In general I agree with you, but be realistic. Most Americans simply have no understanding of the coming issues with energy scarcity. It would have been nice to see them offer a sliding scale of "cash for clunkers" based on fuel mileage. Buy a truck, get nothing. Buy a Toyota Yaris, we'll give you a wad of cash. By a purely electric car and *ding ding ding* you've hit the jackpot.

If the government really wants to use public funds, forget the cars and offer "Cash for Urban Living". Buy a house in an urban area and we'll cover your property taxes on your behalf for 10 years.

One thing that concerns me are "averages." We have a number of cars/trucks that are used for different purposes. If one assumes that all vehicles are driven equally, we have rotten gas mileage.

My 1990 Dodge 1 ton 4x4 pickup gets about 10 mpg...but it's a ranch truck that is seldom driven of the highway whereas my wife's 2004 Corolla gets good gas mileage (30's before ethanol) but is used far more extensively.

We don't live in an area with traffic congestion or stop and go driving (hell, it's the boondocks) so it is likely that my old truck gets gas mileage on a vehicle mile traveled that is equal or better than many high MPG city cars...maybe even Prius'..

So, where do you draw the line?

Todd

I was thinking about what the govts could do too.
Where I live (Japan) there`s now a very high suicide rate, especially among men in their 30s who get tired of looking futilely for a job. I also live in a city with a high suicide rate---it`s awful hearing the sirens.

The govt here doesn`t say anything about the underlying problem, which is energy availability.
They do provide funds for people to buy hybrid cars.
But I wish they would do more!
"Fly! Fly! Fly! Out to the countryside and work work work!" why don`t they accept it`s a real crisis, announce it, embrace it....come out into the open!Bicycles for free! Shack giveaways. Help to retrain for a post-peak economy.

Because here people are sensing this is a real serious crisis by themselves and jumping off high buildings when they lose all hope.

The govt keeps Q-U-I-E-T. No questioning the status quo, studying hard and white-collar jobs are The Only Path. (The suicides are mainly people who won`t do another type of job because they were raised to work white collar). I think the people in the govt are secretly very scared and don`t want to alarm people more than necessary.

But it`s not a good approach in my opinion.

Viewed from the other side of the world it really does appear that the USA is not governed by the political system but instead is governed by the corporations. That is to say the USA is a fascist state. You are ruled by POWER ADDICTS.

Speaking generally, the majority of addicts do not take resaponsibility for their condition until they have a few near death experinces.

TOD commentator, aangel once wrote. in regard to "conversation theory" that new conversations cannot arise until the the old conversations quite down. (of the top of my head)

The only way forward is for the total collapse of the current paradigm, so that is what will happen.

I'll even put a time frame on it. BEGIN 3 weeks, TOTAL CHAOS within a year. My timing has been spot on so many times in the past. Hope I'm wrong but your real economy is shrinking -5% according to KD.

Viewd from the other side of the world to the USA, My final sections of steel security fence and gates will be installed by the end of August and my urban micro-doomstead will be complete. I am not confident at all.

"BICYCLES FOR CLUNKERS"

That had better be one spanktastically nice bicycle. Start talking velomobiles for clunkers...I'll start listening :)

I so much agree with you. We have taken so many things for granted. Car per person for majority of people. Atleast 1 A/C running on most of the home/apt. In one of the Honda's commercial it said "Its the time to think about need v/s want". I just want to say we should not destroy something(nature) if we cannot create it.

We can not address anything in any “big way” because it just might hurt the economy.

We can't address healthcare because it would mean cutting off trillion$ to the economy (primarily to the upper 1 to 5% but I guess there is always some treacle down).

We can’t address military industrial complex (empire) because it would mean cutting off trillion$ to the economy.

We can’t address the collapse of the FIRE economy because it would mean cutting off trillion$ to the existing economy.

We can’t address Global Warming or Environmental devastation in general because it would mean cutting off trillion$ to the economy.

We can’t address Population or Growth in general because it would mean cutting off trillion$ to the economy.

We can’t address ANY of the constraints that the world faces because it would mean cutting off trillion$ to the economy.

Unless we can address all these issues in such a way that everyone makes trillions more than they made on the up side. Na Gunna Happem.

