What if Gas Cost $100/gal?

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4048

by ph0rque • 18 years ago

16 49 18 years ago

What if pigs could fly?

EDIT

To clarify, it's ridiculous to just make a conjecture like this and build a case around it. The same thing could be done for anything else, not just gas and the current state of the economy. If the foundation of the article is this wild, then any of its conclusions are just as off-base and pointless.

easp• 18 years ago

1. How do you know that the foundation of this article is wild?

2. Have you read the article? It's a thought experiment. It's meant to provoke thought and discussion. He's asking people to consider and share what they would do if gas hit a price where business as usual was clearly untenable and there would be no choice but to change consumption patterns.

coglethorpe• 18 years ago

If gas was $100 a gallon, I'd have an electric car and hopefully only one car. The real changes would come from society at large. I hope employers would get serious about telecommuting, for as many employees as possible. Maybe they'd get more serious about using satellite offices.

I'd use electronic means to communicate more and more and I assume others would as well. It would have to bridge the gap of distance that separates us. I'd probably get to know my neighbors a lot better as well. I'd go local for more than food. I'd have no choice.

alaskamiller2• 18 years ago

Would electricity costs be relative enough for an electric car to still make sense? What about goods and products that you buy that's shipped on the massive fleet of trucks?

A sudden surge to $100 a gallon gas destroys civilization.

tomjen• 18 years ago

Rail. Ships with sails.

Humans can take a lot more shit than they are given credit for.

jmilton• 18 years ago

How was this downmodded? An incredible rise in gasoline prices would surely have a profoundly major upward effect on energy pricing. The entire economic structure of American society would be utterly destroyed.

Technology isn't so great if people cannot afford or even get access to food. A more productive exercise would be to imagine that we simply had to half our personal energy use. Merely shifting away from gasoline is not the answer.

umjames• 18 years ago

Then let the gas prices rise! So far, we're up to $4/gal here.

Telecommuting FTW! I know I'd hate my job less if I could telecommute full-time. My equipment at home is better than what I have to work on at the office.

ilamont• 18 years ago

I hope most people will be biking long before we get close to that level:

http://bikeworker.blogspot.com/

jrockway• 18 years ago

Exactly.

Oh, they might buy a smaller car, but they aren't going to start walking 3 miles to the store.

Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid. However, riding 3 miles on your bike is trivial. You'll be there in 15 minutes. I do this about twice a week, and driving wouldn't be any faster than biking.

I think the reason people don't consider biking is because bikes in america are weird. Everyone wants to get a very cool mountain bike. Then it rides poorly on the street, and it can't carry anything, so they assume bikes are useless. I noticed that when I was in Tokyo, every bike on the street was of the useful variety. They all had chain guards, fenders, and racks, which makes casual riding an enjoyable experience. Maybe if you could go to a bike shop and see bikes like this, people would use them for grocery shopping.

In the US, it appears that most people think bikes are a fun thing to ride to kill time on the weekend. I wish we could change that perception somehow.

</rant>

pohart• 18 years ago

> Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid.

What is stupid about that? Every day at lunch a group of 4 of us go on a three mile walk. Most days we stroll and it takes an hour.

  If I had my own cart I could certainly do that once a week.

OK, so no more meat every day, but I could still have eggs every day and milk some days. And I still wouldn't need to use any refrigeration. And since I live within 3 miles of several farms and have a bike, I could make a few milk/meat trips a week. I would probably be drinking sheep's milk and eating mutton more, because that is what is close, but that still sounds fine.

Tichy6• 18 years ago

Since there were so many scaremongering articles in the news lately, I thought about the same problem recently.

I guess I should be worried, but honestly my first thought is always "finally we'll get rid of those pesky cars". I hate cars so much (swallowing their exhausts every day cycling to work), that I think my joy over car-free cities will outweigh most downsides of the expensive energy.

Personally I don't need a car, I could probably do without a fridge, and I don't really need long distance travel very much. Heating could be a problem.

gaius2• 18 years ago

If you'll forgive me, that's a very metropolitan attitude. For huge swathes of the country (including, umm, the bits that provide all the produce to the stores so you can shop whenever you feel like and don't need the means to transport large loads yourself) motor vehicles (including pick-up trucks and other "gas guzzlers") are pretty much essential.

It's all very well to be smug about how high gas prices hurt yuppies in SUVs, but they hurt lots of regular working folks too.

maw3• 18 years ago

It may hurt regular working folks, who or whatever they are, but it's hard to feel very sorry for them.

helveticaman2• 18 years ago

How feasible is using horseback for small distances?

Tichy6• 18 years ago

I realize that trucks, and industrial machinery will still be necessary, but I can't imagine that the car avalanche is necessary that is polluting our cities every day.

I am sorry, but most people could easily switch to public transport or cycling for their daily commute, and they would be healthier for it. That goes for European cities anyway - maybe in the US you are out of luck without a car.

Also, where I live there is a tax reduction for living outside of the city. Obviously that has to go away. If you decide to live outside the city, why shouldn't you have to pay for it.

Please list who am I hurting with my stance on cars, I would honestly be interested and would like to take it into consideration.

hugh4• 18 years ago

Y'know, I cycle to work every day too, but that doesn't mean I want to be a dick to everybody who doesn't.

