
America’s Never-Ending Oil Consumption - jseliger
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/american-oil-consumption/482532/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Best-Of-The-Atlantic+%28The+Atlantic+-+Best+Of%29&amp;single_page=true
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torpfactory
Oil is great.

From an engineering perspective it is energy dense and relatively stable and
easy-to-use. I can put a small amount of it in my pickup truck and drive up
the side of a mountain. A pilot can fly to the other side of the world in a
few hours time with a plane powered by the stuff. A few hundred years ago that
level of mobility and conevnience would have been seen as a magic power - the
domain of witches and demons.

I don't think Americans are addicted to oil. We are addicts of the capability,
the freedom, if you will, that oil enables. In the short term limits on oil
limit our ability to do the things we want, many of which require oil to
enable. When an alternative technology comes along which gives us the same
capability and is cleaner and (most importantly) cheaper, we will gladly move
on from oil.

I personally would even support a tax on oil (and thus marginally reduce my
freedom) in order to invest in whatever is next and facilitate the change
before we permanently impair the earth. Alas my fellow countrymen do not have
it in their hearts to tax themselves for this purpose.

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cpprototypes
Oil is great for energy storage and we have over a hundred years of
infrastructure built for it. And that oil technology is still being refined
and advanced.

The big issues with oil are due to the source, not the technology itself.
Right now the source is underground carbon sinks (fossil fuels). But what if
we produced synthetic oil using excess solar energy during daytime? It would
pull carbon from the air. And would burn cleaner than any fossil fuel source.

It seems many dream of a battery future. But is it really better to produce
millions of batteries instead of just finding better ways to make oil?

It kind of reminds me of the classic desktop app vs web app debate. One big
advantage of web app is that upgrages are single source, just update the
server. But desktop apps, there may be many multiple old versions out there
because users don't always update. In a similar way, why are we focusing on
the very difficult and slow task of upgrading all cars to EV? Why not improve
the source of oil itself?

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bubbleRefuge
EV's have other benefits. Ultimately, when economy of scale is fully realized,
perhaps electric motors are cheaper, cleaner, and easier to maintain than
ICE's. Perhaps automobile supply chains will become similar to laptop/Iphone
supply chains ( ie extremely efficient) . Perhaps EVs are easier to re-cycle.
Perhaps they perform better on the road. For ex, accelerate and stop faster .
Perhaps there will be a 5x 10x 20x breakthrough in battery technology?

~~~
cpprototypes
When comparing just technology, EV cars are superior. Far greater engine
efficiency, less complexity and moving parts, efficient transmission of energy
from power plants to vehicle, etc.

But we live in an oil world. There are billions of cars out there. Cars are
big investments that are handed down generation to generation like houses,
especially in developing countries. EV car sales are still a drop in the
bucket compared to ICE car sales.

If we want fast and rapid action on climate change, the quickest path is not
pushing EV. It would be massive investment in reducing the cost to make
synthetic oil. This may seem impossible, but that's what many said about solar
competing with fossil fuels. EV car enthusiasts often talk about how EV cars
get immediate environmental benefits from power plant upgrades such as burning
coal to solar. But how much more orders of magnitude environment improvement
would we get from carbon neutral oil creation? If a cost effective way was
found that could compete with fossil fuels, billions of cars would immediately
benefit environmentally.

Again, another computer analogy. Imagine someone invented a beautiful new
elegant programming language that reduces CPU energy use by 50%. At the same
time, someone found a way to reduce JVM CPU energy use by 20%. If we wanted
the shortest path to worldwide energy reduction in CPU, what would be faster,
just update the JVM for millions of servers or rewrite everything in the new
programming language?

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seanp2k2
Don't we already kinda do this with Ethanol, and aside from how growing so
much corn is also bad for the environment, how it's a less efficient fuel, and
other concerns (indirect land use change etc), it already works to des crease
our dependence on the stuff in the ground?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_S...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_States#)

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cpprototypes
Ethanol is terrible, especially corn produced ethanol. The type of process I'm
referring to is this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel)

The inputs to this are just energy + water + CO2 = oil. No corn or other
plants required. Currently this type of technology is far from cost
competitive. But that could potentially change if more was invested into this
area.

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rlanday
Getting people to use less oil is easy. Tax it to make it more expensive. I
don’t mean to say that that would necessarily be good policy, but it would be
a hell of a lot more effective than just giving a speech.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's one of the lessons of economics that seems to be largely lost:

To discourage use of something, make it more expensive (or less efficient).

To encourage use of something, make it less expensive (or more efficient).

Increasing efficiency _increases_ overall consumption: the Jevons paradox
(1865).

Jevons was also an early peak-fossil-fuels theorist, though his area was coal
(oil had just been discovered, the 4-cycle internal combustion engine was 20
years off).

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jschwartzi
Americans don't love cars and big homes. The way our cities are arranged and
our land is zoned make it difficult to live without a car and a big home.

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tinbucket
I absolutely agree about cars, but in what way is it "difficult to live
without" a big home for the average American? How does zoning make that the
case?

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stale2002
The biggest effect of zoning rules and regulations is to prevent developers
from building highly dense and efficient neighborhoods.

If zoning rules allowed developers to build larger, taller, and more numerous
buildings, we would all have better, cheaper, and more transportationally
efficient housing.

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ams6110
Zoning rules are largely the result of the desires of the local residents.

