Posted on 12/04/2006 4:49:44 PM PST by SJackson
There is the story about a motorist evacuating New Orleans at the onset of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The motorist ran out of fuel on a crowded expressway. When later asked why he did not turn off the motor to conserve fuel, he replied, "Why would I do that? I needed the air conditioning."
The story illustrates a fundamental obstacle in our country's critical need to conserve energy and use it wisely.
"Even when you are running for your life, with no fuel supply in sight, people do not make the connection with the fact that their fuel tank contains a finite amount," says Tadeusz W. Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
Patzek, a recent guest lecturer of the UW Energy Institute, suggests that people must think of the Earth as a bigger tank, which is also finite, and is being drawn down rapidly of its petroleum reserves.
Patzek admits that societal change in the face of depleting resources is difficult to accomplish.
"We are wired to react to here and now. Evade dangers here and now. Take action here and now," he says. "Talking about what will happen a few years from now is an absolute muddy obstruction for most people."
Instead, people must be stimulated by other reasons to conserve, and he adds that even higher prices at the pump may be in the foreseeable future.
The age of cheap oil is long gone. When today's baby boom generation was learning to drive, gas was no more than 35 cents per gallon. The U.S. had its own oil reserves and set about wasting them.
In 1949 M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with Shell Oil, predicted that the fossil fuel era would be of short duration. Seven years later in a speech to the American Petroleum Institute, Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s and decline thereafter.
His predictions were considered outrageous, but when they came true, Hubbert's prestige soared.
"If someone tells you that there will be plenty of oil forever, well, there won't be," says Patzek. "We should be worried - deeply worried - about oil supplies."
According to Patzek, we are in the plateau of oil production today.
"There will not be one sharp, well-defined peak," he says. "New generations of fields will be gradually brought on line, and they will diffuse the peak and make it shallower and wider. These may contribute to some gradual increases in production for a while, and then be followed by more rapid declines.
"But, folks, this is it - this is as good as it gets," he explains.
The recently publicized Jack 2 well in the Gulf of Mexico was heralded in some quarters as a major discovery. Patzek doesn't agree and regards the news as more of a political find than an actual find.
"Much of this discovery extends beyond U.S. territorial waters and into Mexican waters," he says.
The well, in 7,000 feet of water and about 176 miles off the coast of Louisiana, was touted with great fanfare by Chevron as a significant boost to the industry. It remains uncertain how much oil will flow from Jack 2 and whether pumping it will be economically viable. Estimates put the find at 3 billion to 15 billion barrels.
Even at the higher end, the well would meet U.S. consumption demands for less than two years.
Since the decline of U.S. production, the country has been forced to rely on imported crude and on volatile economic and political circumstances. At the same time, our energy appetite has grown.
"We are wasting oil in unbelievable quantities, and there is no good reason to do so," Patzek says.
The U.S. must initiate sweeping programs in conservation and efficiency, he says, and those programs must be aimed at the country's transportation system, which accounts for two-thirds of all oil burned in the U.S.
It is estimated that if we were to increase the efficiency of the transportation system by 50 percent, we could save 7 million barrels of oil daily.
Unfortunately, the U.S. does not possess a sterling history when it comes to energy conservation and wise use of a treasured resource.
"We are 20 years too late and we have achieved little compared to the rest of the world," Patzek says. Europe uses 15 percent less fuel for transportation today than it did 20 years ago; the U.S. uses 10 percent more.
What do we need to do? We need to build vehicles that use less fuel. We need to devote more time and energy to public transportation systems and development of those infrastructures. And we need to take individual and simple steps: inflate our tires properly, shut off our engine when idling for longer than 30 seconds, and dump the SUV. Here is a quote from Hubbert that has special meaning today: "Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know."
There is little doubt that as a society, we know more today about our world than we did 50 years ago. The challenge is, can we use what we know to our advantage and our children's advantage?
We have been hearing this kind of talk since the early 1970's. Government will not solve the problem. Free enterprise cannot solve the problem because government rules stand in the way. I don't believe we want to find a real solution. Nobody has the willpower to see anything through.
true.
"an engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley"
That sttement makes everything below it pure BS!
The owner of the highly successful company I used to work for summed it up: "Our only real competitive advantage is to learn faster than our competitors."
If the algae BioDiesel comes through, it'll be a big step to weaning the US off Arab (and Arab wannabes) Oil.
The current global warming carbon grab fits their agenda nicely. John Kerry and Charlie Rangel ain't gonna ride no bus to work.
I'd guess that it only takes a second of two's worth of fuel to restart an already warm car or light truck engine.
With all the chemicals they injest, they'd be better used as pesticides.
I wish there was a finite supply of leftist twits.
Ugh, good point.
Even if everybody went to those hybrid cars, the problem would only be delayed by something like three years. If we aren't building nuke plants now we are getting into a classical existential situation.
Yes, that is totally true. It is amazing more of them don't self-detonate any given day.
I happened to recently read a National Geographic printed in 1974. As you said, 32 years ago, the finest scientific minds said that global famine, no oil and massive dieoffs would occur by the late 90's.
What will they think of us 30 years from now?
That being said, REAL conservation never gets implemented. Imagine if 90 % of the interstate tractor-trailer traffic was eliminated along the eastern seaboard of the US in just 2 years. One container ship can do the same job as 10,000 big rigs for a fraction of the cost in fuel and insurance... if the Dems would only reduce the massive moneymaking tax on goods shipped between US ports.
That's conservation. Never mind the scaremongering.
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