Boof,
I couldn't agree more with your comment about Camry hybrid, 6 years too late, but then the Liberals were in power then.
Now, if Rudd can persuade GM to build 10,000 Chevy Volts, could really make a start, but not enough to reduce fuel use by 4% per year. Better still, >500,000 duel Petrol/CNG vehicles per year, is definitely one way of buying 20-30 years extra time at least in Australia. My understanding is that one of the problems with CNG is the tank size required for 400-500km range. Why not have a small CNG tank for all those short trips, and top up at home from domestic NG just like PHEV use short range battery power?

Again, you're talking about people driving to work.

And on average that's 22% of all trips taken.

Okay, so for some people that's going to be 90+% of their driving. But that's not the majority, that's not the average.

I mean, you can always drag out cases of people who genuinely have little or no choices. But the vast majority of people do have a choice, they're like my mate - too lazy to walk or bike or whatever.

I'm just suggesting that each of us take a detailed look at our driving, record our trips and see how many are trips we could do by some other method, or which we could roll in with another trip.

So the guy whose only driving is to and from work from his godforsaken McMansion with no public transport in the area, he records that in his little logbook. But the guy who drives 15km along the railway line to and from work, 1.5km to the park, three times a week 2km to the gym, and six times a week 2km to the shops and then on Sunday goes for a drive to see the country, he records that, too.

Just take a look at your driving. Don't tell us fairy tales about the Poor Little Aussie Battler, just take a serious look at it and see what you can do without or reorganise.

And that'll reduce your fuel use a heap more than buggerising about with the accelerator pedal or any nonsense like that.

I'd frame the problem this way; if the world has too many people to eat steak, drive a car or enjoy air conditioning then maybe there should be fewer of us.

I couldn't agree more. For those of us who don't need to eat steak, drive a car, or have air conditioning though there's plenty of room on the planet. So what do we do? This is a matter of economics. I say we should price energy intensive lifestyles appropriately. If someone wants to eat steak while driving a Hummer with the AC on full blast, sure thing. I also think they should be allowed to heat their home with paper money. The thing is, that our infrastructure, taxes and government foolishly subsidize the Hummer, the AC and the steak. The war in Iraq is about securing access to oil and all US tax payers are paying for it. There are all sorts of tax subsidies for huge cars if you own your own business, regardless of whether its a construction company or a nail salon. There's this amazing transportation network of highways that you can't walk or bike on which tax payers paid for. And coal burning electricity plants produce tons of mercury, CO2 and other nastiness which ordinary folks and critters the world over suffer from. But the people sitting in front of the AC only pay for the cost of making the electricity.

The earth is plenty big enough for people to live simply. In fact the earth could support probably 10 times as many people as there are now if we didn't need to destroy the environment for a buzz.

It's hard to judge how the time driving translates to fuel use. You seem to be imagining that when people drive to work it's along easy freeways, and driving anywhere else is chockers with traffic jams. It ain't necessarily so.

I wouldn't say that more than 70+% of travel is "non-essential", rather that it's "discretionary" or "avoidable." A lot of people go to the shops a few times a week, it's not very difficult to sort yourself out and go just once. And there are other things which can be combined like social/education/active leisure - okay, so Jane goes to night school on Tuesdays and Jim goes to soccer, let's say Jim drives Jane to school, goes to soccer, has a brew or two with his mates afterwards, and Jane goes for coffee with her friend Mary from class. That's better than Jane and Jim taking their separate cars, and going out on different nights, and so on.

How about buy less useless stuff from concrete jungle malls!

No seriously we ahve to look at how people actually live in a typical suburb, where they work, how they get their food supplies, how they fill in all the spare hours they have now that FF does most of their household work and what they are doing when they leave their locales at all.

Then when we understand this, we can start to take a look at the avaialble resources in the suburbs themselves adn see if any of the infrastructure can be adpated so that people don't have to do as much travelling.

