After The Oil Runs Out

An interesting note is that the airlines were granted a five year exemption from paying ANY fuel taxes to the Federal government in the mid 1990's, saving them billions and making the taxpayer foot the bill.

Railroads, including Amtrak, pay fuel taxes like the rest of us do on our gasoline, as well as substantial property taxes for their route infrastructure, something that highways and airlines do not (the highways are "public" and the air is free).

And, remember that when you talk about the Federal Railway Administration budget, that the bulk of that budget is spent with FREIGHT railroads, and not Amtrak. Amtrak's Federal funding is NOT under the FRA. The FRA is the FAA of the rail world (but does NOT have anything do to with train movement control). They are the adminstrative body dealing with safety, standards, etc, and that applies to ALL rail operations, of which Amtrak is a VERY tiny part.

 

charlieh,

Thanks for posting the additional information. Knew that there was preferential federal subsidizing of the automobile/road system that I was just not getting at. Maybe Wolfman can respond to these additional numbers when he gets a chance.

Jon

 

Well, one thing in that Bull***t! episode was how landfills are pretty "technologically advanced" now. No, I still wouldn't want one in my backyard, but they made a pretty compelling argument. First, that a 35 sq mi landfill would last the entire US for a thousand years. To illustrate the point, they put a small dot in the middle of Nebraska, to show just how little space they were talking about.

They also showed a few "modern" landfills, that were filled to capacity and covered up with dirt, grass and trees, along with waterproof clay along the bottom (to protect ground water). I must say, it looked pretty good (you'd never be able to tell there was a mountain of garbage beneath your feet).

 

Penn & Teller also think that second-hand smoke doesn't hurt anybody.

As for the landfill, I'm guessing they would have said 35 miles square, not 35 square miles. But I don't believe that even that would last the U.S. 1,000 years, unless they made it 1,000 miles deep.

Of course, the real solution to garbage is to generate less of it.

 

Yeah, sorry about that, it should've been 35 miles square (or 1225 square miles).

 

Maybe we could figure out a way to liquify all our garbage and inject it into all those empty oil wells.

 

They're trying...
http://www.changingworldtech.com/home.html

(Yea, I know I've posted this several times. I'm fishing to see if anyone has heard anything positive or negative about this technology)

Back to the road subsidies...
Put yourself back in the days when cars were just catching on (and oil was limitless and environmental effects unknown). The concept of personal transportation door to door must have been pretty exciting. I for one probably would have been for massive road construction.

 

twindad, knowing nothing about the technology or anything behind it, the claims appear to me, on first glance, to be similar to a perpetual motion machine.

 

Cars did not replace mass transit, suddenly making door-to-door transportation possible. They replaced horses and carriages. They replaced live animals whose "fuel" was sustainable biomass and whose "waste product" was fertilizer, with dead and filthy machinery whose fuel had to be sucked up out of the bowels of Mother Earth and whose waste products were venomous, toxic filth that turned the pristine air and water black. Cars were, and are, a pact with the devil: environmental destruction in return for getting where we want to go a wee bit faster.

(Whew! I think I outdid myself there.)

 

Maybe a little over the top, Dan, but enjoyable nonetheless.

...And back then (when chat rooms were the local pub) they sat around and bitched about the buildup of manure in the streets. They probably also bitched about those moronic liberals & idiotic conservatives, or whatever parties were hip at the time.

 

Hey Danny, tell us how you REALLY feel!! :mrgreen:

The reality is, that in the cities, the sheer concentration of horses created a huge problem of what to do with all that waste - waste that helped spread disease. Cars were a way out of that environment. Even today, I know I'd much rather deal with automobile exhaust, than to smell, and slog through piles of horse manure - recyclable or not.

I'd hardly call the automobile a deal with the devil. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't continually pursue the further improvement of our methods of transportaion.

 

Modern commuters using millions of horses... I can picture a hilarious commercial of some sort, though I guess only Detroit would be interested in making it.

 

Yeah, I was exaggerating a bit there, and I know that manure can be a problem. However, I've worked on a dairy farm, and I've shovelled manure, and I find gas and diesel fumes far more offensive.

I visited Cuba for the first time in 1997 or thereabouts (I don't remember exactly) and they were still suffering an acute gasoline shortage due to the fall of the USSR and the loss of their fair trade arrangements (a.k.a. "subsidies") and there were virtually no cars on the streets. There were taxis, but hardly any private cars.

