The Fate of the Electric Vehicle Guide Blog

A couple of weeks ago my blog in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about electric cars was cancelled. This was not surprised to me; not only had I been gone unplugged while I was on vacation for two weeks, but even before my vacation (and lack of posts) I had lost enthusiasm for cars and my original desire to save the personal car has all but vanished by now. As a matter of fact, I had emailed several times my contact at the Seattle P-I to let him know I was no longer interested in writing about electric cars due to my now deeper understanding of Peak Oil. While I never got a reply from the numerous emails I sent him, I had told him that I was looking for new writers for the electric vehicle blog, and that if he set up a new blog for me with the topic of Peak Oil, that I would write regularly. What happened was I got no response and then soon after I returned from vacation I got an impersonal message saying my blog was cancelled. Like I said, this is not surprise to me and all is well as far as blogs are concerned.

The issue of oil depletion is something I think about day and night. It’s not that I want to or even enjoy – I simply can’t help it. This has always been the case, and it goes back to the times when I was a little child and learned about cars and also the concept of limited resources. It occurred to me early on that if the stuff we use as fuel for cars (and I loved the personal car), then a question naturally arises: how much of this stuff do we have? Answering that question allows us to think in terms of how many cars we have on the road and for how long, and things like that.
But no one seemed concerned about such questions at the time, so I filed this issue on the back of my mind and moved on with life like everyone else. Another thought that I stored away was this: “someone somewhere must be taking the issue of oil depletion into serious consideration”. So I grew up enjoying the benefits of the personal car, comparing cars for their performance and horsepower numbers, trusting that car sales would increase year after year after year, and so on. I was also a huge Formula 1 fan; not to mention the fact that Ayrton Senna, who was a spectacular F1 driver before his accident in Italy in 1994 in which he died, was a national hero in Brazil. I even remember my dad once being given a VIP pass to a F1 cockpit for a race that took place at the circuit in Interlagos, Sao Paulo – a pass that was given to him by the French company and fuel supplier Elf.

Well, I am an adult now and have come to realize that no one has really taken the issue of oil depletion into consideration – had anyone done so we wouldn’t have squandered the oil reserves to the point that we’re now peaking in production or have peaked. We’re now in a tough predicament. While I don’t consider myself the one man responsible for creating this predicament, the truth is that for most of my life I’ve been complicit in having a lifestyle that has promoted a wasteful consumption of oil. I have given much of my energy, time and hard money to automobile companies, the ones that produce and have produced all the internal combustion engines that are the main culprit of oil depletion, and arguably the biggest contributor to global warming (as far as human activity is concerned), not to mention the pollution of the atmosphere that we all breath into our lungs.

I am just about done reading the book The Long Descent, by John Michael Greer. I find the book excellent, and it has offered a few new thoughts to me. I thought I’d share them here for people to consider also.

1) We have billions of cars in circulation, all of which use the internal combustion engine. In an age of oil and energy scarcity, chances are that we will not be able to fuel these vehicles for as long as they can be driven. Many of these cars were built to last 30 years or more sometimes, and they are typically discarded once the engine (and transmission) goes out of commission. Well, for the first time in history we now face the issue that a car will be discarded while it is still drivable and has engine life left – for the simple fact that fueling it with gasoline or diesel will be prohibitively expensive.

2) Renewable energy can do nothing for us. When I first “found out” about Peak Oil, that is to say, when the issue was brought up to my attention in a way that I understood and that showed the urgency to take action, my first thought was “we should all be investing in renewable energy and that’s where I should be working”. Well, much like I gave up on the dream of electric cars to keep our lifestyles unchanged, I have also given up on the dream of renewable energy as a replacement for petroleum that would keep our lifestyles unchanged and permitted the exponential growth that the world economies are based on.