So we just have to all sit by and watch as the REAL economy slowly tanks (oh yes, and we should all try and profit from this BTW so that we might just get to live)

Then maybe if we are supremely lucky, Who ever is left standing can make some radical changes.

I am beginning to think Bernanke has whats best for humanity in mind as he accelerates the collapse.

Go Ben! Go Ben! Go Ben! Go Ben!

As long as we are using individual transportation capsules with individual power systems, "driven" by individual citizens.... we are screwed.

We need to:

separate cargo transportation from human transportation.
and
separate inner city transport, from intra city.

Computers should be involved, capsules could be individual containers,
but the power system and the control systems must be public.

Cars suck. Buses really suck. Trains suck.

That is why the Cash for CLunkers sucks.

No real change.

The answer to question #2 depends on who qualifies as a mainstream U.S. politician. My hunch is that a handful of U.S. Reps have questioned the primacy of GDP growth. So I think this has already happened and indeed probably happened years ago. Although no U.S. Rep is really mainstream in the sense of representing a wide swath of Americans. So I guess it would have to be a Senator in a politically moderate part of the country. The year that such a politician publicly makes a distinction between quality of life and GDP growth... that would have to be a year when things have already gotten very bad. Even then, tho, the pressure will be to try to prop up an unsustainable economy in ever more unsustainable ways. I'm going to say 2014.

As for #1, I think that one of the other commenters pointed to location-efficient mortgages and instruments of that sort.

Todd: You say "it is likely that my old truck gets gas mileage on a vehicle mile traveled that is equal or better than many high MPG city cars". That's very unlikely, even when stop-and-go city driving is factored in. The hybrids actually get better mileage in stop-and-go than they do on the highway... probably about 5-6 times better than an old pickup truck does on the highway. And even non-hybrids like your corolla get better MPG in stop-and-go than an old pickup does on the highway. It certainly is good that you favor the corolla over the truck when you can.

1) Walkable housing for clunkers
2) Walkable jobs for clunkers

Bikes are wonderful things, but half the people in the US live in the suburbs and work a long way away, making bicycle commuting unrealistic. I saw one estimate that said the average commute is about 16 miles and 27 minutes. Convincing any significant number of people to do this during a New England winter (or a southern summer) is a pipe dream. Unfortunately, given the lack of good public transportation in and around most of our cities, even the entirely reasonable idea of biking to and from public transportation is unrealistic for the majority of suburbanites over a large portion of the year in any given location.

You want people walking and riding bikes and taking public transportation? Let them trade in their cars towards walkable housing and jobs. In other words start actually helping people get jobs in locations that are practical for a non-auto lifestyle. Pay their moving costs. Pay employers (positive and negative tax incentives, direct cash, whatever), to re-locate to (or help create) walkable areas and then to hire locally, thus providing incentive for people to locate accordingly. If you get the jobs to move to livable, walkable locations (or at least to locations directly served by quality, affordable public transit), then you can start to get people to move. At that point, they can trade in their cars towards moving expenses or housing expenses or public transportation passes.

Realistically, you would also have to have some plan that helps people sell their increasingly untenable suburban dwellings so that they could afford to actually pay for their new, walkable housing. As things evolve, the suburbs may be split between those communities that have a critical mass of walkable areas and public transportation to become walkable city/town destinations, and those that empty out as their occupants flee to places where they can find a more tenable situation (work, supplies, etc.). If this happens (and the long-term prospects seem more likely than not), it will put additional severe downward price pressure on all suburban real-estate, but especially anything that falls in the car-dependent category. When that happens, many people whose only remaining net worth is wrapped up in their suburban homes will need some way of unloading their albatross in order to relocate into more tenable situations. Basically, without serious help, it will become musical chairs, but with much nastier consequences for the millions unable to sell their property when the music stops and the DJ has left the building. Some kind of government program will be absolutely necessary to help people shake loose of their suburban anchor as painlessly as possible and make the transition from car-dependent living to something more in tune with future (hell, current!) resource constraints.

As long as the jobs and houses are in the suburbs, people are driving cars... until the gas gets too short or too expensive, at which point it's likely to very quickly get Katy-bar-the-door, Hide-and-watch nasty.

