ago, and I think it cost about 50 pounds. So it’d definitely be more now).

Welcome to the future.

Deirdre

7

Lorenzo

Did you by any chance just turn 50 - or are you about to? The number seems to have cabalistic meaning for you.

Fifty years? I’ll be dead by then, as will most of the people I know. It is therefore meaningless.

But, FWIW, I doubt that there has been a single generation, other than perhaps our parentsin the brain-dead Eisenhower years, that wasn’t actively expecting an apocalypse of some sort or other (oops - forgot “duck and cover”)

8

Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s just my megalophobia coming out again. Yea I’ll be 50 in a couple years. We were just talking about the world’s oil supply (not Lorenzo’s Oil) only lasting for another 50 years and somehow I began to think in terms of fifties. There must be a word for “fear of fifty.” I’ll be looking for it.

What Fifty Said
Poem by Robert Frost.

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.

Now when I am old my teachers are the young.
What can’t be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I got to school to youth to learn the future.



I see there’s already a book written about it called Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir

And look what customers who bought this book also bought…
How to Save Your Own Life
Sappho’s Leap: A Novel
Dude, Where’s My Country?

…which only increases my phobia of phifty.

9

I just looked it up on the currency exchange. Yikes! $60 USD for a tank of gas? Not even filled?

Live mid-market rates as of 2004.04.06 05:40:57 GMT.
50.00 Euro = 60.0336 USD

(at least it’s not fifty something or other–makes me feel better–but a pity just the same)

10

Pentadecaphobia? (Pure guesswork. But fear of the number 13 is “triskadekaphobia”, so who knows?)

With all your experience with sailcraft, I’d think that the oil crash would hardly concern you. Bolt a mast to the top of the car and tack across town.

Here’s a poem by Billy Collins, in response to the large number of poets bemoaning their fiftieth birthday, (or other ages of various multiples of ten):

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

11

You must then realise ireland has one of the lowest fuel prices in Europe, most visitors think petrol is deadly cheap here. All Europeans think fuel is just about given away in the US, which in comparison it is of course.

prices at the moment are high though with 92.9 cents a litre if you get it on the cheap, I have seen stations looking for 98.9 for the litre of unleaded petrol.

I used to know one old guy who in reply to these discussions always said ‘fuel prices?, they don’t affect me, i always get for 20 euro.’ :roll:

12

That’s not the half of it. You just wouldn’t believe what they charge for petrol. :wink:

13

One that is, by default, NOT oil dependent. I tend to be a dynamist in my thinking. Dependence on oil will go extinct, and (not without growing pains,) humans will change their means of operating things.

14

Look on the bright side. Your whistles require very little oil. (There is a small CO2 emission, but that’s another subject.)

15

Hopefully! But in the meantime, let’s buy more and more SUV’s. And let’s make’em bigger and more gas-guzzling too.
:boggle:

16

The truth is you and I, average Joe Blows, aren’t allowed to find out what the truth its.

To believe any of these studies, there would have to be unrelated groups of scientists, preferably without their own agendas, independently getting verifiable, replicatable results.

I doubt even the government at the highest levels knows the real long-term picture, because there are two many advisors who know their jobs will go extinct long before oil supplies do if they say the wrong thing to the wrong boss.

–James

17

I’m looking forward to the day, frankly. I know we can convert our technology and nothing would make me happier, on the global level, than to stop enriching Arabs. They can grow melons and squash in the sand for all I care.

What I don’t know about though is how the numerous other uses of petroleum products, like plastics, chemicals etc etc will be replaced. Guess they will be mining garbage dumps.

The whole SUV thing has mystified me from day one for the most part. I am a conservative person when it comes to resources, and the idea of flushing gas down the throat of a car to get you from point A to point B everyday is NUTS. I really want a hybrid for taking my kid to gymnastics four times a week. I don’t care how ugly it is and I don’t need a tiger in my tank to prove my manhood.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any stupider, Hummers came on the scene… I guess they are using different engines now, but the first ones were like giant Winnebagos for fuel consumption, I think.

