I was at a local truck pull on Friday night. Astonishing! I will do a post about it perhaps.

"I think rationing of fuel is in our future...same with food." These and the water rationing you mention later should be happening now everywhere. We live on a very limited planet which we are rapidly using up. Yet our "economy" is based on consuming as much as you can possibly afford--in fact much more than you can afford. This is an insane, eco-cidal, terra-cidal, and ultimately suicidal system. It has to stop, and the sooner the better. Put all those who can't figure this out in locked, high-security insane asylums for treatment.

I have a hard time seeing nationalization ever happening. The corporate lobbyists have far too much influence. Witness the way the climate bills got watered down and altered to suit the needs of various constituencies. And the same thing will happen with health care reform. Although it was interesting to see how the auto companies seem to have completely lost favor in Washington, whereas Wall St could more or less write the terms and conditions for their own bailouts.

The problem with rationing is how do you decide who gets how much, and how do you prevent people from gaming the system? You might have an elderly person who never drives any more - the kids would be fighting over the ration stamps. You might know someone who has a farm and has an increased allotment, and hence you might find people getting extra from there. You might know someone who has a company that delivers stuff - would that company get an increased allotment? There are all kinds of scenarios, and if too much cheating is perceived to exist, then the credibility of the whole thing is shot.

Last year we already saw gas thefts when gas hit 5$/gallon - primarily larger trucks and SUVs as these have larger tanks and hence more to steal.

I agree with you Robert -- Nationalization of the major public oils will likely become a serious topic. I'm not sure if it will be huge prices or real shortages that drive it to the forefront though. If we want to offer ideas in this thread it would be beneficial for folks to define exactly what they mean. “Nationalization” it self is at best ambiguous and at worst meaningless. I think any practical (and achievable) response to the worst effects of PO will require some form of significant involvement of the gov’t in the free market system IMO. But I doubt taking ownership of the companies would ever be a serious. olks upset about pump prices might fantasize about such possibilities but it’s good to remember that ExxonMobil isn’t owned by Mr. XOM. It’s owned by the American people. Destroying trillions of $’s of the retirement accounts of citizenship, including many union members won’t happen IMO.

But I do believe there has to be some sort of coordinated efforts between the private sector and the gov’t. I can’t see any real progress on any front given the volatility we’ve seen in the market. A few months ago low oil prices killed much of the incentives for alternatives. Even with prices climbing I doubt much capital will be funneled that way without some certainty that those prices will stay elevated for many years. I personally haven’t been able to come up with any model that is politically doable. Maybe some of the clever folks here have some ideas worth sharing

If there is rationing, I am going to make sure I get my share and turn around and resell it for an income. It is the form of cap-and-trade for individuals.

It would be easier if the Gov issued gas consumption rights coupons. This would be easier to trade than gas cans that have to be hauled around.

Would I be right in thinking that an increasing proportion of the crude being heavy would be shifting the balance towards more diesel and less gasoline?

Terrible place NZ, highly overrated

The people are really unfriendly, it's crowded, the climate is shite.

V unfertile soils.

Hardly any high ground to escape the rising sea levels.

Great coffee though, and the occasional good wine.

The Caribbean is a much better place to tough out the arrival of the horsemen....

I'd go there.

/sarcasm

(anyone who wants to come on down and help build some kind of functional public transport would be very welcome though)

"It's possible, for example, that Wisconsin or Alberta will be much better places to tough out the coming changes."

I don't think there is any one ideal place. Alberta has a cool dry climate with lots of petroleum and agriculture, but in the winter when it goes to -35C for a week I listen to my furnace running and try not to think of next month's natural gas bill. Other places don't get winter but they have brutal humidity (never mentioned in radio forecasts here because always dry), summer heat (we don't need air conditioners in Calgary), hurricanes (we get blizzards but they don't require evacuating cities), earthquakes (we are on a stable geosyncline), and kleptocratic governments (one reason the oilsands are so popular is because Alberta doesn't nationalize like Venezuela). No matter where you live, there's always something.

Would love to hear more about NZ as this does seem a very attractive place.

Water, food and energy pretty well positioned to navigate future disruptions. Increased west coast rainfall long term, decent ag and tremendous renewable energy resources in hydro and wind. V. low corruption. Apparently low fraction of religous zealots. Existing N-S rail line. Would never assume that it is any easier to get things done, just that some of the inherent advantages mitigate difficulty of dealing with change.