I fully agree with Kiashu that we should first look at not driving the car or reducing it as much as possible. Lecturing people about it is likely to be counterproductive and waiting for petrol to hit the screaming pain barrier is agaonisingly slow for some of us, but get over it, you can't control the oil price anymore that the next guy so just accept it and do what is within your own control.

Here is my personal list of goals I can achieve in my own community:

1. Set up a point to point ad-hoc car pool from the neighbourhood to the CBD (regional city). We can add other popular routes later like down tothe local shops and back from them if it works out.

2. Start a neighbourhood association with the intention of running the above car pool and maybe extending it in the future to pooled ownership of fewer but better cars shared amongst more people. (big goal)

3. Lobby to build a community wood fired oven in the local park. We teach all the local kids how to bake bread which is done once or twice a week saving people from having to buy stale commercial bread trucked from 300Kms away and save all those two kilometre trips tothe shops to buy it.

4. Around the oven, take over some of the unused grass areas in the park and start growing food. Co-opting the kids again.

5. Germinate and give all my neighbours a fruit tree to plant this Christmas. I ahve peach, nectarine and cherry in the fridge at the moment seeing as we just don't getreally coldwinters anymore.

6. Eventually I would like to see a community workshop built around the garden/park/oven which may be the germination of work opportunities. Small cottage industries with small shops.

7. The community hub is a bustling social hub which attracts home based workers who have learned to telecommute to their slave jobs. Far more people will stay put if they can walk to the local market in five minutes from their house.

8. Build resilience in the local community (as much as I like you guys, real people are also cool) to share knowledge , provide support to those doing it tough, i.e elderly, unemployed, mortage defaulters.

9. My favourtie - start a beer brewing network with all my new found friends and neighbours. Drink locally - no taxis, booze bus etc.

Everything on my list is doable, reduces car use by the whole neighbourhood and will make this a better place to live.

Wow, most of the people (in the Twin cities, Minnesota) I talk to on biking complain their distances they need to travel are too far, but there certainly are places (and times like rushhour) where I don't like to bike at all because of nonexistent shoulders (or parked cars) for safe biking.

We have an extensive biking community in the core cities and inner suburbs with interest in making roads safer for biking. (We also have usually senseless "critical mass" bike rides that purposely ride in the highest traffic times and ignore all traffic rules - not helping with any greater cooperative spirit with drivers.) But it seems improvement comes from participation - people interesting in biking need to get together and express their frustrations and difficulties to local governments/councils/boards and it surely takes time for change. Our buses and LRT also can carry bikes which I see frequently used.

WORSE than unsafe biking, unsafe walking is an even greater craziness of modern cities designed for cars. Getting a safe path for people walk a half mile to a bus stop is a hurdle too. Many neighborhood streets curve around in long blocks to discourage through-traffic, but also discourage walking when you have to go way out of your way just to get around a block. Insane stuff everywhere.

So "Get Political" is the answer in most cases, but change is slow.

Hate to say it but have you considered moving?

While driving today I was passed by small, medium, and giant SUVs and pickups, and by expensive midsize autos doing ten or more miles per hour over the speed limit. I was tailgated by a small car driven by someone who was angry because I wasn't driving over the speed limit. I was given a hard stare by a driver who had to pass me to the right because I was in the left-hand lane, doing the speed limit, to make a left-hand turn. Even at that, I drove only about 10 miles during the day, doing the following:

• took my wife to work, a fifteen minute drive that takes about 40 minutes by bus (one transfer necessary, and fare has to be paid at each boarding); my wife can't walk, and to pull her in a wagon to her school, and then pick her up to pull her home would take about a 2 hour round trip, morning and evening.
• took the dog to the dog-park on the way home, a slight swing south; I could have walked the dog to the park in about 40 minutes; however, knowing it would take another 40 minutes to get back, would I be supid enough to stay another hour at the park with the dog?.
• in the afternoon, I drove back to pick up my wife at work, dropping by a post office box on the way because a letter can't be left in the mail box because of the danger of it being ripped off.
• yesterday I had about the same schedule, but took a slightly modified route on my way to pick up my wife to do a quick shop at Costco; if I had walked to Costco earlier, it would have taken about 15 minutes to get there, though I would have had to pull that wagon again to collect all my loot, and would need a cooler and some ice in the wagon to keep the frozen goods through the trip back.
• eventually, if I kept up a wagon-wife/dog-park/wagon-shopping routine, I would probably attract the attention of the local newspaper and get my picture in the newspaper (Youtube?) as that eccentric who lives in north-county, or I would attract the attention of muggers (probably the same one's ripping off the mail), or I would get run over by one of those vehicles doing 10 mph over the speed limit.