3) The future will not be like the past. That is to say, before the industrial revolution when most people lived in rural areas and few people lived in the cities, some people think that deindustrialization will cause people to do the exact opposite of what industrialization did: an exodus from cities to the countryside, and people will be farming and growing food the same way they did before the discovery of petroleum. Well, everything indicates that in the future people will not live the same way they did before. The reasons are obvious: population is much larger, we have acquired enormous knowledge of technologies and things that did not exist before, and we are a much different culture now in the age of economies based on petroleum. People also have lost all farming skills as new generations came along. I, for example, was born in the city and have always lived in the city. I know very little about rural life. My point is this: even if I moved to a farm, the way I do things and live my life would be different from say, a person who lived on a farm 200 years ago.

These factors make life in the future unpredictable and in my opinion, sort of exciting and interesting. Peak Oil needs not be bad news. Peak Oil actually may be just what will save humanity from the path of destroying its habitat and consuming itself.

The Fate of the Electric Vehicle Guide Blog

A couple of weeks ago my blog in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about electric cars was cancelled. This was not surprised to me; not only had I been gone unplugged while I was on vacation for two weeks, but even before my vacation (and lack of posts) I had lost enthusiasm for cars and my original desire to save the personal car has all but vanished by now. As a matter of fact, I had emailed several times my contact at the Seattle P-I to let him know I was no longer interested in writing about electric cars due to my now deeper understanding of Peak Oil. While I never got a reply from the numerous emails I sent him, I had told him that I was looking for new writers for the electric vehicle blog, and that if he set up a new blog for me with the topic of Peak Oil, that I would write regularly. What happened was I got no response and then soon after I returned from vacation I got an impersonal message saying my blog was cancelled. Like I said, this is not surprise to me and all is well as far as blogs are concerned.

The issue of oil depletion is something I think about day and night. It’s not that I want to or even enjoy – I simply can’t help it. This has always been the case, and it goes back to the times when I was a little child and learned about cars and also the concept of limited resources. It occurred to me early on that if the stuff we use as fuel for cars (and I loved the personal car), then a question naturally arises: how much of this stuff do we have? Answering that question allows us to think in terms of how many cars we have on the road and for how long, and things like that.
But no one seemed concerned about such questions at the time, so I filed this issue on the back of my mind and moved on with life like everyone else. Another thought that I stored away was this: “someone somewhere must be taking the issue of oil depletion into serious consideration”. So I grew up enjoying the benefits of the personal car, comparing cars for their performance and horsepower numbers, trusting that car sales would increase year after year after year, and so on. I was also a huge Formula 1 fan; not to mention the fact that Ayrton Senna, who was a spectacular F1 driver before his accident in Italy in 1994 in which he died, was a national hero in Brazil. I even remember my dad once being given a VIP pass to a F1 cockpit for a race that took place at the circuit in Interlagos, Sao Paulo – a pass that was given to him by the French company and fuel supplier Elf.

Well, I am an adult now and have come to realize that no one has really taken the issue of oil depletion into consideration – had anyone done so we wouldn’t have squandered the oil reserves to the point that we’re now peaking in production or have peaked. We’re now in a tough predicament. While I don’t consider myself the one man responsible for creating this predicament, the truth is that for most of my life I’ve been complicit in having a lifestyle that has promoted a wasteful consumption of oil. I have given much of my energy, time and hard money to automobile companies, the ones that produce and have produced all the internal combustion engines that are the main culprit of oil depletion, and arguably the biggest contributor to global warming (as far as human activity is concerned), not to mention the pollution of the atmosphere that we all breath into our lungs.

I am just about done reading the book The Long Descent, by John Michael Greer. I find the book excellent, and it has offered a few new thoughts to me. I thought I’d share them here for people to consider also.

1) We have billions of cars in circulation, all of which use the internal combustion engine. In an age of oil and energy scarcity, chances are that we will not be able to fuel these vehicles for as long as they can be driven. Many of these cars were built to last 30 years or more sometimes, and they are typically discarded once the engine (and transmission) goes out of commission. Well, for the first time in history we now face the issue that a car will be discarded while it is still drivable and has engine life left – for the simple fact that fueling it with gasoline or diesel will be prohibitively expensive.