Excluding distance from family, biggest negatives that jump out from my 9000 mile view are
- high property values urban & rural
- purchasing power parity about 60% of USA

What else am I missing?

The problem with the first wave of peak oilers is that we are too technical, unversed in the skills of persuasion.

I resemble that remark. Speaking of technical stuff, our upcoming update to the top five net exporter paper will address both net export flow rates and cumulative remaining net oil exports. For example, using 1996 as Indonesia's final production peak, their 1998 net exports were only down by 9% from their 1996 rate, but by the end of 1998, they had shipped 44% of their post-1996 cumulative net oil exports.

I've done some hand drawn graphs, as drafts for our upcoming paper, that I will e-mail you. Based on Sam's work, I estimate that in just the 12 months since oil prices hit $134 (monthly average) in June, 2008, the top five net oil exporters shipped about 7% of their post-2005 cumulative net oil exports (roughly one percent every 50 days). I estimate that by the end of next year, they will have shipped about one-third of their post-2005 cumulative net oil exports (one third gone in five years).

Mexico, our #3 source of imported oil, will probably have shipped about 90% of their post-2004 cumulative net oil exports by the end of 2004.

Regarding what to do as the bidding war for declining net oil exports heats up again, the primary contributor to US fuel prices is the world price of oil. Absent the use of force, we will have to bid the price up enough to bring the oil here. I believe that we are currently importing on the order of 55% to 60% of our total liquids consumption.

Everyone, every country, all over the world is wasting everything to keep the American Empire afloat. Soon we will face an even larger problem when the Chinese all want to be like Americans. How is it that so many people claim to hate American and what it stands for, but want to have all the crap they have?

Doesn't that make them, us... me just as bad??

Once you start living the "American Lifestyle" you literally get addicted to all these things that you don't even need.

Every article on this topic should mention the IEA's Saving Oil in a Hurry, which doesn't leave out the impact political figures can have with advocacy campaigning. How effective actions like that would be in a rationing situation is impossible to guess, of course. We'd like to think people were more noble minded in the past about propriety, but in the early 30s Texas oil glut you had "hot oil," i.e. bunkering, i.e. theft, such as we did in the last few years, documented in the Gasoline and Diesel Thefts Thread if you want to take a little walk down memory lane.

Preventing theft would be as pressing an issue as rationing. How to deter the thieves using vans with holes in the bottom from tapping gas station tanks? Then you'd need to guard tank farms more effectively - this would have to be a 24/7 operation with rotating shifts of guards. But after that you face the prospect of thieves tapping product pipelines, which have above ground markers showing where they are to prevent damage from backhoes etc. You could tear all those out I suppose. But still you have the occasional wellhead marking lines.

Was interested to find that the National Pipeline Mapping System (NPMS) obfuscates the location of these lines for security reasons:

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 placed additional security concerns on the U.S. pipeline infrastructure. As a result, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration restricts access to the NPMS to federal, state, and local government agencies (including emergency responders). Pipeline operators are allowed access to their own pipeline data only.

I agree. When oil went to $147, even some of my neighbors were walking to the grocery store. People pulled out their bicycles and gave them a tune-up.

The framing of the message is important though and it is equally important to realize that people do things for their reasons, not our reasons. How do we attract some marketing wizards to TOD to help us with an appealing message.

The reality is that the solution is profoundly simple and no farther away than the end of your nose:
Stop driving.

Not so much profoundly simple as profoundly impossible for me and my neighbours. There are 20 cars between 116 households here. The chairman of the residents of a neighbouring area says he has used no other mode of transport than walking in the past 2 years. And from my windows I see a lot of others walking and cycling. A six-year old Alfa Romeo untaxed the last five months, a sign of the times?

I'm firmly in the Orlovian Camp ~ "Ignore National Politicians - they are a colossal waste of time..."

I've been saying that myself for years, following my experience of the uselessness of campaigning. But it's a message that meets intense resistance. People want to believe that their "leaders" really are sensible and capable of wanting to help the society in general. And the propaganda is quite sophisticated. Just now the uk parliament is in disgrace (you may have heard) and yet I bet that within 2-3 yrs there'll be many true believers still sucking up to them.[assuming there are still leaders and a national govt by then]

Thanks for your personal support but I assure you I have all the human frailties that got us into this mess. In retrospect it may be selfish to continue the flailing because it is so much fun. The past five years I've met so many incredible people, learned about subjects that continue to intrigue me, and PO has taken me back to one of my favorite things--the garden. When I read posts like yours and others I wish I could sit down and speak with you face to face, to hear your stories and find a way to connect you into the fun I am having. So, Mr. SendOil, if you're in SoCal, give me a ring...

