There is too much inertia and lag time built into the public and personal infrastructure to achieve anything like an aggressive move.  The twenty year lead time you refer to would have been about 1995 when Bill Clinton was president, Al Gore was Vice President, and the US was relatively flush in revenue growth. Our "progressive" leadership pissed away the prosperity.  Had we maintained the wise leadership of Carter we might have had a chance.  But Reagan ushered in an era of profligacy and we are drowning in our own recklessness.

We are not only not going to spare our children the worst impacts of peak oil but we old farts are going to feel the reckoning in our lifetimes.

A progressive president won't have a chance unless the people are ready for a major change.  I am not sure a majority is ready or will have the where with all to do it.  

...$3 a gallon was, for many, a "psychological plateau" in the gas markets.  Once ya significantly passed the mark for a good period of time, it would be unlikely that prices would dip below that again, even if market fundamentals could support slightly lower prices.

Kinda like how inflation changed $0.39 cent stores into $0.99 cent stores.  

Even if inflation suddenly went reverse and we could have 39 cent stores again, 99 cent stores would still probably reign supreme.

And jabailo, ya do realize that the vast majority of facilities on that map have nothin' to do with energy production from hydrogen, correct?  And the ones that are mostly for non-vehicular energy?  And the very few that are for vehicular energy are almost exclusively for either test labs or for privately operated test fleets, not for thr public, correct?

How would that plug into the predictions?

If only Europe and the US did that?  And if the rest of the world demand stabilized?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Then, on the back end, begin plugging in the Nocera process, wind to hydrogen and solar to hydrogen generators and voila -- a New World!

jabailo, why create a middle man?  Why not just use wind and solar directly for our energy?  

Wouldn't there be additional energy lost in the process of sloar/wind to hydrogen to electric energy conversion compared to just a wolar/wind direct to electric energy conversion?

Doesn't seem very efficient.

During the recent run up in oil price, commentators were surprised that at the same time, more or less, everything else went up too (e.g., food).  What a coincidence!  Eventually they figured out it perhaps had to do with oil being used for production of just about everything, services included.

The longer we wait, the higher the oil prices are going.  Since it takes oil to build all that new non-oil infrastructure like the replacement of the vehicle fleet with non-oil vehicles, the longer we wait the more expensive it is going to get to transition.  Which means, essentially, that living standards are going to go down one way or another to pay for it.  Pay now, or pay much more later.

Unless, perhaps, we get moving right away, or, perhaps, there is some technical breakthrough that gets us more oil-equivalent on a global scale within years.  Neither very likely!

It is distressing to see that, even amongst the environmental crowd, all anybody is talking about is finding a way to run cars on something other than gasoline.

That's a dodge.  We need to be talking about a lot more than that.  Transit, for one.  More importantly than anything else, though, we should be talking about building livable, walkable towns and neighborhoods as we did pre-WWII.  Traditional urban development requires no heroic new fuel technologies or radical inventions and would do wonders for freeing us not only from oil, but from having to be dependent on a wheeled box we put any fuel in.

Perhaps game theory, an economic science that won a few Nobel awards, describes the situation better than simple "fundamentals" - a concept I've been trying to clarify here many times but usually get blasted.

There are two other key players, one being that Big Oil no longer commands a majority of the supply and production of oil. The majors only control about 20 percent of the worldwide stocks and the nationals control the rest, meaning that geo-politics is an increasing cause of volatility.  And now you know why the US-based majors want to further develop some offshore fields.

Then you have a pesky economic downturn that started with funked US housing financing and has now spread to global markets such as China. Yes, as US consumers buy less products overseas, that means less energy demand for offshore manufacturing and shipping.

But game theory explains things so simply - that people make irrational decisions about the market in a psychologically "rational" method. And remember, the house always balances with winners and losers and takes a cut down the middle. Why do you think the casinos hate the PHD heuristic modelers worse than the card counters? Because a sucker is born every minute!
-sammie

Onward through the fog

Oil price inflation to match the other commodity inflation?

Would China and India adopt plugin hybrid technology as they became manufacturers of that technology for western markets?

The economic trends are difficult to analyze with any accuracy.  

Could this head off the economic shock of a peak in supply by lowering demand.

It would be a way to cushion the economies that adopt this strategy.  But as far as the ones who don't, we could see a huge crash in China and India as fuel prices soar.  As well as in regions of the US, mainly the bible belt south, where environmentalism is looked on as a commie conspiracy.

No doubt with the present dip in gas prices, gas guzzlers will start top sell again across  southland.

This is why gas rationing might be needed to avert a national and global economic crisis.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Appreciate the comment, Matthew. Game theory is starting to play out when you see people ditching their gas-guzzlers and get small cars, take mass transit, and so forth. It is the people, all playing the same game, that dictate what will happen in the next few years.

The ridiculous part is that folks would back a strategy that ONLY concentrates on offshore drilling. The Big Oil majors were backed into that corner and have little room to move, seemingly as if set up for a "checkmate" in a game of chess. If you want to read a typical trail of tears, just Google the offshore rig known as "Thunderhorse."

I love it - Big Oil has been emasculated and no politician can fix it, just like the Big Car makers were literally castrated. Time for these robber-barons to stand aside as a new group of innovators come in with alternative energy sources. You know something is right when people start complaining about "all those darn windmills."  -sammie

Onward through the fog

Boy, things must have got bad while I wasn't paying attention. That's pretty brutal, even in the land of mandatory life sentences for smoking a joint.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

In game theory, nothing is off limits.  True, Ford and GM are spinning off factories, workers, and divisions as fast as they can. Even Toyota is mothballing a huge line for pickup trucks and is retooling ... hopefully for more Prius production but don't hold your breath.  

Take that together with the "spayed and neutered airlines." They're going to cut flights and over-fill everything they can starting on Labor Day. Early reports are that many more US travelers are taking short car trips or even using mass transit and buses.

I think I'm on a roll!

Onward through the fog

Fort Worthology,

Read posts by Stopgreenpath, a few others, and me.  Some of us are talking about getting out of cars.  It's the only real solution, as cars and their requisite infrastructure (roads, etc.) are very environmentally and ecologically destructive per se. The rest of this is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak.

The problem is that the vast majority of people, including most who on this site, don't want to give up luxuries like driving and/or have chosen to organize their lives so that driving is necessary in order to maintain their lifestyles.  It is those people who we must convince that their lifestyles are killing the planet.

The gasoline consumption is never going to balance out and drop unless we do something about it. Being involved in gasoline business for a while you will see it's not just ourselves that need to make changes to fix the gas prices it's also our governments responsibility. By government i mean less corruption. By less corruption I mean I have seen a gas station owner from the middle east not only get gas cheaper from his town but sell the pathetic gasoline at a price lower than everyone around him and people buy it because they just don't care about what's going on in the car anymore they just want the lowest price possible. I have seen two owners like him get removed from the country for selling bad gasoline and smuggling it. Unfortunately what the government doesn't want you to know is they let those two men back into the country because those men offered a lot of cash to be allowed back. Little things like that also need to be changed if we are to stabilize the price of gas.