Brian

Just wondering--Is your graphic is just something hypothetical that you made up, that has no real numbers behind it, except perhaps your impressions? Or is it taken from some published source? My impressions would be somewhat different--for example, current rail with typical loading is pretty poor in the US.

I am not an economist nor am I a social scientist however, observing the situation in the U.S and the government responses so far it has become very apparent that the real program of the PTB is (are) 1. The U.S. dollar as currently constituted will be destroyed. 2. All debts owed to other nations will be declared null. I personally believe that that is the primary driver of the massive increase in the military budget for this year. Adding the off budget numbers to the announced budget we arrive at a figure of 850 billion plus out of a forecast tax receipts of 1,400 billion. 3. The PTB know that there is no way to ever resurrect the BAU scenario so all of these programs are to placate the unwashed until the PTB are ready. 4. Destruction of the U.S. economy will result in the destruction of most of the world economy but the U.S. has the largest most effective military in the history of the world and currently there is no nation or coalition of nations which could succesfully challenge our actions. I have of course no means of knowing any of this, so this is merely mu WAG as a possible outcome.

Money like liquid seeks its own level. Cash For Clunkers deprives non-profits from a major source of funding thus taxpayers must take up the slack caused by mismanaged auto companies again. Then we are promised the future will be better with vehicles like the Chevy Volt. Do we really want to fuel our golf cart type cars from our mountain tops? Coal powered power plants are at best 18% efficient whild being the biggest cause of global warming. Our mountains will eventually be replaced by mountains of dead batteries, before they can make energy from the wind. "Clean Diesels" are aproaching 40% efficency and are fueled by oil from a hole in the ground. But, we want "energy independance". What to do? Sit back and enjoy the ride. As long as government and corporations work together we'll be spinning our wheels.

Come on, kids, don't get lost at the first fork,

Alan Blinder wrote a NYT column, and the US had their clunkers plan two weeks (days?) later. Germany spends $7 billion on their -big success-Klunkers over some three months, so the US, which has over 3 times as many people and -my estimate- over 5 times as many cars, responds with a 6-month, $1 billion program. Not the, let's say, $25 billion that would have put it on line with Germany.

What does that tell us? In this case, that nobody in Congress thought about the plan for more than 2 seconds. Hey, if they had, it'd probably have been $1 trillion for pure voter attraction. They did bring it down from the original $4 billion. No better proof than that that they had not a clue. But all it did was predictably short-circuit the scheme after 4 days, instead of the two weeks Obama's $4 billion would have provided. Not that Capitol Hill had any predictions going, mind you, they had nothing at all going. So it worked in Germany, you say? Can you see that from Alaska, too?

Talking seriously about the merits of the plan is an obsolete waste of time and proud adult beverages. It's funny as well, that's true. They went and slashed the extra 2 billion for this weekend out of some environmental protection scheme. If you're looking for jokes, clunkers is great. If you're looking to seriously discuss something, you've just been punked by Washington.

As I said yesterday in It's a good idea, but it's wrong, there could easily be 100 million eligible vehicles in the US. Even with the added $2 billion, no more than 750.000 of them would be covered. 60% of US passenger vehicles are more than 7 years old. That's 150 million cars.

A dirty joke. That's what I called it. Wait till after the weekend, when a million or so or ten times as many people get to hear the program's halted while their desperately cheerful dealers have promised them $4500 in free money.

You know what Obama's line will be? "Nobody could have foreseen this!"

1) some other alternatives:
A smart jitney transport system as described in the book "Plan C".
Electric bicycles.
Educate people to check the pressure of the tyres and to clean/replace the air filtre more often.
Use fuel-efficient tyres.
Educate people for driving more efficiently; this can save more than 10% fuel in many cases.

2) I guess in 2012.

I guess my somewhat joking response is that for nearly 100 years we have had a cash for clunkers program. You hand over your hard-earned cash, and you get a clunker in return.

The W.H. is trying to solve every problem in America by doing a little something for everything, including cash for clunkers. I suppose as long as this country can continue to borrow money from the future, any kind of program is possible to try to get back to the falsified notion of returning to BAU.

