Petrol Prices

Remove all ads!

I don't believe that technological energy advances will be the solution. I believe that we will have to change the way we all live our lives. The whole concept of travelling overseas for holidays and commuting from the suburbs and eating imported food is predicated on the availability of cheap petrol.

I think that in the future we will have re-arrange our lives so that we simply don't travel as much or as far. In other words, the 20th century may be a bit of a historical anomaly and we'll go back to living in smaller physical communities. We'll end up placing more reliance on electronic telecommunication for many things, but you can't send a banana via email so we'll have to eat stuff that has been produced near home.

 

Very insightful, HB - and I hope to God you're right. Unfortunately, my boss and neighbors back in Texas who drive Hummers are the people who are going to make such change a long time in coming. Republicans in my country chomping at the bit to drill in ANWR aren't helping much either (and are usually the same people).

 

I don't think anyone particularly WANTS to make that change. I just think it will be forced upon us gradually, as petrol prices keep rising and alternative enegy sources prove to be not as cheap or easy as we hoped.

 

And that's the problem; they won't until they are forced to. But I disagree, I think that there will be technology that will at least begin to shift America away from it's love of cheap gasoline, since before long, there won't be anymore (at least on the cheap) gasoline.

 

I'm with CtR on this one as well. I do not think that at any time soon people will be forced to do this. The only way I can see this happening is if no advances are made at all in alternative fuel sources. I do not expect these alternatives to be cheap at the start, but as the price of oil continues to rise, these alternative sources become more and more viable options. As more people start using these sources, it will become more available and commonplace.

That having been said, there are going to be tough decisions in the years ahead. I think, for example, that to meet our electricity demands it may be necessary to go back to nuclear power. The newest nuclear reactor in the U.S. was completed in 1997, but there hasn't been a new reactor approved for construction since the 1980s. (The one in Tennessee that was completed in 1997 had construction begin on it about 12 years earlier.) After events like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (20th anniversity yesterday) people have been understandably reluctant to use nuclear power. However, we may be getting to the point where there might not be other options.

Rising gas prices may eventually make it prohibitive to own and non-hybrid vehicle. That technology is also rapidly improving. It is possible that 10 years from now the only car you'll be able to purchase is a hybrid.

 

You seem to be dead bend to keep "individualverkerh". One of the problems is archetectonical, in some countries, cities were wrongly planned and built, taking individualverkehr as an eternal constant, ommitting public transport and sprawling all over the landscape, which makes redeeming the earlier wrong decisions costly and problematic.

Public transport, i.e. transport of more than 1 person at a time, has the obvious advantage of being more efficient.

Or, indivualverkehr à la Brazil, why not the Brazilian sugar solution?

As for nuclear power... doing it the French way?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

 

I need some help with this:

1. What is indivualverkehr? If it doesn't translate well to English, can you at least explain approximately what it means?

2. What was the Brazilian sugar solution? I was not even aware of a sugar problem that requried a solution.

3. How does the "French way" of using nuclear power differ from the standard (presumably non-French) way?

 

Ok. Individualverkehr, is one of those German words one can't live without. I know of no English word that can replace it, that's why I left it (like Waldsterben, Schwarzwälder und Kindergarten) (Not to be confused with non-German words like birchermüesli) . It means transport (verkehr) alone, as an indivdual -> a pedestrant, bicycle driver or with a motorised vehicel -> car, motorcycle. In contrast to public transport (öffentlicher Verkehr), like train and bus.

Brazil is a traditional sugar-producing country. After the oil crisises of the seventies, they decided to drive their cars by sugar/alcohol.

Here's a wikipedia link about brazil: sugar

France is the only European country that has so many nuclear plants, is the biggest producer and exporter of nuclear energy in Europe and the least oil dependent (It's the British and the French that have the strictest anti-oil policiy (british oil-taxes) because atom-bombs are nothing if one is dependend on oil from countries one can not control)

 

With my admittedly limited knowledge of German, it seems like a great many German words fall into this category, in that they don't translate particularly well to any other language. It seems like when Germans need a new word for something, they basically take two or more words that describe the new word and smush them together to make a new word. I think they are unique in this regard.

So it's not like France does anything differently in their nuclear reactors than other countries do? They are unusual in the number that they have, not in the way they use them? I agree that 58 is quite a lot for a country the size of France. I just looked up a list of the U.S. nuclear sites, and it turns out France may have the most of any country, as in the entire U.S. there are only 33. The whole of Russia has just 9!

 

Here's an article which was forwarded to me by Jack Funk. It makes some good points about the politics of oil:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/26/AR2006042602307_pf.html

 

France has 58 nuclear power plants vs. 33 for US; but France has a population about 4 times smaller... and their energy consumption should also be many times smaller than that of US. So it is really different for them; I think they are one of a few countries whose energy needs are met mainly by nuclear power.