FWIW, I buy “cheap” gas at $2.09 a gallon from a no-name company whose product doesn’t have MTBE (a prerequisite for the Weekender). As you may know, California has to have either MTBE or methanol to satisfy questionable federal regulation for cleaner-burning fuel. I had to hold my nose and buy Union 76 for the longest time because they were the only refiner not to use the stuff (which penetrates many tank barriers and has polluted many underground aquifers). Ironically, they had some of the worst polluting refineries all the while. They charge about 2.19 now for reg.

Here in Calaforny, some folks actually do use their 4wd for going to the snow, but its a fraction. Somehow, its like a reflection of personal obesity, I swear..

I won’t miss the fumes, I won’t miss the oil companies.

To me, the least understood CONTEXT of looking at gas prices in California is that they are a tremendous source of tax revenue to the state. The state has all these stringent emission and registration laws for cars, but happily take the sales and specific taxes on gas, and the more we pump, the more they get. You can see how two-faced it is. Part of our state’s fiscal crisis was the collapse of the dot.com thing. When people stopped driving to work, the tax revenues plummeted. I would imagine that now that we are in “recovery” the oil companies know they can charge more, in addition to all their other “reasons.”

18

If rising gas prices in the US caused people to purchase and drive smaller, more efficiant cars, I’m all for it. In reality, it won’t as too many people here have enough disposable income to afford a fourty to fifty dollar fill up.
I own a great Nissan Sentra SE, which takes me to and from work for about a tank a week, maybe more with the snow tires off. Rising gas prices don’t hurt me.

19

There will be a significant amount of oil left 50 years from now. We’re still using it because - much as we grumble about the price - we’re effectively, after inflation, paying about as much per gallon as we did in the mid-1960s.

I agree that SUVs, and similar gas hogs, make very little sense for most folks. My commute car is a Ford Escort wagon - over 30 mpg on the highway - but for my next car I’m seriously interested in a hybrid. But that’s more personal philosophy than anything else. I’d feel far happier if our economy - the world’s economy - was much less dependent on imported raw materials.

But even if gas prices were to double, in real dollars, there will still be a lot of folks clinging to their gas hogs. Once it rises - in real terms, not in taxes applied after refining - to 3x or more the current world price I expect you’re going to see some real conservation measures take root. But even now, over half the price of gas in the US is taxes. And the percentage in the rest of the world is far higher. In real terms, gas is still almost dirt cheap.

I expect that overall consumption will start falling long before we’re out of oil, but only because the price will have risen to the point that other fuels become cost-competitive. And I expect the plastics and synthetics industry will be as hard-hit as SUV owners. But although high prices will keep marginal oil wells in operation, those same prices will steer any current oil-dependent that can do so away from using the stuff.

Currently, we - the world economy - are treating oil with all the careful conservation measures (please note sarcasm) that Los Angeles, Los Vegas, and Phoenix use for water.

20

Nice poem there Aaron. I like that. You’re right, no oil wouldn’t really effect me. I’ve lived half my life w/o it anyway, and I’d kind of like to go back. I see myself living on the river or a lake someday, maybe buy one of those podoscaphs for calm days. :smiley:

Weekenders, “…grow melons and squash in the sand for all I care.” :laughing: Why don’t you make the kids walk instead of taking them to gymnastics four times a week? Then they won’t need gymnastics to stay in shape.

“One drop of ‘gasolina’ can push a ton of lead.”

We’ve really done a good job at pillaging the earth of it’s resources. I think nature is stronger than mankind though. When things get out of balance, it has a way of dumping revenge back on us. We’re on the verge of the 11,000 year ice age cycle. One effect from the temperatures rising is that the weather systems off the coast produce more moisture, and in the winters to come, it may not stop snowing for…let’s say 50 years in a row. We see things in short terms. Nature thinks in terms of thousands and millions.

I agree with the small car-seldom use idea, and the hybrids.