I really do try my best to save gas by combining trips, and don't go anywhere unless I have saved up things to do during the trip, but beyond that the car-based life style around here isn't going to end until the gas does. In addition, for most people, there is a disconnect between buying gasoline and using it. When people are filling up, they grumble and shake their heads and blame everyone else for the problem. However, when they are driving, the gasoline becomes like air, always there and used without thinking.

"Since gas has become so expensive, we've installed locking gas caps on both vehicles."

1) Don't those caps just twist off with a little pressure, for example a wrench, for safety reasons?
2) Wouldn't you rather replace your tank of gas than a drilled out gas tank?

Or are the criminals dumb and lazy?

"utterly stupid"? Methinks this is a case of bullshit trying to baffle brains.Or are you just stirring?There is a name for this.

The simple answer to this rubbish is - A car may be a more efficient energy converter than a human or a horse but both animals use renewable fuel.Since when was oil renewable?

You've forgotten an essential component of this, how much more food will someone have to consume to live a life this way? I suspect barely any on average. All to many people are grossly fat, they could cut the food intake and start doing this and not starve. Fit people will probably find they have enough spare energy to do it without eating much more anyway.

Also renewable != oil.

Gee....For all those years I didn't own a car or bike I walked and/or used transit to carry up to 25-30kg of groceries and fermented beverages, and I suffered not, nor did any of my foodstuffs spoil. And yes, this was done for several years during Colorado winter snows and freezing temps, and during other years in the sweltering heat and humidity of Hawaii.

People make choices. I chose to do without a car, which meant I also chose to shop on foot or via transit, which didn't exist in my Colorado town.

I don't really care for Nike, but their mantra I found useful: "Just Do It."

This is utterly stupid

I assume you are refering to what you wrote, right?

To call this pure bullshit would be to miss an opportunity to call it what it really is, The Most Finely Refined Yak Dung Ever Produced.

At 55 I can easily out walk and out bike most 25 year olds and I do walk to the supermarket and I can easily carry my weekly provisions home on my back in a small knapsack.

Disclaimer I do use my car to drive my kayak and scuba gear to beach at least once a week.
and last week I took second place in a 12 mile kayak race in rough seas and strong winds.
@#$%!&* I was beaten by a 25 year old who took first.

So the car is about 2x as efficient energy usage (that's obviously why cars took off : they're cheaper in real world currency (in energy cost) than walking.

What a hot steaming pile that statement is!

Ride a Bike or Take a Hike!

First of all, most of those trips are trips to the supermarket. A car has a carrying capacity of about 500 kg. A bike can maybe take 10 kg.

I wasn't aware that people were buying half a tonne of groceries. I've never seen it - not even when I work in restaurants where they feed a hundred or more people daily.

Shopping is a quarter of all journeys, and the journeys average 13 minutes - that suggests the shopping is relatively close to home, and that they're going there a few times a week. I didn't say that people shouldn't drive to the supermarket. I said that they could, by planning, turn four or more trips a week into one.

Furthermore, for certain classes of the population going to the supermarket would become prohibitively difficult and/or expensive. If you can't walk 5 km, like a lot of pensioners, never mind wakling 5 km carrying 10 kg of food and goods.

Here in my suburb I see many old people who have a combination walking frame/shopping trolley. They get about slowly but quite usefully with those. They're walking 2km or so to the shops and back, and I usually see them walking another kilometre or so as they meet their friends around the shops and catch up with them.