Oh, we will be going back to nuclear plants, no doubt. People have all sorts of dumb hangups when it comes to nuclear power, but that will go away pretty fast when gas will reach $5/gallon (or even more). I do not know if people in other parts of the world realizes how dependend americans are on cheap gas for transportation.

 

That's word-compostion, there are fine latin (or greek ?) grammar words that describe the two most common way of creating new words -> either hang to together with an of (declaration of independence) or put them together (independencedeclaration), but I can't remember them. (failure of memory makes them greek!)

I don't think word-composition is unique to German, as greek words have the same -> biology and not the logy of bio , geology and not the logy of geo. And I suspect slavic languages to do the same.

And word-composition isn't the problem with translation (a lation of trans). A word is usually contained when it's an artefact word, i.e. representing a new (or different) thing or a new (or different) thought. Pizza, liberalism, nuclear-energy, biology, al chemistry, kangaroo... (or at least the stay phoneticly the same or similar, like phonetic)

Or keep them as a different point of reference. Zeitgeist is another take on trend.

So, the problem with Individualverkehr is for me, I know of no English word than contains the same meaning. And meaning in a result of a thought. A thought that lead to a new word that contained new insight. Or at least a different point of view. Or a different system of definition. And individualverkehr comes from the contrast public and individual ways of transportation. And me thinks this is the product of a certain school of thought, i.e. of certain problem solving attempts that lead in the end to the defintion of words to describe the problem in a suitable way. And I think that it results in the focus on public transportation, at least in centra Europe, as means to get out of the hydrocarbonate trap.

 

Well, many people I know are already starting to do this, so I don't think it will be long before the rest of you are forced to look at things this way as well. I know people who are deliberately taking jobs much closer to home and who are riding bicycles to work, for no other reason than they can't afford to pay for the rising petrol prices. And we make far fewer trips down to Hamilton to see my wife's relatives, because the cost in petrol is so high.

 

Since nuclear power can only serve as basis of energy supply (meaning a steady but low powered output), the french needs cannot be met mainly by nuclear power plants. They are not flexible enough to react on rising and falling demand.

"Going back" to nuclear power is equally dumb, because the costs are at least as high as for gas, because nuclear power has to be heavily subsided. The investation costs for an nuclear plant are usually too high, so that a plant is not efficient under real market conditions.
The only difference is that the costs are hidden.

 

Hey Harbourboy - looks like our mayor has decided to go one step further and wants to charge us road tolls on top of high petrol prices and increased numbers of parking meters. Maybe he should look at the reasons why people choose to drive rather than utilise the hopeless Auckland public transport system.

 

Good point Tassadar. Although I'm lucky I live on the North Shore, where the recent improvements to bus stations and soon-to-be better bus lanes have meant that catching the bus to work is now super convenient for me. Much cheaper and faster than driving.

 

Nuclear plants might not be efficient now, but if the cost of other fuels increase, they will become efficient. And the more plants they build, the cheaper they become (as with all technologies). Also, if you take into account the environmental costs of burning coal, nuclear power starts to look much better.

IIRC, France relies on nuclear power because they lack alternate natural resources (like coal). They were smart this way, and rather than rely on imports (like US does with oil), they decided to go the alternate route. And while it is true that you cannot use exclusively nuclear power (because they cannot easily adapt to surges in demand), you can still use it for a significant portion (I think nuclear generated electricity takes care of roughly 75% of France's total energy use).

 

In relation to all other energy sources, nuclear plants are the most expensive by far. You need a whole lot of money to build one, they are a maintenance nightmare (that's why most of them only run for about 25 years, which is too short to be cost effective), atomic waste is a major problem (lack of a safe storage location), and now sane insurance agency will insure an power plant for the case of a major accident (the state bears the risk).

That may be. The technical side is a bit beyond me.

BUT: Due to the rising temperatures, France won't be able to hold this ratio. Nuclear plants have to be "tuned down" if the cooling water is getting too hot. Since a few years ago, that happens every summer at least in south France.

 

Yes, and I just did that. I went from the 25 miles I used to drive (one way), and now I'm only 9 miles from work. I'm so happy. And when the new house is finished, I'll be only 7 miles from my job.

 

@Fabius Maximum: Any large industrial plant takes buttloads of money to build, most of which is interest on the construction loans. THe problem with a nuclear power plant is that protesters and their lawsuits stretched out the commissioning process for so long that that interest REALLY piled up before the plants could go into operation and start paying for themselves. There's NOTHING unique about the construction process.

Also, the design lifetime of US nuclear plants is 40 years, and many plants are undergoing upgrades to extend that lifetime even farther.