|
Posted by on March 29, 2008, 6:12 pm
> Virtually every survey shows that the cost of oil is not a deterrent to its
> use. Oil is not price elastic. Like food, fuel is a necessity and increasing
> the price - through taxes or supply/demand - only nibbles at the margins.
Sure it's elastic! It's just not IMMEDIATELY elastic. You have to be
able to buy the more efficient car, or the alternative transportation
has to be made available. At $1.00/gallon, carpooling isn't
"reasonable". At $5.00, it sure as heck becomes reasonable. Cheap
gas = SUV. Expensive gas = higher mpg car.
Europeans live a comfortable lifestyle, and for many years their gas
has been at a price that would cause a revolt here in the guzzler
nation.
> Doubling the cost of fuel means adding 10% to the cost of almost everything
> that travels by truck. That translates to about a 30% increase at the retail
> level.
Yep, that's just the point. Maybe we'd grow produce locally instead
of trucking it all over. Maybe we wouldn't be bottling water in
Europe and Hawaii, just so some bunchasnobs can pretend they know the
difference.
> Alternative energies may gain influence, but there are two things to
> consider when pinning hopes on such plans:
>
> 1. Solar energy is dependent entirely on the earth's distance from the sun*.
> It would take a solar collector farm the size of the Los Angeles basin to
> provide electricity for just California.
Solar may vary with the distance. But it's relatively trivial.
Put solar on all the roofs in LA, and you make a big difference
without taking any land up.
> 2. Meddling in the natural order causes unintended consequences. Conversion
> of traditional crops to grow corn (for example) has contributed to a
> doubling of rice prices in only one year (now up to $1000/ton from $360 in
> January 2007). Just this past week, Egypt, Pakistan, and Viet Nam stopped
> the export of locally grown rice to forstall famine and inflation.
Here, you are absolutely correct. I am not a fan of ethanol from
crops, primarily because there isn't sufficient gain in energy after
you consider the farming, trucking, processing, fertilizing, water
pumping, and land consumption. The price of tortillas for Mexicans
has jumped substantially since we started putting corn in our gas
tanks. The whole thing is a moneymaker for Archer Daniels Midland,
which gets huge subsidies from the feds, even though they make huge
amounts of money from the crops. And don't get me started on crop
subsidies for the farmers themselves. It's a racket.
> -------
> *745 watts/sq meter at the equator, at noon, with no clouds. Adjusted for
> latitude, night, and cloud cover, a solar collector farm in, say, Arizona
> might average 100-200 watts/sq m.
Without a collector, people in AZ use fossil or nuclear fuels to cool
their homes.
| 
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML Sitemap