In any case, we're talking about the average, the majority. Are you suggesting that disabled and elderly people make up the majority of car drivers? Not the last time I walked past the highway near my home.

All the other stuff about humans converting energy to food is such patent nonsense that it's not even worth replying to. It's like those vegan goofballs who said that if you eat meat, you use more energy walking 5km than driving there.

It's understandable that someone may want to combine all their shopping into one big trip to save time, but take a look at your grocery cart and which are the heaviest items? I'm guessing drinks. Of all the drinks, only milk is perishable and would need to be restocked regularly. What else is in the heavy and perishable category, maybe watermelons? Bottled water and soft drinks are a waste, and we'd be better off not buying them at all. That leaves alcohol and fruit juice. Those aren't perishable, and you could easily stock a month's worth in one car load if you wanted to cut back on car trips.

"A bike can maybe take 10 kg."

You can easily tow over 100kg in a simple trailer.

DIY Trailer Gallery

There are plenty of plans on instructables.com for trailers with 50-200kg capacity which can be built for under €50.

Whoa, bullshit detector just sounded the alarm. Dude, I don't know where you made up your numbers. Unfortunately I can't follow your reasoning because it is so obtuse. Plus you work in BTUs instead of SI units. But there is no way in hell that a car is going to beat a bicycle in efficiency going to the grocery store! Why can I say that with certainty? Because you're dragging around 1 (metric) ton of (essentially useless) scrap metal when you drive a car.

Let's simplify your calculation:

1 litre of petrol/gasoline contains 35 MJ of chemical energy. Let's say your car gets 5 liters per 100 km. It's a little generous, but fine. That means it takes 35MJ to move the car 20 km. Input, output, very simple.

Now let's do the cyclist. Forget efficiency, forget power output, don't screw around, pulling random numbers out your arse. How much food do I need to cycle 20 km? Unlike you I actually cycle and so if I say I could cycle 20 km with a 600 kcal meal (that equals 2.4 MJ if I'm not screwing up my conversion) I'm not making up something unreasonable. If you look at this website about the bike leg of the ironman, the guy says

Aim for 300-750 Calories per hour on the bike based on your size, training and racing experience.

So I think I'm being rather hard on the bicycle here. The real caloric intake is probably half my estimate, but I'm trying to be kind to you here. So with these VERY GENEROUS numbers (35 MJ versus 2.4 MJ), it looks like it takes about one fifteenth of the energy to ride the bike as it takes to drive the car 20 km. And you sir are an idiot.

Clever! You could turn your witty slogans into a cottage industry of making such signage for other cyclists.

I wouldn't be surprised about the voluntary restraint part, I've made similar arguments for myself when I wanted to indulge. "Well, already I create only one-tenth the emissions of the average Aussie, so screw it, steak-time."

But it goes the other way, too. When my woman asked why we had to have wind power when it costs extra, I said, "we have to do something to balance the effect of your international flight earlier this year, that flight was four tonnes of CO₂. So we won't pay for anyone to burn coal."

Your joking about video-linked weddings reminds me: in a world with less fossil fuels, families and people who want to keep in touch are going to live closer to each-other. Cheap fossil fuels have allowed us to spread out across the country and the world.

Lou was just writing about how just four years ago, fuel was 10-20% of the cost of aircraft tickets, now it's 50%. So if the fare were to go up in proportion, instead of $120 Melbourne-Sydney it'd be $600-$1,200. Instead of $3,000 round-the-world it'd be $15,000-$30,000. Will that end the airline industry? I doubt it. If at $10 oil in 1998 you'd asked people what would happen at $135 oil, they'd predict complete collapse. I don't think airline fares will go up to that much, but it's easy to imagine them doubling or tripling in the next year or two.

Unless these airlines get bailouts from public funds, either the aircraft are going to become empty cattlecars in terms of amenities as they cut down further on extras being getting you from A to B, or else many airlines are going bust and those remaining will boost prices.

