I want alternatives. I want them now. I'm tired of waiting.
Every day I read diaries/headlines/news stories and hear commentary/presidential addresses on how we're addicted to oil/foreign oil/fossil fuels.
Yada yada yada.
We've been hearing this stuff for years. It has no impact. None. Zip. Zilch. Does anyone know why? Is it because it's actually wrong? Or if not wrong, irrelevant to the cause of finding alternatives?
Saying we're addicted to oil is great tree-hugger talk (full disclosure: I am a tree hugger). The problem with it is that it won't bring the country along in finding a solution. It inspires guilt. That's all. Not one thing more.
Saying that we're addicted to oil is like saying that rice farmers are addicted to water buffalo. Or that Thai peoples are addicted to boats. Or that Dutch people are addicted to living below sea level.
How silly. It's all we know. No one can really describe what life in the United States would be like without oil. No one. Because it's so far removed from anything we know, so far removed from anything anyone alive has ever known, it's like trying to describe what life is like on a planet where we've never been, with life-forms like we've never seen. Sci-fi tries to help us get there in our minds, but it's just sci-fi. It's not reality TV.
Even people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute aren't currently working on future solutions completely without oil.
One thing for sure, if we try to get there too fast, we'll end up in worse shape than we were in back in '07-'08, when gas prices were skyrocketing. If we think that greedy Wall Streeters caused the near-collapse of '08 single-handedly, we're deluding ourselves. They had an assist from oil prices.
Some people think that the right response is to tax the living hell out of oil and gasoline, so as to choke off demand. I know from reading some of the diaries here that such a proposal brings out very strong passions.
Bring on the big gas tax too fast, it disproportionately hurts lower income folks, who do most of their driving to get to work. I've seen comments to this, such as, why don't they just move?
Well.... to seem obvious about it, moving is expensive, even if you do it yourself, and we are talking about lower income people. Besides, haven't you noticed that lower income folks drive to jobs located in places where they could not afford to live? Duh?
Do you really think someone living in south San Jose, CA could just move to Palo Alto instead of driving back and forth? Hell, you don't even have to be "lower income" to find yourself driving from anywhere else to Palo Alto.
It's simple. People live where they choose to, often based on affordability, followed by schools choices and lifestyle, and then drive to the job. It's a way of life for most Americans.
Now back to the "addicted" discussion.
Don't you think that if there were affordable, reasonable alternatives to driving from south San Jose to Palo Alto, people would use them? Now before we jump into a discussion of why not use CalTrans, the bus, etc etc., let's emphasize "reasonable".
Yes, you could ride your bike to work from south San Jose to Palo Alto. Most of the year, you would not even have to do it in cold weather. A couple of months of the year, you'd have to do it wet or in good rain gear, but you could still do it.
But let's look at "reasonable", which this is not. The bike ride would simply take too long to expect mass population acceptance. If you add a stop to take your kid to daycare/school/grandma's house, it's going to take even longer. The trip will take so long that part of the year, you'll do this trip in the dark, both ways, making a somewhat unsafe project even less safe. Since there's not enough contiguous bike paths available to get you there, you have to get your exercise sucking in car exhaust, or wearing a mask.
Is the person unwilling to do this "addicted to oil"? Ummmm.....no. How about someone who cannot ride a bicycle due to poor health, disability, age? What good does it do to make them feel guilty of being "addicted to oil"?
Let's look at the bus as an option for our imaginary oil addict, traveling from south San Jose to Palo Alto. (Your mileage may vary, but this person is coming from Blossom Hill Road and Alameda Expressway in south San Jose and is headed for an imaginary job with HP in Palo Alto. This is a truly fictional character, but not an unreasonable example in the Bay Area. I know; I used to live there. I knew many for whom this would be a short trip.)
The best trip predicted by the local transit authority says this trip will take 1 hour 17 minutes, will cost $10.00 one-way (!), and involve 9 minutes of walking. For less money, you can look at the option that takes 1 hour 11 minutes, only six bucks one-way (!), and includes a health-building 26 minutes of walking (with car exhaust included).
Honestly, is this the best we can do as a country, asking someone to pay maybe as much as $20/day in transit to avoid driving? Um, yes, if you tax the hell out of gasoline it could make this seem like a helluva deal. See previous discussion.
And yes, I know about the discounts available to some, and the subsidies available by some employers, but I'm trying to point out that we need an alternative that works for everyone.