How about, '5K for Working from Home'. To qualify you must be able to prove you've been commuting at least 20 miles each way. Then you must have a note from your employer saying you will now work from home. The govt. will save from reduced wear and tear on the roads, reduced oil imported, reduced freeway congestion, reduced number of astma patients... Oh, but of course that would hurt auto sales.

Hmm, how about '1K for learning about Peak Oil'? To qualify you must have a moniker at TOD, have read at least two books on the subject from an approved list and pass an online quiz. But the W.H. doesn't want people to know the predicament we are in...

Then, maybe we could have 'Dollars for Stupification'. To qualify you must have no interest, idea of or education about: Peak oil, debt pyramid, Oldavai Theory, King Hubbert, Matthew Simmons 'Twilight in the Desert', carbon sequestration, carbon trading, climate change, Permian extinction, capacity limits, depletion, conservation, electric trains, bell curves, drawbacks to ethanol, etc. But most people wouldn't even understand the question, so never mind.

Just go back to something easily understood. Cash for Clunkers people get.

This probably means governments will screw up cap-and-trade.

Maybe even low paid workers could afford 20 km/L or 60 mpg cars if they didn't need airbags, ABS brakes, CD players and so on. If only high mileage cars were eligible that would sort out the needy from the greedy. To those stuck with clunkers or nothing give frequent traveller points or prizes for using public transport (transit).

what type of strategies could break the cycle of myopic baby steps? ... what kind of things might have a chance of working within our current system, that might steer us in a better direction?

Here's a radical idea: the free market. Get the government to stop trying to dictate behaviour. Eliminate all subsidies and free giveaways, eliminate obvious anticompetitive barriers like the $10,000 per vehicle/engine/year CNG licence requirement, and just set the rules by which people can sell and buy from behind John Rawls's "veil of ignorance".

Stop subsidising auto manufacturers and energy companies, including farmers. Stop subsidising house buyers. Let "too-big-to-fail" companies fail. And let the market deal with it.

Slogan: "Yes, we can get out of your way."

On second thoughts, never mind. That'll never happen in the USA in the 21st century.

I don't think I've seen any graphs showing vehicle mileage / efficiency that include the use of air-conditioning. There is a dramatic drop in engine efficiency and no-one seems to be taking that in account. If we are heading into more efficient transportation why arent car manufactures required to report these figures? Even the option of not having air-condition in a car is often limited. Perhaps there should be incentives for those who buy cars without one?

In general I agree that incentives (positive or negative) can help steer public opinion and consumer trends. The question is how effective this can be taking into consideration time limits. One thing is for certain, we cant expect people to dramatically change their lifestyle, such as move away from burbs and into walking distances from their work, its just not practical thinking. Dramatic changes only come after dramatic events (i.e. 9/11) and so perhaps it is a the plan to bring dramatic shifts sooner rather than later, since todays forecasts are stronger and more certain than tomorrows, ie. today the US is the leader in many fields - who knows about tomorrow? That perhaps explains bullish attitudes, in politics, economics, etc.

1. What might be some other creative policies to steer us away from the business as usual path?

1. Continue encouraging the descent of the world into an economic depression to ultimately deprive 83% of the population of their jobs and present consumptive lifestyles.

2. Implement short and long term policies to reduce population to 1/6 of its present level. In the U.S. this includes elimination of Social Security and a disastrous implementation of socialized medicine.

3. Increase military spending to protect elites and government from any chaos.

4. Construct plug-in series hybrid vehicles for the survivors.

Having fewer people with a higher standard of living is better than having more people with a lower standard of living.

This approach may be too similar to BAU to qualify as an answer.

Nate,
Your comment;
" The business as usual path, given our fiat debt pyramid, and depleting cheap resources, has reasonably high odds of leading to that event, which is why I am not in favor of continuing current goals, aspirations and policies. (As usual, I speak only for myself, not the rest of TOD staff.)"

Considering that only a few months ago a good number of commentators were suggesting that the US and perhaps the world economy was going to go from a severe recession into a deflationary depression, perhaps one that would be the end of the economy and society as we know it.