So whether we want to restrain our fossil fuel consumption or not, it's going to be restrained in the future. "Rationing by price", I believe they call it around here. If we want the great uncle in Scotland we only met once when we were two to come to our wedding, we'll have to get him to live in the same state, we won't be able to afford to fly him.

Peak fossil fuels means relocalisation not only of production of food and other things, but relocalisation of family and friends, too.

I'm just suggesting we do by choice what we'll be forced to do in the future. If you've cut your driving by a lot, or even better cut it out entirely, then when the price of fuel zooms up it won't cripple you. This applies in other energy-dependent areas, too: electricity went up a few cents per kWh, but since we'd dropped our electricity consumption by two-thirds we didn't care.

I am too chickenshit to cycle much, the drivers in Melbourne are crazy and with an enormous sense of entitlement. My neighbour told me indignantly that bikes don't have to pay registration.
"Registration goes to the upkeep of roads."
"So?"
"You drive 1,200kg of sedan, plus 100kg of yourself. The cyclist has 12kg of cycle and 70kg of themselves. Do you think the cyclist causes as much wear and tear on the road as you?"

There are a few bike trails but they're designed for leisure, not commuting, and they don't go where I need to go for my work and social stuff. But unlike the insane USA where some suburbs have no pedestrian paths, we have plenty, so I can walk. And our public transport is crappy and infrequent and unreliable, but is better than many places, with planning and a decent allowance of time you can get around. And I have the time spare to wait for trains or walk because I don't have to work to pay for a car... That would take up about 6-10 hours of work for me.

I'd love to cycle, but I'm too cowardly. But again: there are always options.

I am probably an example of most people. I could walk to work. I have done it. Takes about 20 minutes each way. Flat and sidewalks all the way. Rarely rains where I live, Bayarea, Ca, and the weather is mild. But I don't. Shame on me. I get up at the crack of dawn, get the kids ready for school, make breakfast, by the time were ready to ship out, I have about 10 minutes, if I am lucky, to get everyone to where they need to be on time. Now, this is all sheer laziness one might say. Of course I am pooped when I get home from work and I get ready for the evening to do it all over again in the morning. So, I suspect that there are a lot of folks like me. Gassing up and getting to where they need to be , conveniently. That is the way of life that is very hard to give up. We are a convenient society and changing that will be very difficult. Being peak oil aware it still is hard. I feel like a junkie, let's just use it all up till its all gone. But I intend to change my ways. I need a 24 step program I think!

Your car is depreciating, therefore you have to drive it?

You're losing money from its depreciation, so you should lose more money by burning fuel in it?

You're not by any chance an accountant for Bear Sterns, are you?

The depreciation of cars is in large part based on their kilometres driven, that's the biggest factor in their drop in price after the "driven out of the lot for the first time" factor. So the less you drive it, the less it depreciates. It might even appreciate - hell, find a Model T with o miles on it and you'll become a multi-millionaire :)

Of course, if you have no car at all then the depreciation rate is 0%...

It is indeed cultural. Just look at all the desperate cries of pain and suffering in this thread. People are very quick to point out their exceptional circumstances which mean that change is impossible. "Of course, everyone else can change, but me? Impossible! Let's wait for Science! or The Market! to come up with a better car, or for The Government To Do Something. I can't do anything, I'm helpless."

And this on a website about peak oil. Here we are discussing how the stuff is going to run short and be stupidly expensive, but there's still enormous resistance to the idea of "burn less." Indeed, I think that if you forced the average man to choose between losing his car forever or his testicles, he would be hard-put to make the choice.

I used it ironically, considering that my reading audience is almost entirely Western; to them, "islamofascist" is like "communism" in that it has no real meaning, conveying no actual ideology, but only means "those guys who we think are crazy and evil."

My idea was that to the average Westerner, the simplest possible solution to high fuel prices, fossil fuel depletion and climate change - "just burn less of the stuff" - is an idea which seems crazy and evil. They would no more vote for a political leader who says, "no more burgers and SUVs" than they would vote for Stalin or Osama Bin Laden.