If we try to figure out what is reasonble in the rural communities (no, we can't forget them, just 'cause there's not as many folks there as in NYC), we have to think about the immense distances between places in rural America.
Just think about how tone deaf we sound in rural America advocating some Euro-solution that works for high-density populations in tiny countries.
Tell somebody in Clarendon, TX to take the train or stand convicted of being an "oil addict". Or Buena Vista, CO. Or Laramie, WY. Or lots of places in Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, or really anywhere beyond the coastal areas of the US.
I know, Amtrak serves quite a few of these places in my examples, but outside of the east coast, Amtrak is slow, extremely expensive and nearly useless (other than scenic tourism). It's a national shame, never discussed.
So what are supposed to do? Stay stuck in the same, gas-guzzling rut until that rut goes off the cliff?
I agree with the President that doing nothing is not an option.
Right now, we pump it out of the ground and set it on fire to propel ourselves around the planet. The oil used to get our fictional commuter from south San Jose to Palo Alto is gone once burned, never again to be used for anything else. Not to make plastic stuff. Not to power a bus, or train. Not to build a road. Or make a toilet seat. The list could go on and on.
Yes, we'll learn how to make all this stuff from corn, or soybeans, or whatever...eventually.
But the point is that we need national focus on alternatives to oil before it becomes a crash and burn emergency. That will just make things more expensive.
Our economy and the economy of the world cannot and will not sustain anything vaguely resembling normal if we wait until we have to have find solutions under duress.
To get the national focus on alternatives, we're going to have to find vocabulary to use in the discussion that doesn't immediately alienate a big chunk of the country.
We need inventions. Without them, we will not move off of our current consumption habits. And to get the level of invention we need, we must not leave it to the corporations to do it. Most corporations are followers; most do not wish to be truly out there on the cutting edge. It takes a long time to make money after the cutting edge has become common place, and they know it. The finance guys (who, after all, really run all corporations, if you haven't noticed) will paint a truly scary picture about the great unknown, and then the discussion will end.
So to move beyond the corporate world's mass hesitation, we need to dramatically expand the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), so that it can absorb some of the risk of scientific progress for the good of all. It would be worth the taxpayer investment to fund some ideas that will take decades to mature otherwise.
We need NREL to focus on developing different cars, maybe electric cars, electric trucks, big huge electric trucks to carry heavy stuff. Progress has to move much faster than rolling out the Prius or the Volt. They're really cool, but they won't get you across Nebraska without spending some quality time watching corn grow while you wait for a recharge. Of course, all this electricity demand means we need a whole new electricity generating infrastructure, because we can't just stop burning oil and start burning way more coal to support this. (Don't go there about nuclear, because the tax payers can't afford the cost of dealing with nuclear waste for the next million years or so.)
We need alternatives to roads because we spend way too much of our national treasure on roads. We see too many people go to their deaths on our current idea of roads: More than 34,000 in 2008.
We need to move more goods long-hauled by rail than by truck. So we need locomotives that don't set anything on fire to turn those big generators.
Yes, we could argue that everyone will just have to slow down, that current technology just doesn't support going 75MPH everywhere without oil being included. But c'mon... Ever tried to cross Texas on I-10 at 35MPH? Me neither, and I don't want to. It took damn long enough at 70. I don't want to slow down. I want to speed up, and I don't want to help make the Earth a less human-supporting place in the process.
With our population now double what it was in 1950, with all of us traveling way more than we ever did in 1950 to see family in increasingly far-flung parts of the country, we need transportation systems that truly interconnect everyone in the country. Anything less simply will not be sufficient (ever tried to hug your niece via Skype?).
So let's stop arguing with ourselves, stop wanting to tax ourselves into ecomomic oblivion and get to work on the alternatives.
The US population will jump on alternatives with both feet, without a moment's hesitation, if the alternative accomplishes what it's supposed to and meets people's needs. You can drive from one side of the country to the other in a Prius. Its successor will need to do that too, just without the oil assist.
This could be very exciting, not an exercise in denial. The reality is that denial won't work, guilt won't work, trying to completely change our culture into something it has never been, won't work.
We must go after the bridge technologies with unabated national vigor (cellulosic ethanol, hybrids) and changing lifestyles can and will help. I home office; my commute is from my coffee pot down the stairs to my office, and I've been fortunate to be able to do this since 2001.
All the bridge techonologies and lifestyle changes help, but ultimately, we must invent our way off of oil, and apologize to no one for demanding that this is what we do. There really is no alternative.