Bill has an article about the City of Seattle's greenhouse gas reduction plan in today's PI. The article is titled City plan on cars could be a boon for suburbia and his argument is fundamentally flawed.
I am particularly glad that he mentioned "the Hubbert's Peak folks," but his main idea is founded upon an erroneous assumption: nothing will ever replace oil--there is no such thing as the magical "something else" he writes about. He should read Kenneth Deffeyes' book Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak. Deffeyes is an oil geologist and he worked with Hubbert for years. Hubbert applied his technique to U.S. oil production and accurately predicted the peak of U.S. oil production; Deffeyes has applied the same methodology to world oil production. In his book, he examines all of the potential replacements for oil, and methodically demonstrates that they are all non-starters.
The upshot is this: oil production has either already peaked or will within just a few years, and it will never go up again. When that happens, the cost of gasoline will skyrocket, and as a society we have not worked hard enough or long enough to prepare for the consequences. Yes, people like their cars, and I agree with him that they will not voluntarily stop driving them. But when gasoline costs $12, $15, or $20 a gallon (or when there is no gasoline at all) the suburbs he (and so many others) love so much--with their widely dispersed land uses and super-low density neighborhoods--will become functionally uninhabitable.
Think about that the next time you have to drive 3 miles for a gallon of milk.
No comments:
Post a Comment