WWO: Life Is At The Center
May. 22nd, 2007 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyIn a World Without Oil:
You've heard from a lot of alarmists now that gasoline and diesel prices are so much higher. People are talking about the grid falling apart, the sky falling, etc. It's just not so.
I personally have been involved in two incidents that were fairly shocking: an idiot transporting gasoline in the passenger compartment of his SUV; and an attempted tanker hijacking from a pipeline facility in which four criminals were killed and a security guard and police officer each seriously wounded. These were exceptions, certainly not the general rule.
I want to be very clear about this. Life is going on. In the heart of the Silicon Valley economic engine, one could almost pretend that things are normal.
People have had to change their comfortable habits. People have to think about where to go to shop. You just don't get in your car and go for a cruise around the block. You have to think and plan. You do your errands, those few that can't be done from your computer, as part of your commute. You budget carefully. Corporate travel is less popular. Vacations are more likely to be taken at home. Long commutes equal job changes.
What has really been affected is the tourist communities, the small towns, the independent gasoline dealers and small stores and businesses, the nomadic RVers, the owner-operator truckers and commercial fishermen . . . they are hurting, let there be no doubt.
They are marginalized, further off the map. Only through the Internet are some of their stories being told. However, the Internet is bringing these small towns a dose of practical advice and a bigger dose of hope.
I have to wonder a bit. Did the "Powers That Be" create this oil crisis specifically to achieve this objective -- to tighten up the rural / urban divide, to create a disparity of poverty between the Oil Haves and the Have Nots?
A 50% to 100% increase in oil prices honestly isn't much for the Great Center. We'll deal. But when you're barely scraping along, whether you're working poor or a poor community . . . it's a harsh hit. Not to mention places utterly dependent on HVAC, either the frigid North or the humid South. California's weather is comparatively mild. What is this winter going to be like for the East Coast? Or this summer for places uninhabitable without A/C?
This is the silent media story. We hear constantly about incidents here, incidents there, fear mongering and panic and what-if scenarios. What we don't hear about is what Heinlein called "the quiet desperate struggle for survival that takes place in every home in the land." Everyday people trying to get by, and getting squeezed. Tighter every week.
But to question the rightness of this is to question the underpinnings of American economics. Capitalism and the free market. Is the energy market truly free? Clearly it is not, with so much regulation and price supports and emerging technologies sometimes pushed and sometimes handicapped.
We need to do for energy what the Internet did for information. Create a medium of exchange more efficient than 90% loss electrical wires and 30% loss fossil fuels. Instead of depending on your wall sockets to work, make your own power and store it and be efficient with it. From biodiesel and ethanol to DC and solar and windpower . . . the tools are out there.
Just some musings to distract from my day job. Making the world safe for capital.
You've heard from a lot of alarmists now that gasoline and diesel prices are so much higher. People are talking about the grid falling apart, the sky falling, etc. It's just not so.
I personally have been involved in two incidents that were fairly shocking: an idiot transporting gasoline in the passenger compartment of his SUV; and an attempted tanker hijacking from a pipeline facility in which four criminals were killed and a security guard and police officer each seriously wounded. These were exceptions, certainly not the general rule.
I want to be very clear about this. Life is going on. In the heart of the Silicon Valley economic engine, one could almost pretend that things are normal.
People have had to change their comfortable habits. People have to think about where to go to shop. You just don't get in your car and go for a cruise around the block. You have to think and plan. You do your errands, those few that can't be done from your computer, as part of your commute. You budget carefully. Corporate travel is less popular. Vacations are more likely to be taken at home. Long commutes equal job changes.
What has really been affected is the tourist communities, the small towns, the independent gasoline dealers and small stores and businesses, the nomadic RVers, the owner-operator truckers and commercial fishermen . . . they are hurting, let there be no doubt.
They are marginalized, further off the map. Only through the Internet are some of their stories being told. However, the Internet is bringing these small towns a dose of practical advice and a bigger dose of hope.
I have to wonder a bit. Did the "Powers That Be" create this oil crisis specifically to achieve this objective -- to tighten up the rural / urban divide, to create a disparity of poverty between the Oil Haves and the Have Nots?
A 50% to 100% increase in oil prices honestly isn't much for the Great Center. We'll deal. But when you're barely scraping along, whether you're working poor or a poor community . . . it's a harsh hit. Not to mention places utterly dependent on HVAC, either the frigid North or the humid South. California's weather is comparatively mild. What is this winter going to be like for the East Coast? Or this summer for places uninhabitable without A/C?
This is the silent media story. We hear constantly about incidents here, incidents there, fear mongering and panic and what-if scenarios. What we don't hear about is what Heinlein called "the quiet desperate struggle for survival that takes place in every home in the land." Everyday people trying to get by, and getting squeezed. Tighter every week.
But to question the rightness of this is to question the underpinnings of American economics. Capitalism and the free market. Is the energy market truly free? Clearly it is not, with so much regulation and price supports and emerging technologies sometimes pushed and sometimes handicapped.
We need to do for energy what the Internet did for information. Create a medium of exchange more efficient than 90% loss electrical wires and 30% loss fossil fuels. Instead of depending on your wall sockets to work, make your own power and store it and be efficient with it. From biodiesel and ethanol to DC and solar and windpower . . . the tools are out there.
Just some musings to distract from my day job. Making the world safe for capital.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 07:31 am (UTC)There may actually be something relatively affordable to do about that. More and more big electrical power plants have been built as natural gas turbines for the last 10 years, because they're easier to get environmental permits for, and because natural gas was perceived as so cheap as to be nearly free. It's not, of course, and temporarily losing our only completed LPNG terminal to Katrina hurt the natural gas supply in America a lot, but the World Without Natural Gas is a lot farther off than the World Without Oil. And we already have natural gas lines run to almost every suburban and urban building in America. And what with all the electrical grid problems we were having even before the events of the last four or five months, more and more people were already buying natural gas backup generators.
Maybe that trend needs to be encouraged? And maybe combined with some kind of fuel cell technology to store power during off peak times and supplement the generator during peak times? It's not cheap, no. But neither is building new power plants, whether they have to run on coal or oil or uranium. If we're losing that much of what we generate to long distance transmission, maybe it's long distance transmission that's the habit we need to break?