Tichy6• 18 years ago

I don't want to be a dick to anybody, I just don't like cars. It's nothing personal.

jon_dahl• 18 years ago

$100/gallon gas would do a lot more than slow down commuting. It would make air travel prohibitively expensive (thousands or tens of thousands to fly anywhere - fuel is already the biggest cost at any airline with $100/barrel oil). Shipping would also be seriously impacted; the 20% savings on a radio made in China would be offset by transportation costs. $4 winter strawberries from Chile would be no more. That, and global recession. Personally, sounds to me like some good and some bad.

pchristensen• 18 years ago

America would look a lot like it did during the Great Depression. People wouldn't travel much, more things would be produced locally because shipping would be expensive, people would live closer together (both in proximity and density), people would eat local produce because out-of-season foods would be expensive to ship, etc. Things like digital content, electronics, etc would seem extremely cheap ($500 for iPod touch or 5 gallons of gas), while other things like wine, strawberries, air travel, etc would be extravagant luxuries. It wouldn't be like the poverty of the great depression, but a lot of things we take for granted now would get very, very expensive.

On the other hand, the high shipping costs would make local labor a lot more economical for manufacturing, maintenance, etc.

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

People traveled a lot during the Great Depression. That's when hobos, okies, migrant workers, and Route 66 entered popular culture. Much of California was settled during the 1930s, as emigrants from the dust-bowl states moved to the Central Valley and LA areas. One of the fastest-growing professions was "gas station attendant", and the Depression years featured the consolidation of the auto industry.

jmzachary2• 18 years ago

Yep, a lot of us would have to adopt the hobo life and cut other people with our hobo knife.

petercooper4• 18 years ago

> Things like [..] electronics, etc would seem extremely cheap ($500 for iPod touch or 5 gallons of gas)

Almost certainly not, unfortunately. That iPod Touch would be significantly more expensive due to the shipping costs and the massively increased production costs. Anything that contains plastic would be far more expensive (since we'd be looking at a circa $3000 barrel of oil).

steveplace• 18 years ago

This is the wrong question.

The real question is:

What will be the economic and social implications if the current trend (up) of commodity prices given the timeframe (fast) were to continue.

Just to note: statistically, oil prices peak around this time. Oil prices do tend to be seasonal, so be on the lookout for that.

hugh4• 18 years ago

Basically we'd almost all starve to death. Transporting food would become uneconomical. Hell, harvesting food would become uneconomical. The trickle of food which got into urban areas would sell for insanely high prices. The rich would still be able to afford it for a while, but with the whole economy collapsing and widescale starvation the rich wouldn't stay that way for long. Rural folks might be able to survive for a while, until the looters came pouring out of the cities and into the countryside (on foot, presumably) looking for food.

Eventually we'd be able to re-establish some kind of civilization (pseudo-steampunk?) with a severely reduced population, but there'd be all sorts of bad stuff to happen in between now and then.

aaronblohowiak• 18 years ago

don't forget where our fertilizer comes from.

jimbokun• 18 years ago

Yea, once I started thinking about the obvious kinds of things you mention, I couldn't take the article's premise seriously any more.

pricees• 18 years ago

I already started an article "In Defense of $20/gal gas" on

http://showtimeoncapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-defense-...

I got bored and quit because I thought it was pretty clear to anyone with relative intelligence exactly what would occur.

DougBTX• 18 years ago

I'm just waiting for the Ron Paul posts now, and the transition will be complete...

rms• 18 years ago

Cycles of stories happen here, this peak oil post was triggered by the higher voted electric car conversion story. It'll be gone in a day.

eyudkowsky• 18 years ago

At some point it becomes economical to synthesize fuel using nuclear power plants. I would expect this to be well short of $100/gal.

petercooper4• 18 years ago

Just for posterity, and so I can look this back up in a year's time, but.. I predict an oil price crash by this time next year. If we're not under $50/barrel by summer 2009, I'd be surprised.

I can't cite any great insights here, but I've tended to notice that when everyone jumps on the bandwagon of saying something bad is going to happen, some price is going to rise forever, or the like, the opposite tends to occur within a certain timeframe. It's now happening with property prices (and I remember the bulls just one year ago..) and it'll happen with oil. Same happens with memory prices too.

jmzachary2• 18 years ago

That's hard to say. One can make the argument for a price crash as speculators have flooded into the oil and commodities markets and bid up prices. There is a lot of fear of peak <insert finite natural resource>. Once people got tired of it, prices would drop.

On the other hand, oil is a finite natural resource that has been pumped out of the ground for decades at an increasing rate. Only severely retarded politicians don't believe in peak oil or believe that oil is an infinite resource (they also believe in ghosts, so there). Thanks to China, India, and other countries deciding they want some basic level of civilization, the rate of increase in the rate of increase of demand means oil supplies and proven reserves are going down fast. That means there might not be a price crash and in a few years we will look at $6/gallon for gasoline as the good ole days.

petercooper4• 18 years ago

Everything is finite. It all depends on /how/ finite things are. Technological advances, increases in efficiency, and the influence of competing technologies (electric, hydrogen, liquid propane gas, and so forth) will all have a role to play.

It is typically very hard to accept that these things can have a big effect, but that doesn't mean they won't (nor, of course, that they must, but the odds are better that they will). The price of oil will be as "immaterial" within 50 years as the prices of horses or gas lamps were immaterial in 1940 compared to 1890.

What if Gas Cost $100/gal?

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