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gas prices are highly highly sensitive to auto fuel consumption. even a modest downsizing of cars will have enormous effect on gas price. what is keeping the hummer humming? easy credit? daddy?
how do they do it?
Agreed. Get the clunkers off the road and get people into smaller vehicles. Bring back the station wagon for families that may need a little more room but don't need a full-sized SUV. American car companies produce vehicles that get insanely high mpg in other countries but refuse to sell them here in America because they say "there is no market for them, people want SUVs." I disagree with that and believe there is a definite market for high mpg cars if they are made available.
The solution to much of that issue is to get the long haul truckers off the highways and start using the rail lines again. It's much more energy efficiant, and rail is the safest form of transportation. Plus, the rail roads pay better than the long haul trucking firms, with better benefits.
The solution to much of that issue is to get the long haul truckers off the highways and start using the rail lines again. It's much more energy efficiant, and rail is the safest form of transportation. Plus, the rail roads pay better than the long haul trucking firms, with better benefits.
I'd agree about the first part but you're going to lose a huge amount of jobs by taking long haul trucks off the road. How many people do you have operating a train hauling how many tons of material? 3 or 4 taking the jobs of how many hundreds of truckers? There is cascading effect, less maintenance, less trucks to be built etc. Keep in mind I'd support getting long hsaul trucks off the highways but lets be realistic, there will be a lot of jobs lost.
As far as the OP goes while many nations face a serious problem including China it's because of a lack of domestic resources. There is perhaps two nations with enough fossil fuel reserves to remain energy independent and that is the US and Russia. Even China which has a huge reserve of coal is going to face a serious shortfall in about 3 decades simply because of the huge amount they consume. Certainly within the next few decades we need to consider large tariffs on any domestic fossil fuel resource that is being exported.
You might have oil rich nations like Saudi Arabia that you could argue could be energy independent but that is all they have. They'll never be an economic power because they lack the other resources.
I'd agree about the first part but you're going to lose a huge amount of jobs by taking long haul trucks off the road. How many people do you have operating a train hauling how many tons of material? 3 or 4 taking the jobs of how many hundreds of truckers? There is cascading effect, less maintenance, less trucks to be built etc. Keep in mind I'd support getting long hsaul trucks off the highways but lets be realistic, there will be a lot of jobs lost.
As far as the OP goes while many nations face a serious problem including China it's because of a lack of domestic resources. There is perhaps two nations with enough fossil fuel reserves to remain energy independent and that is the US and Russia. Even China which has a huge reserve of coal is going to face a serious shortfall in about 3 decades simply because of the huge amount they consume. Certainly within the next few decades we need to consider large tariffs on any domestic fossil fuel resource that is being exported.
You might have oil rich nations like Saudi Arabia that you could argue could be energy independent but that is all they have. They'll never be an economic power because they lack the other resources.
I'm sure the auto workers said the same thing about automation in the factory.
As for energy resources, as long as the U.S. is reliant on fossil fuels, it will never be energy independent.
It's rather odd that it took Jim Hoftover a year to respond to that bill. Since it was signed in 20120, where have all the trucker protests bee happening. I've not seen any. I also find it a bit odd that he would suggest (and that is all that it is) that having more fuel efficient trucks is going to wreck the trucking industry, particularly when we see the very high price of today's diesel fuel. That said, imagine how much diesel fuel could be saved if all that long haul freight was moved via rail.
Derailing it because I don't agree with the premise of the article?
Derailing it because I scoff at the idea that 2 (two) scientists publish an opinion paper which uses as some reference material from the Times newspaper?
So as per you I am barred from voicing my opinion on the topic in a thread? I have to "publish" my "specific issues" with the findings?
My feelings are I say drill more and build numerous new nuclear plants, NOT cut back on the usage of fossil fuel items.
I'm sure the auto workers said the same thing about automation in the factory.
Well that has cost people jobs too, as we move forward with more and more automation the unskilled laborer and even the skilled laborer become less needed. I'm not against automation, for example I often make the argument if we didn't have cheap labor to pick tomatoes we'd ave people building an maintaining robots to do it. Cheap labor stifles innovation but you have to strike a balance, you can't have robots on one farm if the neighboring farm can do it cheaper with labor.
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As for energy resources, as long as the U.S. is reliant on fossil fuels, it will never be energy independent.
How do you figure that? We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25%+ of the worlds coal. This is nearly as much as China and Russia combined who are second and third on the list. The EIA estimates suggests this would last for 120 years and that is probably conservative estimate because the reserve base is much larger than the recoverable reserves:
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"Total resources" is our best estimate of the total amount of coal, including undiscovered in the United States. Currently, total resources are estimated to be about 4 trillion short tons.1 Total Resources includes several categories of coal with various degrees of geologic assurance and data reliability.
But not all coal is feasible to mine. The Demonstrated Reserve Base2 is the sum of coal in both measured and indicated resource categories of reliability, representing 100% of the in-place coal that could be mined commercially at a given time. EIA estimates the Demonstrated Reserve Base to measure 486 billion short tons.
"Estimated Recoverable Reserves" include only the coal that can be mined with today’s mining technology, after accessibility constraints and recovery factors are considered. EIA estimates there are 261 billion short tons of U.S. recoverable coal reserves, about 54% of the Demonstrated Reserve Base.
Based on U.S. coal consumption for 2010, the U.S. recoverable coal reserves represent enough coal to last 249 years. However, EIA projects in the most recent Annual Energy Outlook (April 2011) that U.S. coal consumption will increase at about 1.1% per year for the period 2009-2035. If that growth rate continues into the future, U.S. recoverable coal reserves would be exhausted in about 119 years if no new reserves are added.
As of right now that coal can be converted to liquid fuels for less than what it cost for conventional oil. Using a cogen type facility they could efficiently produce both liquid fuels and generate power.
The estimates I've seen being thrown around for natural gas are in the neighborhood of 100 years, this is not something I've researched so I don't know where that number comes from. Suffice it say whatever the number it there is a lot of it.
How many other untapped resources do we have in this country like oil shale? There's estimates of nearly a trillion, that's trillion with a T, barrels in the Green River formation.
One thing that may become an issue in the future is the petro chemical industry however where there is a will there is way.
Some of these alternative may cost more but that's not the point, something is better than nothing. The fossil fule resources in this country per capita are substantially larger than any other nation. As the costs for these fuels rise so will the incentive for truly competitive alternatives and that is when you will see a lot of private investment into research and development. In the meantime the US has a nice buffer during this transitional period.
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