Now, after a lot of short term spending Obama and his administration seem to have prevented a deflationary spiral, and although many banks and companies have collapsed, there are good indications that the recession is ending. This doesn't mean rampant growth, but it does mean that the economy will still function and be able to respond to the changes needed in a post-peak oil world. You may recall Gail predicting a collapse in oil use by 2012 because the economy has totally collapsed and we would not be able to build renewable energy, expand the electric grid and replace ICE vehicles with PHEV and EV's.

Now accepting that the world has depleting cheap natural resources and cheap energy, that doesn't mean we are going to eventually have WWIII over resources. Japan proved a society with very few resources can do better by trade with resource rich countries than trying to take by war. We are not running out of resources or energy just "cheap" resources and "cheap" energy. In fact expensive energy, especially expensive oil will be the best thing that occurs to the US economy after the initial price shock, how else is the US going to transition to a world without oil? No oil doesn't mean no energy.

What year will a mainstream US politician publicly question economic growth as the goal of our society**? (Bonus points if you can guess the politician)
Probably after the majority of TOD readers question that we can only have economic growth by growth in resource consumption or growth in population.
The thing about BAU is that things keep changing, change is the usual state, change allows adaptation, total economic destruction doesn't allow any further change. More than 80% of the jobs people have now didn't exist 100 years ago.

The situation is too big for me to handle.
By abrogating my resposibility I become a child.

The spokes of my cheap bicycle fell out.
I am tottering on the edge of buying a top of the range recumbant.
This will create penis envy in my friends who drive Humoungous 4 wheel drives.
I will smile.

God gives life. God will take it away.

Relax.

Next weeks Campfire topic - "Does the World Need More Women in Policy Roles?"

Yes. Nuns past child bearing age.

What year will a mainstream US politician publicly question economic growth as the goal of our society**? (Bonus points if you can guess the politician)

Umm, the same year the Pope publicly declares herself to be a rational secular humanist and an atheist and decides to give away all of the Catholic Church's assets to the world's poor?

Mass transit passes for clunkers. $4k gets about 10 years of passes if you use $1's worth each day. And it feeds a system that's last on the list of transportation funding.

What year will a mainstream US politician publicly question economic growth as the goal of our society**? (Bonus points if you can guess the politician)

The last year they hold public office. Bonus - Ex-Mayor of Burlinigton Nate Hagans.

The kash for klunks program is such a blatant attempt to forcibly implement what ‘the market’ - an illusory construct itself - is normally supposed to do (create a lot of waste, thrash, produce and sell new) I’m surprised there were not stronger, and effective, voices against it.

At heart, this points to the fact that ‘free market’ ideology is, depending on pov, sugary pap, or cynical crap which serves exploitation, or any number of other formulations, and that nobody truly believes it anyway. (Except for Austrian economists, some die-hard paleo-conservative Republicans, anarchists, etc. all of them thin on the ground in the US.)

The heart of politics in the US has been gutted.

All this reminds me powerfully of the USSR, where ‘communism’ had the exact same reputation and function - upheld by the domineering class and very varied in its manifestations of the ground, it was anything goes as long as we coat it up this and that way...

One difference is that in the USSR state organisation and investment did purport to be for the good of all, the advancement of all (while preserving the privileges of the ruling classes, and indulging in malinvestment, creating deadly pollution, etc. the list might be very long, let’s not even think about the arms race) but this is explicitly not the case in the US. (Yes, set in different historical periods. )

Bail-outs of cronies (some banks, part of Wall Street, insurance ...) and of industries that provide voters to play a role in the ersatz democracy (automobiles..) coupled with moves that are very ambiguous, such as 'helping' ppl to keep a roof over their heads but at the same time stimulating ‘the housing market’; providing health care to more to feed extra hapless bodies into Big Medecine/Pharma by taxation, extra debt, more squeezing of the poor, makes for a very uncomfortable, schizophrenic, disastrous and ultimately deadly mix.

These are not rational responses to present US problems.

Earnest Lux wrote: The only way forward is for the total collapse of the current paradigm, so that is what will happen.

No amount of tinkering with clunkers will make a whit of difference.

System re-set. Either consciously implemented and managed as best as possible -those legendary soft landings- or it will happen as a series of ricochet reactions, all of them leading to more chaos. (see also souperman above.)

