capolover

https://www.alternet.org/story/85280/

Two years ago a leading economist published a study provocatively titled: "What would $120 oil mean for the global economy?" Answer: a global recession, if the price stayed there for a year.

Now the future has arrived, with the United States and other nations getting a double whammy from both the mortgage crisis and oil futures hovering at $120 per barrel. If oil prices stay stratospheric, the cost of fueling cars and planes could slash US economic growth up to 2.3 percent and global growth by 3.6 percent, says Robert Wescott, former chief economist of the president's council of economic advisers and author of the $120 oil report.

While many energy-security experts worry about a terrorist attack that suddenly crimps global oil supplies and hammers the US economy, Dr. Wescott and other experts say a terror attack is hardly the only, or even the worst, oil threat the nation now faces. "What we are seeing today is more of a slow-motion, rolling oil crisis rather than a sharp shock, yet ultimately we end up with the same sorts of impacts [as a terror attack]," says Wescott, now president of Keybridge Research, a Washington economic-consulting firm.

ItsJustMe

We're in for an adjustment, that's for sure. Personally, my view is that we've built an economy and an infrastructure on artificially-cheap energy from oil, and now that oil isn't cheap anymore, it's going to hurt living within that infrastructure. The proper way out of it is to readjust how we live, but nobody wants to do that, so they're all frantically looking for another source of cheap energy. If we can find cheap energy that's also clean (my own wish) then probably we can maintain the current way of life. I think we will but these changes don't happen fast.

Honestly, we got a wake-up call on this 30 years ago. We could be totally off oil already, but people only remember about as far as last week, so as soon as oil got cheap again, everyone said "Gee, that sucked, glad that won't ever happen again. Let's go buy a huge SUV, honey!"

And if gas went back down to $2/gallon tomorrow, you know darn well the SUV sales lots would empty out in a week. People do not learn and they do not heed warnings, they have to be being hurt RIGHT NOW to do anything.

AEO

anyone remember how food prices were in the 70's oil crisis?
I wasn't even born, but I'm sure there are people who remember.

climbhoser

Hydrogen?

They've more or less figgered out how to bottle it, and there are stations in Hollywood along with cars already in production to run off of it.

All that needs to happen is an urgency for stations to change over their technology. It's an investment that needs to be brought on by a decline in petrol purchases. If you've read the stats you've seen that despite the prices we are still buying petrol as quickly as we always have been, and that the cost isn't deterring us one bit. SUV sales may be plateaued, but barely. Family people still want big cars, and familys are being started every day. My wife was an eco-crusadeder, still is I should say, but once we had our daughter she started chanting "Suburban, Yukon, Excursion, Durango..." I retaliated with "Civic Hybrid, new bike, Prius..."

Anyhoo, I'm moderately concerned, but not so much that I fear a crisis on the level of terrorist attacks. Watch petrol purchases decline, gas burner car purchases decline and we'll see a market strategy arise that pushes alternative burners. It's simple economics really.

I see here in this thread fear that the technology can't sustain an alternative source of energy, but it can and it's already developed. Now it's just up to the market to bring it to the public and into our culture and way of living!

Besides, as a family member/oil-man just told me the other day-Cars utilize a microscopic portion of oil production. Everything else in our lives is also made from oil...think about the computer keys you're typing on when you respond to me! I think we're in for a big spanking if we can't get ahold of oil, but in a different way.

lil brown bat

It's funny, but as I read the comments in this thread, I hear people saying what "we" are going to go through, and yet I get the strong sense that each poster is thinking "those idiots driving the gas-guzzlers". As I have said in another thread, many more people will suffer besides those driving SUVs. If you feel that you won't be among them, I hope for your sake that you're right -- but it would be gracious to stay well away from any suggestion of gloating about it.

jefferee

I'm gonna have to call B.S. here. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2/3 of U.S. oil consumption is for vehicle fuel. It may well have taken as much oil to ship my computer from the factory to my door as it contains in plastics.
https://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/p...%20by%20sector

DataJunkie

k. We need a few more of these threads each week to meet a quota.
Tomorrow someone else needs to start one.

Screw gas prices. I am more concerned with how it is affecting my grocery bill. My family has to eat. We can always drive less.

ItsJustMe

Hydrogen is idiotic. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's just a way to store energy, and not a good one at that.
There are generally two ways to get hydrogen. You can extract it from hydrocarbons, which is always a losing proposition; you wind up with hydrogen that contains less energy than the hydrocarbons you just split to get the hydrogen out. Or you can electrolyze it from water. This also is a losing proposition. At best it's 50% efficient, so you have to pump in twice as much power as you can ideally get out of the hydrogen at the other end.

The ONLY thing hydrogen has going for it is that it allows a path to continue to use IC engines with a solar/wind source of energy, and it allows companies that own distribution infrastructure (gas stations, tankers, pipelines, etc) to stay in business. It's the latter that are pushing hydrogen.

If you have electricity, it's a lot more efficient to use it to charge batteries in an electric car than it is to convert it to hydrogen and then burn it.

The other thing hydrogen has going for it, at least temporarily, is that you can refill a hydrogen car in a few minutes, but you can't charge an electric car quickly.

Also given the choice, it's safer to have a tank of hydrogen in your car than a tank of gasoline.

capolover

If you're worried about food prices than you should think about phony bio-fuels like ethanol. It isn't efficient. Classic example of a government coming in and screwing something up they should leave to the markets.

But oil is food. Oil is used to make, farm, process and transport food. You must realize that.

It's also about the dropping standards in our country. 8 years of bush and the gutting of the middle class makes it harder for people to pay all their bills and absorb price hikes.

capolover

Everybody will suffer.
But if you're saving all the money you'd spend on gas and riding your bike you're ahead of the game when it comes to absorbing rising food costs, ect.

