[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', 'I')n terms of oil, or ethanol, or anything being a net energy looser, that's true, but kinda useless in any context other than the second law of thermodynamics/entropy since every energy stream we use is subject to this.

[yesplease]

The thing is, everything is renewable or non-renewable depending on the time scale and circumstances, so for the sake of argument we should probably define renewable.

For farm machinery, the simplest way to fuel diesel equipment is by retrofitting them to use plant oil well and planting a small amount of oil based crops. Pimentel is correct about the scale of our use, but that doesn't mean appropriate cellulosic ethanol production isn't great if it gets off the ground, just that we're using up oil as fast as possible.

Why are we using oil so inefficiently? IMO, probably because we are at a unique time in our technological development. On one hand, we can harness quite a few different sources of energy, but on the other, the small groups who control access to these resources have a vested interest in keeping us on their specific resource for as long as possible, at as high a cost as possible.

We only need a tenth to fifteenth of what we use currently for personal transportation, with similar benefits. If we go completely spartan, a few hundredth of current consumption. Wrt what Pimentel said, if current consumption kept up, and if we could only produce half the energy we use, then we could barely keep up with current transportation fuel demand assuming very optimistic projections for ethanol production. But that's fairly unreasonable to assume since our current levels of consumption of petroleum are designed to burn through the stuff as fast as possible. If the bulk of the population were to end up with fancy tandem two seaters powered by whatever, we would only need a tenth of the optimistic ethanol scenario, and if were to go super spartan, we would only need a hundredth or less of it.

So yes, even cellulosic ethanol couldn't provide for current use, but that's a bit silly to put forth since current use is only designed to waste large amounts of crude and generate correspondingly large profit streams. If anything is telling it's this, I can buy a residence built for one, a pair of pants built for one, a backpack for one, etc... But I can't buy a car built for one. Why? Because that's just how demand side management is with autos/oil. Something like that would be as dangerous to profitability as the CA ZEV mandate was. Inelasticity is a two way street, just like a quadrupling or more in oil/gas price can come from a few percentage points of change in supply/demand, the same can happen the other way.

[Aaron]

I told you we were in trouble.

The painful part is that we pretty much deserve the consequences of this kind of pseudo-thinking.

The fault dear Brutus...

[AirlinePilot]

yesplease,

Your caught in that really ugly trap of denial. Take your time. You'll get it. You rationally do not understand what all this means. There will be no "spartan use" no magical bullet.

Just an initial slow decline followed by the cliff and all we are doing is spending all of our resources to maintain the status quo. You really need to think through what "using less" means from a global standpoint, not just your little microcosm.

All the cornucopian fantasy's you can imagine are already too late to save us.

[yesplease]

What cornucopian fantasies?

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', 'I')f anything is telling it's this, I can buy a residence built for one, a pair of pants built for one, a backpack for one, etc... But I can't buy a car built for one.

[yesplease]

The irony of motorcycles is they are as inefficient as passenger vehicles. They don't drop as low, but they're essentially equivalent to different 2-5 passenger vehicles in terms of average mileage.

I think we're going to engineer ourselves out of the problem insofar as we have engineered ourselves into to it. By that I mean right now the average passenger vehicle is a ~5000lb barge that transports one person but only gets two to three times the mileage a fully load semi gets transporting tens of thousands of pounds of cargo. If average passenger vehicle mileage were to go any lower it would be too obvious to too many people that these vehicles were deliberately designed to be inefficient. Can auto makers design more efficient vehicles? Sure. Will they? It may be, who knows. What I would wager is that automakers will increase efficiency past a certain price point in step with oil decline in order to keep as many people on board and using their product as possible, in order to make as much money as possible. Is this point $3/gal? Probably not. It's probably much higher, around what many European countries pay with taxes.

[yesplease]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'o')ther fuel sources?' what other fuel sources. You drive to work with crude oil. Your food is trucked with crude oil? It is fertilized with crude oil. Your toys, your plastic, your pharmaceuticals are made with crude oil. THERE ARE NO OTHER FUEL SOURCES.

[dub_scratch]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', '
')I think we're going to engineer ourselves out of the problem insofar as we have engineered ourselves into to it. By that I mean right now the average passenger vehicle is a ~5000lb barge that transports one person but only gets two to three times the mileage a fully load semi gets transporting tens of thousands of pounds of cargo. If average passenger vehicle mileage were to go any lower it would be too obvious to too many people that these vehicles were deliberately designed to be inefficient. Can auto makers design more efficient vehicles? Sure. Will they? It may be, who knows. What I would wager is that automakers will increase efficiency past a certain price point in step with oil decline in order to keep as many people on board and using their product as possible, in order to make as much money as possible.