Irony, mate.

Quite a few people could be telecommuting, actually, at least part-time. For example, my spouse works as a translator/interpreter at an engineering firm. She could be at home translating about two days a week and only have to go in three days a week. Most of the engineers are doing work on their own workstations most of the time, and co-ordinate with other engineers on just a couple of days a week. Certainly the finance department could do their work from home.

Usually the objections to telecommuting come from distrustful managers, who believe that without someone looking over their shoulder their workers will slack off, and that the workers will be busily selling off the company's secrets to rivals from home. Whether they really believe this or are just trying to justify their job is hard to tell. After all, if workers can be trusted then we don't need so many supervisors, do we?

I think there's some resistance, too, from genuinely slack or incompetent workers. If all the boss sees of you is what you send them each day as your work done, the boss might notice how little you actually do. In the office with endless meetings and paper-shuffling and arse-kissing it's less obvious when someone's a slacker.

But in actual practical terms, lots of people could be telecommuting. Workers can be paid according to what they produce rather than simple salaries, and there are plenty of IT solutions for security - dedicated company-supplied laptops with sealed cases (no USB ports) and dedicated work-home internet lines, and so on. And anyway if you don't trust someone why did you hire them?

Just look at websites like this - created by a group of people who've never met, and who are all working from home. Okay, it's not a commercial enterprise - but it is nonetheless a piece of productive work which is a resource used by others. Me, Big Gav, Prof Goose - we are all telecommuting volunteers ;)

So don't preach then offer febble excuses as to why you still have two gas guzzlers on your drive.

I have only one fuel guzzler on my driveway, my spouse uses it to drive the 7km to work three days a week, and cycles two days a week. Two of the driving days are because she has a hobby in the evenings, if she relied on public transport to get from work to the hobby and then home, she'd be home at midnight. Still I think she should get rid of the stupid thing, but... the days when men could command their spouses are long past.

But me, the only times I drive are when my spouse wants to drink at some social occasion. For everything else, I walk and use public transport. Our fuel use is a 40lt tank every six weeks, or 350lt a year. The average Aussie car travels 14,700km annually getting 13.7lt/100km, thus 2,000lt annually. So we use 17.5% of the average, or 82.5% less than average if we want to make it sound really good.

Do I get to preach?

To me, the point is not to say that this guy is good and that guy is bad in their fuel consumption, though that's amusing and fun. Really the point is that for most people driving is not a rational choice, they don't sit down and analyse the best possible means of transport for each particular trip, they just have a way they're used to using, and choose that reflexively.

For example, I only recently in my 30s got a car licence. I had somewhere to go, and said, "damn, only 10km but I'll need to take two buses and it'll take an hour, oh well." My spouse said, "you can take the car, you know." I simply hadn't thought of taking the car - after twenty or so years of travelling about independently on foot or public transport, "take the car" just didn't occur to me.

Likewise, for people who've been driving since they were 16 or 18, "walk" or "bike" or "take the bus" just won't occur to them. They're just used to getting straight into the car and going.

In a world where we're facing economic troubles and rising fuel prices, where fossil fuels are finite and contributing to climate change, we cannot afford to have unthinking habits anymore. We have to think about what we're doing. We have to minimise the use of fossil fuels, and eventually eliminate them altogether.

Change begins at home. It begins with looking seriously at how you live to see if you can change some things. And as the statistics show, around two-thirds of all car trips taken are avoidable or could be rearranged so that two or three trips become one. So there's a good chance we could halve our use of petrol, diesel and so on.

If you're not convinced of the need for that in terms of peak oil and climate change, there's still the economic issue. I mean, if the fuel price doubles but you halved your driving, you won't care about the price rise very much. For example us with our 40lt every six weeks, so the price went from $1.50 to $1.60 - big deal, that's another $4 every six weeks, who cares? But if it were 40lt twice a week then it'd start to matter.