

What if Gas Cost $100/gal? - ph0rque
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4048

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coglethorpe
If gas was $100 a gallon, I'd have an electric car and hopefully only one car.
The real changes would come from society at large. I hope employers would get
serious about telecommuting, for as many employees as possible. Maybe they'd
get more serious about using satellite offices.

I'd use electronic means to communicate more and more and I assume others
would as well. It would have to bridge the gap of distance that separates us.
I'd probably get to know my neighbors a lot better as well. I'd go local for
more than food. I'd have no choice.

~~~
alaskamiller
Would electricity costs be relative enough for an electric car to still make
sense? What about goods and products that you buy that's shipped on the
massive fleet of trucks?

A sudden surge to $100 a gallon gas destroys civilization.

~~~
tomjen
Rail. Ships with sails.

Humans can take a lot more shit than they are given credit for.

~~~
helveticaman
Warren Buffet invests in trains: <http://www.cnbc.com/id/20519680/> Freight
ship with parachute-like sail:
<http://www.shippingtimes.co.uk/images/Beluga_SkySails.jpg>

~~~
tlrobinson
Interesting idea, but that sail looks tiny for that size ship. I can't imagine
it does much.

~~~
nostrademons
The sails in the picture are being winched in. Normally, they fly like a kite,
about 200 m above the ship, and tow it forwards. The winds are much stronger
up there. It also looks like the kite has been partially furled - the picture
on Wikipedia looks much bigger:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Beluga_Skysails>

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Tichy
Since there were so many scaremongering articles in the news lately, I thought
about the same problem recently.

I guess I should be worried, but honestly my first thought is always "finally
we'll get rid of those pesky cars". I hate cars so much (swallowing their
exhausts every day cycling to work), that I think my joy over car-free cities
will outweigh most downsides of the expensive energy.

Personally I don't need a car, I could probably do without a fridge, and I
don't really need long distance travel very much. Heating could be a problem.

~~~
gaius
If you'll forgive me, that's a very metropolitan attitude. For huge swathes of
the country (including, umm, the bits that provide all the produce to the
stores so you can shop whenever you feel like and don't need the means to
transport large loads yourself) motor vehicles (including pick-up trucks and
other "gas guzzlers") are pretty much essential.

It's all very well to be smug about how high gas prices hurt yuppies in SUVs,
but they hurt lots of regular working folks too.

~~~
helveticaman
How feasible is using horseback for small distances?

~~~
khafra
Horses are quite inefficient; in fact, all animals are. The only reason it's
cheaper to ride a bicycle someplace than a motorcycle is because of the lesser
weight and speeds; if you created electricity with a human-powered generator
like [this](<http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen.html>), you'd actually
burn more energy in extra food than you would by getting the same amount of
electricity from a gasoline-powered generator.

...which, of course, isn't a direct concern since many people bicycle for
their health anyway. But it is a concern when it comes to more equine
suggestions.

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hugh
Basically we'd almost all starve to death. Transporting food would become
uneconomical. Hell, harvesting food would become uneconomical. The trickle of
food which got into urban areas would sell for insanely high prices. The rich
would still be able to afford it for a while, but with the whole economy
collapsing and widescale starvation the rich wouldn't stay that way for long.
Rural folks might be able to survive for a while, until the looters came
pouring out of the cities and into the countryside (on foot, presumably)
looking for food.

Eventually we'd be able to re-establish some kind of civilization (pseudo-
steampunk?) with a severely reduced population, but there'd be all sorts of
bad stuff to happen in between now and then.

~~~
jimbokun
Yea, once I started thinking about the obvious kinds of things you mention, I
couldn't take the article's premise seriously any more.

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jon_dahl
$100/gallon gas would do a lot more than slow down commuting. It would make
air travel prohibitively expensive (thousands or tens of thousands to fly
anywhere - fuel is already the biggest cost at any airline with $100/barrel
oil). Shipping would also be seriously impacted; the 20% savings on a radio
made in China would be offset by transportation costs. $4 winter strawberries
from Chile would be no more. That, and global recession. Personally, sounds to
me like some good and some bad.

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ilamont
I hope most people will be biking long before we get close to that level:

<http://bikeworker.blogspot.com/>

~~~
jrockway
Exactly.

 _Oh, they might buy a smaller car, but they aren't going to start walking 3
miles to the store._

Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid. However, riding 3
miles on your bike is trivial. You'll be there in 15 minutes. I do this about
twice a week, and driving wouldn't be any faster than biking.

I think the reason people don't consider biking is because bikes in america
are weird. Everyone wants to get a very cool mountain bike. Then it rides
poorly on the street, and it can't carry anything, so they assume bikes are
useless. I noticed that when I was in Tokyo, every bike on the street was of
the useful variety. They all had chain guards, fenders, and racks, which makes
casual riding an enjoyable experience. Maybe if you could go to a bike shop
and see bikes like this, people would use them for grocery shopping.

