degringolade

Impressionism / Henri Matisse/ Paysage Des Environs De Toulouse, Le Pont Des Demoiselles

Back in the long ago, early nineties, I went through a kinda modified midlife crisis and me and the mother of my children moved to a tiny town in Eastern Washington where she ran a clinic and I became the City Planner.

Odd state of affairs, but Republic is a small town with a history of weirdness and I fit in. The ex didn’t and that took us off on another set of adventures. But as part of the process of planning was writing grants and getting funded to study things. It was how I paid my bills and how the City paid me. The powers that be were amused by the paltry sums being requested, the remoteness of the city, and the things that I proposed to study. Since the sitting Speaker of the US House of Representatives was our congresscritter, lots of my paltry requests got funded.

One of the studies was recycling and waste management. Another was eclectic power analysis and overall energy requirements. Six month’s of study each, turn in a report that got filed somewhere and assiduously ignored. I didn’t care. It was as close to an academic position as I ever cared to get.

Anyhoo, the energy study was where I came to the gospel of peak oil. I spent some time smoking dope behind the maintenance shed (My office was down with the roads crew until the fire department got their new building) and running though numbers on gasoline, diesel, electricity, mileage estimated, manufacturing costs, the entire gamut of transportation and electrical draw.

What it all worked out was that the city could survive pretty well and grow 10% with just the electrical feed that came through a single line coming over the pass. But then the copper ridge fire wiped out 20,000 or so acres and threatened the hell out of that single line. But that is another story.

As part and parcel of the study, I threw in a spreadsheet analysis of the costs and needs of replacing the gasoline/diesel with electric vehicles. Even then the costs and physical requirements blew my mind. The costs of making the cars was about the same as best I could figure. The sales costs would be higher, but the real tickler was that there simply wasn’t enough power generated in the USA to replace all the fossil fuel vehicles with electric. I can’t remember the exact number I came up with, but the country would have to build around 2000 nuclear power plants to provide ½ the energy equivalents of electricity in order to fuel the shiny new electric vehicles.

I can’t imagine that I was more than a half order of magnitude off. When you start playing with these kinds of numbers, the constraints are pretty well defined.

What I am saying here point blank is that the car culture in the USA is terminal. Oil isn’t going to get more plentiful. There isn’t enough electricity for a multi-vehicle family unit.

Welcome to Cuba.