Fossil Fuels

I know alot of people carry around a fear that the oil will soon be depleted and we'll all be thrust back into the days of horses and buggies. And you think to yourself, where the hell do I buy a horse? Or a buggy for that matter? But I don't ever worry about such things, and I'll tell you why.

It's all about greed. Or, at least, it's about paychecks. Those of us at the bottom of the economic ladder (okay, I'll admit, I'm not at the bottom but I'm certainly somewhere south of the middle), we have bills to pay and jobs to go to and we need that money from week to week just to survive. Any threat to that system worries us.
Back before everyone had a car, or even before the invention of the car itself, people didn't have a need for them. You either lived in a city or town, close to everything you needed in order to survive (meaning within walking distance), or you lived well outside of town and the ownership of a horse or some other beastial transportation was a given. Of course, back then the very defintion of "walking distance" was different. Five miles? Oh, that's walking distance, sir.
The invention of the automobile changed that. More specifically, Henry Ford changed that. Ford made ownership of a personal automobile affordable, and as more people owned one, more people found that they no longer needed to worry so much about the distances they lived from their sources of revenue or from the places where they bought food and clothing. The creation of the vast interstate highway system cemented the exodus from urban centers. Oil was cheap and plentiful, so why not live thirty miles from the city? It only took twenty minutes to drive to work.

It didn't take very long before something else was invented: the traffic jam. While suburbia grew, the centers of industry and employment remained relatively the same. You might live in a nice neighborhood well outside the city, but you still had to drive to the city in order to work and get that much-needed paycheck. The flight of industry from urban centers followed a much slower progression than that of the industrial workers. Financial centers remained the same, for the most part. Support structure followed the workers as the grocery store, department store, mercantile, all the businesses that depended upon consumers found it profitable to relocate, to be the one closest to the centers of population. Convenience became a commodity.

Today we look at a much different world that the one envisioned by those early suburban pioneers. They moved away from the city only to find that the city followed them out to the country. Downtown businesses in smaller cities and towns continue to suffer as they compete with sprawling shopping complexes located well away from urban centers. Despite the fact that the automobile negates the necessity of locating one's home in relative close proximity to schools, shopping, or the workplace, we still continue to place a high value on convenience. Only the scale of measurements has changed. The average citizen wouldn't have balked at the idea of living a mile away from the source of his groceries, while today we think twenty miles is a short distance.

In short, our entire economic structure is dependent upon maintaining convenient transportation. Without oil there would be no fuel for the automobiles, no way for workers to get back and forth to their jobs. Without workers, industry collapses. There is extremely strong motivation from all directions to keep the cars running.

Public transportation is often touted as a solution for the crisis ahead. But public transportation doesn't reach all areas of our society yet. The buses don't run all the way out to the farm. Trains run only where tracks have been laid. Likewise, hybrid or electric cars might be seen as the technologies to save us from the death of fossil fuels. What isn't said is that over half of all electricity used in the US comes from coal-burning power plants, while another high percentage comes from plants that burn petroleum to make electricity. We like to think that all power comes from hydroelectric dams, but that's not the case. If we all switched to electric cars, those cars would add a heavy burden to the existing power grid. The easiest way to make new power is to build a plant that depends upon fossil fuels. It's a catch-22 that can only be ameliorated by switching to alternative forms of power production such as nuclear, geothermal, hydroelectric, or wind turbines.

Newer technologies that show promise include the generation of electricity from tides or even nuclear fusion (what we call nuclear power today comes from nuclear fission, not fusion). According to the U.S. Department of Transportation Statistical Records Office there are currently about 62 million vehicles in use in the United States alone. There is simply no way to generate enough electricty for all of them if they were electric, and the growth of the power-producing industry is insufficient to meet future demands. So what, then, is a viable alternative?
As I see it, people tend to resist change. Change happens, no doubt about it, but people like to go to what's familiar, or at least the closest thing to familiar that they can find. We didn't reach our present state of civilized sprawl overnight. We won't return to urban condensation so quickly either. Alternative fuels for the cars that already exist is the only viable solution. I'm sure car companies would dearly love to sell each and every one of us a brand new electric car, but there's no way we could afford it. Most people can't afford to buy even a new dishwasher or sofa without going into debt to do so.

Converting a car to run on bio-diesel, however, is affordable. It's convenient. It doesn't change the habits we have. We'll still pull our car up to the pump to fill our tanks. No matter what fuel it is, whether bio-diesel, hydrogen, or ethanol, it is the least radical shift, and that has historically been the only way to convert large masses of people to new thought patterns. Even the protestant reformation began with Martin Luther making a few changes within the existing Catholic Church and today there are over thirty thousand different Christian denominations.

But what convinces me most that I needn't worry about the depletion of the oil reserves is, again, paychecks. Not mine, but those that corporate executives earn. Not only are they paid millions of dollars a year to run the giant companies that supply us with gasoline, natural gas, electricity, coal, oil, and every other source of energy, they get huge bonuses when their companies show profits. It is within their best interest to keep those companies profitable, and they can't do it when they've got no product to sell. They want to keep the cars moving, they want to keep the working class in motion, and they'll do it. They might not advertise it, but I'd bet money that the giant petroleum companies invest as much money into researching alternative fuels as they do in looking for new oil deposits. The economies of some entire countries depend upon oil production, and an easy internet search will show that some of those nations are so completely unconcerned about oil depletion that they're embarking upon major internal investments.

No, I don't worry about the future of oil, and neither should you. Gasoline prices go up because of greed, not because supply is dwindling. Don't get me wrong, the supply actually is dwindling, and it will most definitely run out one day. Or at least get so expensive that no one can afford it anymore. But the days of horses and buggies are behind us. Of that, I am quite sure.