~~~
nine_k
Exactly; local residents totally don't like housing in their area become
cheaper, because their own houses would become cheaper. They use their
privilege of being local residents to constrain other property owners' rights
in their area, preventing them from building denser housing.

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castratikron
If you're an American and you're interested in supporting a carbon tax, check
out the Citizen's Climate Lobby:
[http://citizensclimatelobby.org/](http://citizensclimatelobby.org/)

What they're trying to implement is a revenue-neutral fee on carbon emissions:
a fee is collected on fossil fuels at the source (the well, the mine,
whatever), and the money from the fee is placed in a fund. At the end of the
year, the money is then redistributed to every citizen. About 2/3 of citizens
would net positive on this fee.

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ryanwaggoner
So 2/3rds of citizens are incentivized with hard currency every year to want
MORE carbon emissions?

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castratikron
The fee is aimed at and energy producers and investors. The fee would increase
steadily every year, which would signal them to divest from fossil fuels. The
dividend part of the plan is put in mainly to make Republicans happy, since no
Republican is ever going to support a new tax (Al Gore couldn't even increase
the gas tax by 5 cents).

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jakozaur
Politician speaches has usually little to no impact on dayily life habbits.

What can help is the policies. E.g. Higher gas tax, denser cities with better
public transport, higher taxes on cars...

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dredmorbius
That's an interesting exploration of the past 50 years or so of US domestic
oil consumption politics. For a rather more detailed history of oil, I
recommend Daniel Yergin's _The Prize_. It's rather the epic book (there's also
a PBS/BBC miniseries), and it wraps up in 1992 with the first Iraq War, but
really hammers home the impact of oil.

As to consumption, conservation, price, encouragement, and discouragement, the
problem's complicated.

As torpfactory notes here, oil is close to a perfect fuel. It's high in energy
density (by weight or volume), _exceptionally_ stable (proven multi-million
year stability), liquid (so it flows, unlike solids, but stays in what you put
it in, unlike gas), safe (little or no protective equipment is needed near it,
and while I wouldn't advise bathing in it, you can touch it with little harm),
and works in thermal and motive systems ranging from thimble-sized to the size
of a large house. The immediate exhaust products are mostly harmless (CO2 and
water -- though yes, over time the CO2 becomes _quite_ problematic).

There's little else that's so immensely attractive as a fuel.

It was also abundant and cheap, for a time. But it's ultimately finite,
supplies we've used took tens, possibly hundreds of millions of years to form,
and we're consuming them at the rate of ~5 million years of formation per year
of consumption. Jeffrey S. Dukes' paper, "Burning Buried Sunshine", describes
this calculus in detail, and I highly recommend it.

If you want people to use more of something, lower prices and increase
efficiency. If you want them to use less, increase prices and decrease
efficiency. The fact that increased efficiency _increases_ overall production
has long been noted, William Stanley Jevons is credited with describing his
eponymous paradox in _The Coal Question_ , 1865.

Oil's price is another problem. Carbon taxes address externalities on the
_consumption_ side, but in _extraction_ , I'm coming to the conclusion that
typical market forces tend to ignore, to their error, the _embodied creation
costs_ of oil. It's as if you were living off a trust fund but considered only
the cab fare to cross town to the bank to make a withdrawal, and not a
depletion allowance _based on actual costs of replacement_ for the funds
removed. Properly accounted, oil would cost hundreds, thousands, possibly
millions of times what we account for it.

There's also the problem that a democratic populace is an ultimate "shoot the
messenger" manager. The public wants to hear what it wants to hear, and the
lessons of US presidents Carter and Reagan should be closely studied. Carter
told the inconvenient truth, Reagan the attractive lie.

