Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on May 22, 2013
Bound by the Chains of Oil: The Need for Energy Innovation
We all know that when the price of oil goes up Americans are negatively affected. High oil prices increase our gasoline expenditures, constricting household budgets, and cause the price of everything that is transported or produced using oil (which is basically everything) to escalate. Nationally, our trade deficit rises and often a recession is close at hand.
But what happens on the rare occasion when oil prices go down (albeit ever so slightly)? Do people continue their penny-pinching ways from the days of higher gas prices? Not really — a University of Michigan study shows that in April the average MPG of new vehicles sold actually fell from the previous month, likely due to lower gas prices. So this small drop in prices may be emboldening some consumers to buy less efficient vehicles, putting them at risk of a more restrained budget (or less driving) when gas prices inevitably go back up.
So, when gas prices go up, we all suffer and our economy lags. When gas prices go down, we position ourselves to be more at risk of rising gas prices in the future. Seems like a lose-lose situation. The chains that bind us just get heavier.
What we really need are more choices to break the iron-clad grip that oil prices have on our lives and our economy. We shouldn’t have to rely only on oil to power our transportation. Doing so gives oil a monopoly over transportation, perhaps explaining why it costs so much and why we are largely helpless to do anything about it.
The solution to break oil’s iron grip on our lives requires giving people more choice. For example, some people need to drive gas-guzzling, heavy-duty trucks for work, others just like driving those kinds of vehicles. Either way, when gas prices rise, these drivers have to spend significantly more money just to try to fill up their tanks. However, if they had a flex-fuel enabled engine that could run on ethanol, or possibly even methanol, they could chose to fill their tanks using fuels that, unlike gasoline, aren’t so closely linked to oil prices. If they had hybrid plug-in electric technology they could choose to “plug-in” more often and fuel up less.
These fuels would then be competing against each other for your transportation dollar. And if centuries of economic theory and real-world application are any indication of what may ensue in a competitive, open market, fuel prices will inevitably decrease.
9 Comments on "Bound by the Chains of Oil: The Need for Energy Innovation"
Plantagenet on Wed, 22nd May 2013 11:00 pm
Flex fuel pickup trucks are on the way! Should be available nationwide by next year.
Ham on Wed, 22nd May 2013 11:15 pm
Really? And what would that be a combination of? ……Boondoggle and gas?
The real solution is to give up car dependency and not use the polluting stuff as if there is no tomorrow, which there will be, if we carry on using the amount of fossil fuels at the current rates of consumption.
Beery on Thu, 23rd May 2013 1:08 am
The folks at ‘Fuel Freedom’ can carry on bickering over what unsustainable fuels they want to use. Meanwhile, I’m just going to keep riding my bicycle everywhere. I don’t need any of their fossil fuel garbage, no matter whether it’s coal, oil, ethanol, methanol, natural gas or methane extracted from cows’ anuses. It’s all unsustainable junk fuel.
BillT on Thu, 23rd May 2013 1:22 am
We need Conservation, not Innovation.
We need few vehicles on the road, not just different ones.
We need real articles that discuss the dilemma, not more advertising by the techie dreamers.
Fuel freedom comes when you don’t need ANY fuels except your own muscle power.
Airwicky on Thu, 23rd May 2013 1:36 am
Sadly we will use up every drop of whichever fuel possible. The only way we will go back to mostly muscle power is when there’s no other choice. The human race as a whole are the equivilent to adolensence teenagers – spoiled when they taste laziness
DC on Thu, 23rd May 2013 3:14 am
Funny, this sounds like the sort of article Kenz would write. Clearly these guys value the illusion of choice and wish for a slightly different set of toxic, liquid fuels in order to keep there mobile-trash bins, well..mobile.
We do not need ‘energy innovation’, what we really need to do is stabilize, then reduce energy use in absolute terms.
BillT on Thu, 23rd May 2013 1:10 pm
Airwicky, you are corect that we have a tendency to ‘laziness’. After all, we had many thousands of years of hunter-gatherer lifestyle to over come. Then it only took a few hours per day, max, to ‘make a living. Food was grown locally and shelter was simple. Clothing was furs left over from dinner. Weapons lay on the ground waiting to be chipped and tied into mastodon killers. When food got scarce, you walked to another valley.
It was farming, quickly followed by banking that destroyed all that ‘laziness’. Now we barely have time to reproduce and certainly not much leisure to enjoy sex for pleasure as it was meant to be.
Imagine. Get up, eat some left over mastodon, some berries on the nearby bush, and some clear clean cool water from the stream nearby and then do what ever you want until you get hungry again. Maybe on a busy day, you go out with the boys on a hunting trip to bring home the bacon for another few days of feasting and lazy sex with your women. BRRRIING! Wake up! Time to go to the office! Grab a cup of coffee and fight traffic for an hour, have the boss look at his watch as you walk in a minute late, sit in front of a glowing piece of plastic, eat some cardboard food at the local greasy spoon, go back for more sitting, then drive back through the traffic, and eat another fast food meal, mow the lawn, fix the leaking sink and kiss your strange kids good night, trying to remember their names, and fall into bed. Rinse and repeat for 50 years.
Now, which life would you choose? The modern one or the lazy one? ^_^
Kenz300 on Thu, 23rd May 2013 6:58 pm
It is time to diversify our transportation fuels and end the oil monopoly on transportation fuels.
Electric, biofuel, hybrid, CNG, LNG and hydrogen fueled vehicles are the future.
Robert Hirsch – The Impending World Oil Shortage: Learning from the Past – YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIWg6CyVKk0
BillT on Fri, 24th May 2013 12:06 pm
Dream on Kenz300…