Time for the voting buttons again, one up!

I too, have stopped the proselytizing, and have moved onto looking after my own with like minded people. I also try not to get married to one expected outcome or the other, but to keep my eyes and ears open and adapt. I've been wrong before (once!), and I'll probably be wrong again.

What I have noticed over the last few years is how my circle of acquaintances, cohorts, and friends has been changing away from the typical engineering professional to the community sustainable. Perhaps our social programming over the past 100 years or so has conditioned us to value some professions more than others, but I find myself giving equal weight to the story tellers and medical healers, as I do to the technocrati.

How does it go? I went away to a better place to leave my problems behind, but I found they were still there. There is not any nirvana on earth for escaping PO impacts, there are only those with slightly better chances. That is why we moved back to western Canada. The only short coming is they have paved over, or sub-divided most of the prime agricultural land, otherwise we could be self sustaining. Oh, and there will be the hoards of hungry, destitute, pissed-off, gun toting 'Merikans to the south - kidding. To believe our futures and outcomes are independent of each other is folly.

Rationing, now there's a pickle. For rationing to truly work, one has to go to the root of the problem. I still recall a colleague telling me how they rationed bread in WWII Switzerland. You weren't allowed to sell bread on the first day. Simple, eh? Fresh bread gets wolfed down immediately (guilty as charged), and day-old bread gets used more slowly. As they say in Guinness, "Brilliant!!" I postulate fuel rationing will come in the form of food rationing. Diminishing fuel will increasingly be allocated to key food production and transportation, thereby decreasing discretionary uses.

One positive effect that came to mind right away while pondering my own situation, is will this bring families closer together geographically? My parents live 500 km away and if fuel is rationed by whatever means, how will I plan my travels? Can we devise a method that can make hitch-hiking safe and reliable again?

Hmmm, good food for thought on a Sunday morning (PDT).

Knowing the current state of "markets" in the U.S., I imagine the ration coupon market will be either all black, imaginary, or broken. I can see the scams now. If they want to continue the spiraling devolution of American society, have at 'er.

How long would it take someone to figure out they can get gas coupons for a vehicle that doesn't actually operate because it needs $2,000 in parts, but they can trade the coupons for street drugs? If the U.S. wants to ensure a fairly equitable and safe rationing system, I wouldn't make them transferable.

"I hope folks realize that there may be a bit of a paradox coming if we go to some kind of rationing: It is possible that how much you are allowed to have will be based on your current consumption."

It's a good point, but not likely, at least at first. For that to work, they would have to keep some kind of records for how much you use. There are no such records right now. After the rationing had been running for a while, they may build up that information. So, if you don't use your ration, you lose the excess the next time around. Sensible people will use their full ration or figure out some way to sell it rather than lose some.

The real problem will be the people who want more ration and can't get it. If the ration is tradeable, like Martin Feldstein has called for for some time, then there's no problem, since people who use less can sell the excess.

I don't expect rationing until we go to war with China. I'm not expecting that for eight years or so, just based on the Great Depression/WWII history. Until then or some surprise event, I expect we'll stick to rationing by price. It's working fairly well at the moment.

Debbie,

I would have liked to discuss the propaganda aspect, but really, what can we say about it? The government and environmental groups are already involved in propaganda involving climate change, and it has had some effect, but much of the effort so far has been in "greenwashing" products so the company making them can get some of the pressure off their backs. But "greenwashing" is a form of propaganda, and it plants the seed that we SHOULD probably be using less carbon releasing energy, but without the stick of rationing, why would we? Why would I, who alrady consume very little in the way of energy compared with my much more prosperous neighbors, desire to cut even more so they can use more?

Without the stick of rationing, the best propaganda is (a) peer pressure, and (b)transparent efficiency. We saw the peer pressure work in the 1970's when the "big barge" Cadillacs and Lincolns and the custom vans became a mark of stupidity, not status, for those who drove them, so they were quickly disavowed by the "in" crowd. We are seeing it now with SUV's and Hummers, especially the latter. What a turn of events for the owners of those, envied one day and seemingly only days later laughed off the block and blamed for all the ills of the nation and the world!