2) Renewable energy can do nothing for us. When I first “found out” about Peak Oil, that is to say, when the issue was brought up to my attention in a way that I understood and that showed the urgency to take action, my first thought was “we should all be investing in renewable energy and that’s where I should be working”. Well, much like I gave up on the dream of electric cars to keep our lifestyles unchanged, I have also given up on the dream of renewable energy as a replacement for petroleum that would keep our lifestyles unchanged and permitted the exponential growth that the world economies are based on.

3) The future will not be like the past. That is to say, before the industrial revolution when most people lived in rural areas and few people lived in the cities, some people think that deindustrialization will cause people to do the exact opposite of what industrialization did: an exodus from cities to the countryside, and people will be farming and growing food the same way they did before the discovery of petroleum. Well, everything indicates that in the future people will not live the same way they did before. The reasons are obvious: population is much larger, we have acquired enormous knowledge of technologies and things that did not exist before, and we are a much different culture now in the age of economies based on petroleum. People also have lost all farming skills as new generations came along. I, for example, was born in the city and have always lived in the city. I know very little about rural life. My point is this: even if I moved to a farm, the way I do things and live my life would be different from say, a person who lived on a farm 200 years ago.

These factors make life in the future unpredictable and in my opinion, sort of exciting and interesting. Peak Oil needs not be bad news. Peak Oil actually may be just what will save humanity from the path of destroying its habitat and consuming itself.

Burning Man 2008

It has been over a month since my last post that I have written something on Peak Oil. I have gone through moments of feeling I have having too much to write and other moments in which I feel I have nothing I could write about is worthwhile. However, I do enjoy writing, so after having gone through a wide spectrum of experiences during this time I thought I’d write another post approach a number of subjects from a Peak Oil perspective, of course.

First I want to confess a grave sin in order that I once and for all let go of the guilt I’ve been living in. I just came back from Burning Man 2008. This was my second time at Burning Man and trust me, I went there for the spirit of Burning Man which include the celebration of humanity, a great deal of giving and generosity, and being in a place of no judgment and censorship. Burning Man is a phenomenal party and I did not want to miss it in 2008. I doubt I’ll go in 20089 assuming there will be one. I say this because I’ve had my doubts for a while, considering all the changes the world and the USA are going through. Burning Man is incredibly energy intensive, and as we enter a period of an energy crunch I suspect that Burning Man will continue to happen for years to come, but possibly in a much smaller scale. I probably won’t attend Burning Man next year as I predict that gasoline could cost $7 a gallon by August, and the scenario of gasoline rationing nationwide is a plausible one in my view. There are already talks about decentralizing Burning Man so that people are not flying from all over the world to one central location.

My feeling of guilt comes from the fact that Burning Man is a party of excess consumption, which of course includes energy. After embracing the lifestyle of bicyclist for months, which helped me significantly reduce my consumption of gasoline and environmental footprint, I went to Burning Man in a Chevy truck that required more diesel than you could get in one straight pumping from any gas station. Some stations limit the amount of fuel you can pump at $75 (a safety feature) while others allow you to pump as much as $125 of fuel. Either way, we had to run the credit card again and continue to fill in order to get a full tank. I’m not proud to reveal this, but our round trip to the middle of nowhere and back required 184 gallons of diesel, and that for transportation alone. That number alone boggles my mind. Now, consider that there were about close to 50,000 participants this time, from all over the world. Some people came from as far as Wisconsin (by driving) while other people came from Australia and all parts of Europe. This makes for a spectacular party indeed, but it does go against any efforts towards sustainability.