All attempts to solve The Problem by techno-fixes to improve machine efficiency and attempts to persuade the people to save energy by buying/using more fuel-efficient machines will be undermined by the Jeavons principle/paradox: improvements in machine energy efficiency will result in more, no less, consumption of the energy resource. This is well understood by mainstream economists. It is most readily understood in industrial/commercial applications, where better energy efficiency allows lower pricing therefore more machine use to satisfy higher sales demand; but it also applies to consumer behavior. One of my sons is a social psychologist who tells me he has been doing research (questionnaire responses, not actual measurement) on this, and has been surprised by how clear-cut the results are. Those with the most fuel-efficient cars will burn much more, not less, total fuel/time unit.

What we must have is a culture shift. The best exemplar/promoter of The Better Way I know of is Sharon Astyk. Also see Ivan Illich's little mid-70s book Energy and Equity -- "any speed over 15 mph destroys community and creates social and economic inequity." (My paraphrase, probably not the exact words.)

The current transportation paradigm is not sustainable and will not be fixed by the use of personal
motorized vehicles, regardless of their efficiency. Start by returning to an era after the train and before the widespread use of the automobile. I am currently reading Sherlock Holmes where they seemed to get along fine combining trains supplemented by bikes and horse drawn vehicles,

But really. What we really need is cash for babies to include cash for vasectomies and tubal ligations. Further, we should pay people a thousand dollars for every thousand miles they drive less than 10,000.

What we are doing is grossly pathetic and criminal considering the trillions we are spending on the banks.

This whole program is like a whale giving birth to a mouse.

There is no hope. This program is the last straw. What little hope I had has vanished.

Nate;
As a sidebar to next week's topic, would you find any meat ..(err, Protein?) in the question ..

"Would our Government be able to 'think' and act better if it were structured to include Left-brain and Right-Brain components, like we as individual humans have?"

I do think about the model that Jefferson brought from the First Nations with their council of Women as a more fully human approach to the question of running a society, but I also see that our current Political Culture draws in Men AND Women who have many similar strengths and backgrounds, and wonder what are the complementary traits that are underrepresented there? What besides Gender might balance out this game?

I also wonder about modelling a government structure that institutionally is required to include fully voting representatives from a range of societal positions, to ensure possibly a full rich>poor spectrum, (not just claims of daddy at the factory and being 'of the real people', etc..) Reps from a range of Trades and Occupations, including Homeless people, a Rep. for Children, a rep for Seniors, a rep for people in the Mental Health System, and People with Disabilities.

Just spitballing, trying to make your topic more complicated.. thank me later!

Bob

Without our oil imports, I suspect that the problem would take care of itself in short order, one way or another. Without oil imports, we can't possibly have enough motor fuel to keep all of the automobiles running to anywhere near the extent that they are now. We can keep all of them running a small fraction of the VMT they are now, or we can keep a small fraction running the same VMT they are now (and the majority of automobiles not running any VMT at all, i.e., sitting idle); most likely, we will end up with some intermediate mix, with a very few people still driving vehicles pretty much as intensively as ever, a very large number having to make drastic cutbacks, and some substantial number having to give up on owning automobiles altogether.

Without oil imports, there is no choice - this MUST happen.

The thing is: this WILL happen. We know from the ELM model that exports must dwindle at a far more rapid rate than overall global depletion. Add to this the fact that EROI for new wells is declining, resulting in less net energy to be exported. Add to this the fact that new oil is going to be increasingly expensive to find and develop, and that a global economy in trouble is not going to be able to supply ever-increasing amounts of investment capital. The writing is certainly on the wall: except for a continuing trickle from Canada, the US cannot expect to see oil imports continuing for much more than a decade, or two decades at the most. One can imagine geopolitical scenarios that could result in the day of zero imports happening much sooner than that.

This being the case, I am not particularly concerned about how to convince people to change their behavior. Soon enough, events will transpire in such a manner as to force people to change, whether they want to or not.

The really important questions we need to be considering are:

1) How will people cope, and what will people have to do, once US oil imports are down to zero, or very nearly so?

and 2) What can we do between now and then to prepare and strategically position the nation and its communities so that when the day of zero imports arrives (and actually a good while before that, as supplies are likely to tighten long before imports disappear), people will have better rather than worse transport options?