Transparent efficiency is to me fascinating. This is achieved by the introduction of technology in such a way so that the efficiency of consumption goes up radically without the customer even knowing it! the fuel efficiency of drivetrains in vehicles through the last two decades are a great example of this, but the propaganda of the auto companies was used to sell weight, size and performance instead of fuel efficiency, so the overall fleet fuel mileage did not improve, but the performance and size of the vehicles climbed by staggering amounts.

What this means is that when the public decides or are compelled to come back to more efficient sized and performing vehicles, the fuel mileage of thse vehicles will be astounding. In the old days, a tiny box of almost no performance such as the Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel or the Ford Fiesta or Dodge Colt was needed to get above 38 miles per gallon. Now, a midsize sophisticated well performing car such as the Mercury Milan Hybrid or Toyota Camry Hybrid can do it, and provide performance better than even performance cars did only 30 years ago.

The problem with propaganda is that it must be ABSOLUTELY CORRECT and it must be very sophisticated, or it can do more harm to the cause it intends to support than good. When I was a child, the environmental movement had thse heavy handed commercials on showing the year 2000, with a father and son out in a desert with oxygen tanks and space suits on, telling us that all the trees would be gone by the time the kid grew up. I was that kid, and at the time it terrified me. Now my memory of how idiotic the commercial was causes me to take anything said by the environmental community with a grain of salt, a big one.

Oh by the way, in the case of WWII, the propaganda in the "Fibber" radio comedy states accurately the REAL reason for conserving gasoline: It was not to save the gasoline, which the U.S. had plenty of, but to conserve rubber (tires). In recent years some folks havecome to believe that the U.S. was short of gasoline to fight the war, but nothing could be further from the truth: During WWII the U.S. was the BIGGEST producer of crude oil in the world, and shipped crude oil to our allies.

Now a fascinating point of discussion: Where did all the excesss oil and gasoline go? Remember, all construction and steel was being used in the war effort, even train tracks were being pulled up and scrapped, so there could have been no building of storage tanks to put the extra oil and gasoline in...so WHERE DID IT GO?

I know the answer, because this was something of a controversy when it was revealed after the war, and oldtimers such as Andy Rooney and others of that era have mentioned it several times (Andy at least once mentioned it on "60 Minutes" back in the 1970's in his dismissal of the energy crisis in that period), and as late as the 1980's I had personal friends, old men who were friends and customers of my businesses then, who were personally involved in the program...but I will see if anyone wants to discuss this and tell me where all that excess crude oil and gasoline went before I say...and there was A LOT of it, millions of barrels.

Debbie, I was hoping more folks would want to discuss old time radio...I can tell your a fan! What a period that was! I still love the old time radio shows when I can find them, and the music from that period was excellent. We could use streaming audio on the internet that way and produce whole little sound dramas if we were willing, they would be cheap and easy to broadcast...a sort of a middle ground between "books on tape" and video...would anyone listen?
It could be a fun hobby just to see,

But for now, again, the quiz: WHERE DID ALL THE EXCESS OIL AND GASOLINE GO IN WWII?, since the massive rationing was to save tires, not oil?

RC

Debbie;
I know what you mean.. while I've had to remember that in posting responses, I can't make any secondary points that could act like red meat and upstage the key point I wanted to address.

It's a bit like asking a challenging, compound question at a Q&A or a political debate. You will probably get an answer to the 'easier part' of your question, while the tough one is magically left behind..

Your Point about there being 'Various Possible Responses' is well taken, and that there are a lot of different directions things surely can turn. The conversation here can very quickly become a kind of Target Practice where posters follow the old edict of 'What's WRONG with this picture?' .. because debate and argument is so rooted in Identifying Errors.. and yet I have to remind myself to look at proposals with the question of "What's RIGHT with this picture?", in order to find the potential fruit in an idea that may not work as a whole... as we look for BB's (or Blueberries, as some prefer to call it..), I think that question needs to be on our minds in order to recheck proposals that have come and gone because of incidental, but not necessarily fundamental problems. (Like Solar Hot Water, which had a misguided incentive program and lot of scam artists giving it a bad rep in the late seventies.. but which could offset just massive amounts of Oil Propane and NGas use throughout the country)

Thanks for the article!
Bob Fiske

WNC Observer, to your point about "wartime footing", I was frankly astounded we did not go to rationing after the attack on 9/11/01. What an opportunity we missed! People were ready to sacrifice in a way they had not been since WWII. Instead we stalled and ended up having the recession/crash last year that we were so afraid of then. "pay now or pay later"

RC