And I gotta tell you, it was really nice. It was quiet, and you could cross the street without risking your life, as you would in most big cities, and there were no traffic jams. Also, the absence of cars made it a LOT safer for bicycles, pedicabs, and little three-wheeled motorcycle cabs.

Maybe a horse is not the answer for high-rise apartment-dwellers, but cars really are a pact with the devil. They have allowed us to squander an enormous, cheap, energy supply in a generation and pollute the planet at the same time. And we have become so addicted to our cars and cheap gas to run them that we are willing to wage wars, murdering innocent women and children in the process, to preserve the "right" to use a 12 mpg vehicle to transport one person to the grocery store at an "affordable" cost.

And I don't pretend to be much better in this respect than anyone else. My Prius gets around 45 mpg (short trips, summer; worse in winter) but I don't want to take the bus (long waits in inclement weather) or live where walking would be practical. I'm as addicted to my car as anyone. I can feel smug comparing my Prius to an SUV, but either way, cars and gas are a DRUG, pure and simple, and our collective addiction to this drug is going to kill the next generation, as it's already killed so many people in the Middle East, and kept so many others under the boot of such tyrannical governments as the House of Saud, as we wage wars and prop up dictators to facilitate the continued flow of cheap oil.

And I'm utterly pessimistic about the future, as China and India believe it's their inalienable right to follow our bad example, and of course will not be able to afford pollution controls. Take a look at Mexico City: bumper-to-bumper jalopies spewing black exhaust, and a government too corrupt to enforce its own anti-pollution laws, so that living there is like smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day.

 

Industrialzed soceity has given us a series of freedoms that the pre-industrial world did not have, it is true. The problem is that these freedoms have not been without huge costs, both hidden and apparent. The debate over whether the "pact with the devil" was worth the cost is, of course, a matter of personal opinion. The issue we have to face is that even if you think it was a good deal, the pact has an expiration date. Once oil production peaks, natural gas peaks, coal becomes too difficult and expensive to mine, the pact is null and void. We need to be contemplating the future and what kind of world we want to live in.

And as for horses... Energy is at the heart of all that happens. Heinberg's review of energy, nature and society in The Party's Over discusses the transition in medieval times from oxen to horses in the 12th century, and notes that with the adoption of the horse-collar, horses could now be used as draft animals. Oxen were cheaper to maintain than horses beacause as ruminants, they can live on grass, stublle and straw alone. Horses typically require between four and five acres of land for food production for the horse itself. The horse is able to do more work and more quickly than an oxen, but at a higher energy input cost, hence the need for more land dedicated to feeding them. Horses CAN survive on grass, but the normal scenario is to feed the horse grains. The use of the horse as a traction animal reduced the human carrying capacity of the land (more farming dedicated to horse fodder) at the same time as it added to it by enabling the plowing of larger fields (the bad news and the good news). Animals in general were costly to maintain and only the more wealthy could afford them (sounds like a car, in relative terms). Heinberg notes that by 1900 Britain had a horse population of 3.5 million, consuming 4 million tons of oats and hay earch year, which caused Britain to have to IMPORT grain for animal and human consumption. Things might have been really bad if there as an OPEC for grain (OGEC?? :? ). In the US during the same period, the growing horse population required 25% of the total 90 million acres of available cropland.

While this biomass fuel for horses could be applied to our "herd" of cars the calculation has been made that in order to supply our fuel for cars and trucks from biomass, all arable land in the US would have to be dedicated 100% to fuel production - not likely to happen, particularly with the probable negative impact of global warming on food production in the US. Most models predict a dramatice decline in our midwest farm production with a die off of Canadian forests and subsequent use of Canada and Siberia as cropland.

Again, it is the tremendous energy bounty in oil that has allowed us to build civilization as we know it because all that energy wasconcentrated and stored millions of years ago in the black stuff which we are now burning in a matter of decades. Heinberg prefers to speak of the petroleum "interval" rather than the petroleum "era". Era implies some duration of historic proportion, and this period will not really be more than three or four human generations at most.

We as humans have great intellect and a remarkable position as the most inventive and flexible creatures to have moved on the face of the earth. As such, we CAN move on to a new world without these energy freebies - we have to, because the freebies have not really been free (just like a pact with the devil) and the handouts won't be there one of the days. We just need to be thinking about it now rather than later because our latitude to make those changes will narrow as energy supplies become more constrained.