I anticipate that as motor fuel supplies become increasingly tight, more and more people are going to have to relocate closer to their jobs, or to mass transit nodes if available. What at first will be a trickle (and in fact might have already started, the dismantling of entire neighborhoods in places like Flint being exhibit A) will eventually expand into a flood tide. There needs to be a massive re-arrangement of the US population to minimize commuting distances. It will be a wrenching transformation of the entire nation, the built environment, and patterns of settlement, but there is no alternative, it must happen.

Once the major population shifts have mostly run their course, we will then have a situation where metropolitan populations are more concentrated, and electrified mass transit will be highly feasible and necessary. Most of what is needed does not exist today. (Although to a large extent, it used to.) It would be nice if we could anticipate and start building it out now, so that it would be there when the motor fuel for most people becomes unobtainable. It would be nice, but it isn't likely to happen, at least not to anything close to an adequate extent. Most likely, we are going to need to have masses of people needing to get to work with no means of fueling an automobile before work will even get started on the necessary urban mass transit buildout. Of course, building the systems will take years, and the time is likely to be stretched out even futher given the likelihood that the economy will be stagnant at best and investment capital hard to come by.

So what will people do during the transition time, when neither driving to work nor taking some form of electrified rail transport is available?

Those who can might walk or bike, but these are not the universal panaceas that some make them out to be. Bad weather can be a challenge, and not everyone is fit and healthy enough for it.

Carpooling will certainly become increasingly popular, at least in the earlier stages of the transition. In the later stages, even a full automobile might cost too much per passenger to be an affordable option.

That leaves the humble bus, from small jitneys and shuttle services up to the largest urban commuter motor coaches. The bus as the primary transition vehicle does have several advantages. First, there are already a lot of them out there in service. It would be a pretty simple matter to retool idle auto manufacturing plants to turn out even more buses. Buses are highly flexible when it comes to routing and scheduling. They could be powered by a variety of energy options, including NG/biogas from landfills/CTG, or petrodiesel/biodiesel. IMHO, buses are one of the few justifiable uses of biodiesel, and we can probably grow enough oilseeds for these and the few other essential uses without diverting too much cropland from food production. Finally, as the chart at the top of this article demonstrates, buses are clearly more energy efficient than automobiles, and are only slightly less energy efficient than passener rail.

Thus, it seems to me that the most important thing we could be doing is to preserve and expand urban bus services, and our domestic capacity to manufacture more buses in the future. Electrified passenger rail is a longer-term project; build it out where we can, but understand that we'll still need buses to close the gaps for a long while, yet.

Thank you Nate for being sane.

I don't understand it, we are in daflation. Putting more into debt is completely wrong, a lot of these new car buyers will wind up in real trouble when the next deleveragaing leg takes place.

Here we see the government putting its citizens into debt slavery. Shameful.

One thing would be to trade clunkers for shares in US government owned land and natural resources. Conditions; shares could only be sold back to the government, shared property cannot be developed without shares losing all value, keeping undeveloped would earn guaranteed interest.

I bet next year will be the year America wakes up. Dennis Kucinich will likely be the first or him and Ron Paul. Senator Bernie Sanders is also beginning to wake up ..

2. What year will a mainstream US politician publicly question economic growth as the goal of our society**? (Bonus points if you can guess the politician)

RFK - '68 election

youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY

And we all know what happened to him, don't we?

Here is a nice comment on the Cash For Clunkers program (h/t Cafe Hayek):

Imagine you’re a member of Congress. You’re a fan of the Cash for Clunkers program. You discover that the $1 billion that Congress budgeted for the program has been spent in FOUR DAYS. The program is now out of money. What do you do?

A. Realize that $4500 per clunker was too big a subsidy and that you can achieve the same effects with a much smaller amount.

B. Worry that maybe there is some fraud in the program and that some of the cash isn’t going to clunkers

C. Increase the budget by $2 billion

The correct answer for clunkheads is C, of course. That’s the wise choice when you are spending other people’s money. What fun that must be!