Nobody is gloating......that I can tell. I think you're just being contrary for the sake of it.

Kabir424

"can charge to 80% capacity in around 10 minutes on a 200 amp AC service"

https://www.gizmag.com/go/3069/

Quick charging technology for electric cars is improving and it should be relatively easy to charge them in the future.

AEO

200amps on 115VAC, talk about industrial grade... that's what... 3/5 the full power power capacity most mid sized houses have on the breaker box?

Your gas price will stabilize if Iraq stabilizes, it's a really long term (think decade at least) investment.
But what it all boils down to is greed.

wolfbrother

true, but we need fuel to make the electricity. coal? Just as bad as oil.
I agree with the fact that we need to all need to make sacrifices. I guy I work with comes in the other day (yes, in an suv) talking about how we need to start drilling holes for more oil. I usually stay out of politics with people at work, but I just want to say "you know, if you trade your car in for something that gets 40mpg you will cut your gas bill/consumption in half. in half! Not to mention if you try other forms of transportation or just simply drive less."

adebrunner

Electricity produced by nuclear power always seemed to be an amazing option to me. I'm no scientist but it appears to be the perfect solution with the only drawbacks being the relatively remote, but obviously serious, threat of nuclear meltdown (note: I live like 5 miles from Three Mile Island) and the extremely high capital costs. There is no reason we shouldn't have electric cars from nuclear power. If they standardized a car battery size or limited it to a few standards, then gas stations could make money by stocking charged batteries and selling them to motorists who would trade their old battery in when it got low. Then all the station has to do is charge the old battery and sell it to someone else. I think this is how propane tanks work at a gas station. I could be wrong, but I think nuclear power is a renewable resource where we can control exactly the production level and therefore prices of the product. I don't think there has been a new nuclear plant built since the mid/late 70s but none have melted down ever in the US. If we can use nuclear power on submarines, why can't we harness it for other applications safely as well? Anyway, my house is electric and I'm trying to figure out how to grow my own garden. If you shop locally (direct from the farm if possible), you don't need to worry as much about fuel costs affecting their production costs.

DataJunkie

What about nuclear waste?
I say store it in berkely. Either that or shoot it into the sun.

n4zou

NO! The media wants you to think they get Hydrogen from ocean water, they don't. It's a byproduct of petroleum distillation. Hydrogen is even worse than ethanol taking more energy to extract from ocean water than what it produces in energy. Ethanol is almost 1:1 taking as much energy to produce as you get out of it. As a comparison you get 18 times the energy from gasoline and diesel than it takes to drill, pump, refine, distribute, and sell. There is no viable alternative to petroleum or coal derived fuels, and never will be. Switching to Hydrogen extracted from ocean water is going to require hundreds of nuclear power plants but due to the can't drill, can't refine, can't import sugar ethanol, can't mine and use coal, global warming scam, wacko socialist environmentalists are never going to allow that to be done. Just suck it up and get ready to join the ranks of the dirt poor third world and hope you don't starve as whats left of our industries pack it up and leave for countries that have the common since not to impose Cap and trade Kyoto economy busting crap on us as all three of the idiots running for President want to do. Yes; were screwed!

AEO

nuclear waste takes a long time to decay, and during that time it has the chance of leaking into the soil and water surrounding the disposal location.

Having said that, it's way better than coal power plants, but much more expensive to maintain and operate.
so the alternative of...
solar: too inefficient unless we cover the whole city with them, and unreliable in certain areas.
wind: same as above, except some argue that having a massive farms of these causes environmental changes.
hydro: gotta find a nice water fall like Niagara Falls, or dam up existing rivers flooding the habitat upstream.

don't work too great either.
The world will have to go entirely nuclear and go into space to harvest energy from Jupiter or something.

CMY

Berkeley or the nuclear waste?

Artkansas 

I'm gonna invest in some better bicycle locks. Bike theft rates are bound to climb.

Artkansas 

I remember that sugar prices spiked back then.

HardyWeinberg

Imagine what will happen now that all our sugar is supplemented w/ HFCS but all the corn is being diverted to ethanol!!

DataJunkie

lol

MIKEnDC

Everything went haywire.

The one thing I remember as the great hope for the future back then was fusion nuclear (no radioactive waste). In the mid-70s, it was thought to be about 30 years away. The only thing I've heard about it since then were a couple of hoaxes. If that had been vigorously pursued, we might be looking at having a real good solution to the powerplant problems.

There are lots of people working on lots of different things right now. I think for the near-term, anyway, we'll need to employ anything and everything we can to keep things going enough to avoid a general collapse.

The biggest thing is in peoples attitudes, though. I'm not sure that that will change quickly enough...

supton

$6k/year on fuel? Only if it doubles in price. I drive 34kmiles/year, and average 46mpg. At the current $4.30/gallon, that's about $3.2k.

ItsJustMe

If we had any sense we'd be reprocessing nuclear waste so we could get even more power from it. As it is, we're throwing it away when it's only partially exhausted. France has the most complete and advanced nuclear power infrastructure in the world and that's what they do. The US is just afraid that someone will steal the byproducts and do something nasty with them.

France also has a few standard, pre-approved designs for power plants. If you want to build a plant, you find a site, get site approval for the size plant you want, and you build per the standard plan and you're set. In the US every plant is a one-off and it's almost impossible to get plans approved. My cousin worked for Bechtel back in the 70s when they were building a plant here in Michigan. At one time they were 85% done with the plant. When they finally gave up and shelved the project they were about 30% done, because the government kept changing requirements on them, and they had to take extremely expensive building and equipment that they'd bought and built, tear it out and start over on whole chunks of the plant.