[yesplease]

Since the average vehicle in the states, including all those not covered by cafe but used for personal transportation, get something like 19mpg, which equates to about 15mpg real world, there's plenty of room to go up. Driving style extremes can account for a ~100% difference in fuel economy, and by that I mean an efficient driver may get twice the mileage an inefficient driver gets in the exact same vehicle. There are still plenty of compact cars that can get ~40-100mpg depending on driving style/conditions and owner handiness that aren't used as much if at all. I see 'em going to the j-yards en mass, although I've noticed recently that the number of trucks/SUVs there has increased.

In short, given the number of fairly fuel efficient cars left over from the 80s/early 90s, the latitude in fuel economy afforded by driving style, and the potential to migrate to other forms of transportation, manufacturers don't need to start making significantly more efficient vehicles in order for a drop in consumption to occur, yet... There are plenty of other mechanisms for reducing oil consumption that have only been minimally exploited by the populace so far. In the mean time, oil profits will sore, and everyone who is in on the action will wind up much wealthier.

[dub_scratch]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', 'S')ince the average vehicle in the states, including all those not covered by cafe but used for personal transportation, get something like 19mpg, which equates to about 15mpg real world, there's plenty of room to go up. Driving style extremes can account for a ~100% difference in fuel economy, and by that I mean an efficient driver may get twice the mileage an inefficient driver gets in the exact same vehicle.

[AirlinePilot]

yesplease,

You asked me what cornucopian fantasies you are talking about?

I give you exhibit A....

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', 'S')ince the average vehicle in the states, including all those not covered by cafe but used for personal transportation, get something like 19mpg, which equates to about 15mpg real world, there's plenty of room to go up. Driving style extremes can account for a ~100% difference in fuel economy, and by that I mean an efficient driver may get twice the mileage an inefficient driver gets in the exact same vehicle.

[yesplease]

dub_scratch, I never said 100% improvement, I said 100% difference. By that I mean the most wasteful drivers get roughly half the mileage the most efficient drivers do all things being equal. For most, the most they can expect by driving as efficiently as possible is a 50% increase, give or take, depending on the vehicle.

Shoot, if ya ever came down from Santa Monica and I could find someone with a scanguage and an OBDII vehicle it'd be cake. Otherwise I feel it would be far too time/money consuming to be bothered with yourself. I will PM you with a couple applicable links if you would like more information on driving efficiently.

[yesplease]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AirlinePilot', 'I')f you think this is going to happen you have to be smoking some pretty good dope. You are trapped in a delight of cornucopian denial.

[Pixie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheDude', '[')What does he mean by this, then?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '"')Clear thinking shows that we value the services that energy can perform, not the energy per se, so it would be better to compare fuels by the services that each provides...not on a straight energy basis...which is likely to be irrelevant and misleading," says Dale.

For example, biofuels could be rated on how much petroleum use they can displace or their greenhouse gas production compared with petroleum.

[Pixie]

This article, http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/17/autos/h ... 2007121911 , recently posted on the newsboard, points out that cars have gotten heaveir and have more safety features since the '80s, and for this reason alone, get lower mileage than some of the cars on the market in the early 90's. The author points at the Honda CRX as an example. To that, I would add my old 1993 tercel, which got 40mpg on the highway, and my even older 1991 Geo metro, which got 50 mpg. Neither of these cars could pass a crash test. However, I survived a decent crash in teh metro. The car basically sacrificed itself to save me. I put a cross next to the highway in its memory.

Anyway, I now drive a prius, and I have discovered that a prius driven at 50 mph will get about 54mpg. The same car driven at 80mph will only get 30mpg. So, I actually agree with much of what yesplease had to say about driving habits and available technology.

I don't think that car companies are goign to go backwards on safety or performance, however, so in terms of cars, we are probably stuck with larger cars than we drove in the '80's. Funny little trend that I have noticed however, is more people driving dirt bikes and scooters to work, as well as people driving those little electric razor scooters, etc. I believe that as the price of gas continues rising, people with short commutes will buy these trendy "alternatives" rather than driving cars at all. Thus, rather than feeling like they are moving down, they can feel hip. Ironic, isn't it, that people will turn up their nose at an 1980's style compact car, bu they'll ride a dirt bike through city traffic to save gas.

[Twilight]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')rofessor Bruce Dale from Michigan State University claims, "Net energy analysis is simple and has great intuitive appeal, but it is also dead wrong and dangerously misleading -- net energy must be eliminated from our discourse."