In the US, it appears that most people think bikes are a fun thing to ride to
kill time on the weekend. I wish we could change that perception somehow.

</rant>

~~~
pohart
> Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid.

What is stupid about that? Every day at lunch a group of 4 of us go on a three
mile walk. Most days we stroll and it takes an hour.

    
    
      If I had my own cart I could certainly do that once a week.

OK, so no more meat every day, but I could still have eggs every day and milk
some days. And I still wouldn't need to use any refrigeration. And since I
live within 3 miles of several farms and have a bike, I could make a few
milk/meat trips a week. I would probably be drinking sheep's milk and eating
mutton more, because that is what is close, but that still sounds fine.

------
ComputerGuru
What if pigs could fly?

EDIT

To clarify, it's ridiculous to just make a conjecture like this and build a
case around it. The same thing could be done for anything else, not just gas
and the current state of the economy. If the foundation of the article is this
wild, then any of its conclusions are just as off-base and pointless.

~~~
easp
1\. How do you know that the foundation of this article is wild?

2\. Have you read the article? It's a thought experiment. It's meant to
provoke thought and discussion. He's asking people to consider and share what
they would do if gas hit a price where business as usual was clearly untenable
and there would be no choice but to change consumption patterns.

------
eyudkowsky
At some point it becomes economical to synthesize fuel using nuclear power
plants. I would expect this to be well short of $100/gal.

------
pchristensen
America would look a lot like it did during the Great Depression. People
wouldn't travel much, more things would be produced locally because shipping
would be expensive, people would live closer together (both in proximity and
density), people would eat local produce because out-of-season foods would be
expensive to ship, etc. Things like digital content, electronics, etc would
seem extremely cheap ($500 for iPod touch or 5 gallons of gas), while other
things like wine, strawberries, air travel, etc would be extravagant luxuries.
It wouldn't be like the poverty of the great depression, but a lot of things
we take for granted now would get very, very expensive.

On the other hand, the high shipping costs would make local labor a lot more
economical for manufacturing, maintenance, etc.

~~~
nostrademons
People traveled _a lot_ during the Great Depression. That's when hobos, okies,
migrant workers, and Route 66 entered popular culture. Much of California was
settled during the 1930s, as emigrants from the dust-bowl states moved to the
Central Valley and LA areas. One of the fastest-growing professions was "gas
station attendant", and the Depression years featured the consolidation of the
auto industry.

~~~
jmzachary
Yep, a lot of us would have to adopt the hobo life and cut other people with
our hobo knife.

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petercooper
Just for posterity, and so I can look this back up in a year's time, but.. I
predict an oil price crash by this time next year. If we're not under
$50/barrel by summer 2009, I'd be surprised.

I can't cite any great insights here, but I've tended to notice that when
everyone jumps on the bandwagon of saying something bad is going to happen,
some price is going to rise forever, or the like, the opposite tends to occur
within a certain timeframe. It's now happening with property prices (and I
remember the bulls just one year ago..) and it'll happen with oil. Same
happens with memory prices too.

~~~
jmzachary
That's hard to say. One can make the argument for a price crash as speculators
have flooded into the oil and commodities markets and bid up prices. There is
a lot of fear of peak <insert finite natural resource>. Once people got tired
of it, prices would drop.

On the other hand, oil is a finite natural resource that has been pumped out
of the ground for decades at an increasing rate. Only severely retarded
politicians don't believe in peak oil or believe that oil is an infinite
resource (they also believe in ghosts, so there). Thanks to China, India, and
other countries deciding they want some basic level of civilization, the rate
of increase in the rate of increase of demand means oil supplies and proven
reserves are going down fast. That means there might not be a price crash and
in a few years we will look at $6/gallon for gasoline as the good ole days.

~~~
petercooper
Everything is finite. It all depends on /how/ finite things are. Technological
advances, increases in efficiency, and the influence of competing technologies
(electric, hydrogen, liquid propane gas, and so forth) will all have a role to
play.

It is typically very hard to accept that these things can have a big effect,
but that doesn't mean they won't (nor, of course, that they must, but the odds
are better that they will). The price of oil will be as "immaterial" within 50
years as the prices of horses or gas lamps were immaterial in 1940 compared to
1890.

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steveplace
This is the wrong question.

The real question is:

What will be the economic and social implications if the current trend (up) of
commodity prices given the timeframe (fast) were to continue.

Just to note: statistically, oil prices peak around this time. Oil prices do
tend to be seasonal, so be on the lookout for that.

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pricees
I already started an article "In Defense of $20/gal gas" on

[http://showtimeoncapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-
defense-...](http://showtimeoncapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-defense-
of-20gal-gasoline.html)

I got bored and quit because I thought it was pretty clear to anyone with
relative intelligence exactly what would occur.

------
DougBTX
I'm just waiting for the Ron Paul posts now, and the transition will be
complete...

~~~
rms
Cycles of stories happen here, this peak oil post was triggered by the higher
voted electric car conversion story. It'll be gone in a day.