There’s good at Burning Man, though. People often have an opinion even though they do not know what it is. If you want to have an opinion about Burning Man and sound somewhat educated, I recommend you form your opinion by talking to someone who actually has been to Burning Man. For example, the system of bartering and camping in tents is probably how many people will live in a future not too distant from now. Burning Man is great practice for that. I don’t think this type of life will exist in the desert (where there’s no water or anything besides dust, for that matter), but I do think the lifestyle will be very similar, and one that requires people to unite with their neighbors, to become social, and to share everything they have. As the world economy powers down it just makes a lot more sense to say, have a sledge hammer that everyone in a neighborhood can have, instead of each household having one item of everything that does not get shared.

I am currently reading a book titled The Long Descent, which is excellent and I’d like to recommend for anyone who wants to understand the effects Peak Oil will have in our society. I am reading this book not so much to gain understanding of Peak Oil (which I don’t think need any more of), but simply because I cannot put it down.

So long.

Burning Man 2008

It has been over a month since my last post that I have written something on Peak Oil. I have gone through moments of feeling I have having too much to write and other moments in which I feel I have nothing I could write about is worthwhile. However, I do enjoy writing, so after having gone through a wide spectrum of experiences during this time I thought I’d write another post approach a number of subjects from a Peak Oil perspective, of course.

First I want to confess a grave sin in order that I once and for all let go of the guilt I’ve been living in. I just came back from Burning Man 2008. This was my second time at Burning Man and trust me, I went there for the spirit of Burning Man which include the celebration of humanity, a great deal of giving and generosity, and being in a place of no judgment and censorship. Burning Man is a phenomenal party and I did not want to miss it in 2008. I doubt I’ll go in 20089 assuming there will be one. I say this because I’ve had my doubts for a while, considering all the changes the world and the USA are going through. Burning Man is incredibly energy intensive, and as we enter a period of an energy crunch I suspect that Burning Man will continue to happen for years to come, but possibly in a much smaller scale. I probably won’t attend Burning Man next year as I predict that gasoline could cost $7 a gallon by August, and the scenario of gasoline rationing nationwide is a plausible one in my view. There are already talks about decentralizing Burning Man so that people are not flying from all over the world to one central location.

My feeling of guilt comes from the fact that Burning Man is a party of excess consumption, which of course includes energy. After embracing the lifestyle of bicyclist for months, which helped me significantly reduce my consumption of gasoline and environmental footprint, I went to Burning Man in a Chevy truck that required more diesel than you could get in one straight pumping from any gas station. Some stations limit the amount of fuel you can pump at $75 (a safety feature) while others allow you to pump as much as $125 of fuel. Either way, we had to run the credit card again and continue to fill in order to get a full tank. I’m not proud to reveal this, but our round trip to the middle of nowhere and back required 184 gallons of diesel, and that for transportation alone. That number alone boggles my mind. Now, consider that there were about close to 50,000 participants this time, from all over the world. Some people came from as far as Wisconsin (by driving) while other people came from Australia and all parts of Europe. This makes for a spectacular party indeed, but it does go against any efforts towards sustainability.

There’s good at Burning Man, though. People often have an opinion even though they do not know what it is. If you want to have an opinion about Burning Man and sound somewhat educated, I recommend you form your opinion by talking to someone who actually has been to Burning Man. For example, the system of bartering and camping in tents is probably how many people will live in a future not too distant from now. Burning Man is great practice for that. I don’t think this type of life will exist in the desert (where there’s no water or anything besides dust, for that matter), but I do think the lifestyle will be very similar, and one that requires people to unite with their neighbors, to become social, and to share everything they have. As the world economy powers down it just makes a lot more sense to say, have a sledge hammer that everyone in a neighborhood can have, instead of each household having one item of everything that does not get shared.

I am currently reading a book titled The Long Descent, which is excellent and I’d like to recommend for anyone who wants to understand the effects Peak Oil will have in our society. I am reading this book not so much to gain understanding of Peak Oil (which I don’t think need any more of), but simply because I cannot put it down.

So long.