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Over a barrel - a new vision needed
Posted by Big Gav on July 23, 2008 - 7:40am in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
This is a guest post from Tim Jones, the Convenor of the Sustainable Energy Forum (New Zealand). It was previously published in The (Wellington) Dominion Post.
In November 2007, when the world oil price was nudging US $90 per barrel, I wrote an article entitled “The Future of Oil” for the Dominion Post. The article explained that oil prices were rising because world oil production had been virtually static since 2005, while demand had continued to rise.
Since my article appeared, the price has climbed still higher. And there’s not much relief in sight: the International Energy Agency is now predicting only a slight increase in supply over the next couple of years, and a worsening supply crunch after that.
It appears that historically high oil prices are here to stay, and further increases remain likely. The question now is: how should we respond?
Individual New Zealanders have been taking sensible steps to reduce their dependence on oil. People have been using their cars less and walking, cycling and using public transport more. Those who can afford to buy new cars have bought smaller cars. Those who can afford to relocate have been moving closer to where they work.
But individual action won’t be enough. Since the end of World War Two, our entire economic system has become dependent on the easy mobility that oil,
with its low price, ready availability, and high energy content, allows. The “business as usual” position is that we can depend on an unhindered
flow of oil to keep our just-in-time economy moving: but business as usual stopped making sense a while ago.
We now face two threats: the long-term depletion of oil supplies, leading to sky-high prices and potential shortages as an unprepared world struggles to adapt; and the increasing risk of short- to medium-term oil emergencies. With production already struggling to meet demand, any disruption caused by war, terrorism or natural disaster will be magnified.
The recent truckies’ protests are a sign of the times. The road transport industry grew to dominate freight transport because of cheap fuel and policies that favoured road freight over sea and rail. Now that fuel is no longer cheap, and other modes are starting to make better sense, the truckies are feeling the pinch, and using their political muscle to try to insulate themselves from the winds of change.
Yet our distribution system for food and freight depends on trucks. Even if we shift long-distance transport to sea and rail, it is trucks that move goods from port or railhead to the shops where we buy them.
Of all goods, the most critical is food: New Zealand may grow far more food than we need for domestic consumption, but we still need to move it from farm to consumer. And our heavily mechanised farming system is just as dependent as trucking on oil and oil-based products. It’s time for the humble vegetable garden to make a comeback in our cities.
New Zealand is still better placed than most countries to cope with restrictions on oil imports. But all of us – politicians, planners, officials and the public – have to get real about what the post-cheap-oil future will be like. Where are we most vulnerable? What must we do as a society to become more resilient and adaptable? How do we manage the transition to a less oil-dependent future?
In the pursuit of economic efficiency, we have become dependent on overseas manufacturers for such critical items as clothing and medicine. But this dependence increases our vulnerability. Is it time to bring such critical industries back to New Zealand?
We also need to stop wasting money on projects that only make things worse. Let’s start by placing a moratorium on building new motorways and highways. In an era of declining vehicle use, there is no longer any justification for more of these expensive white elephants, foisted on us by transport planners whose models and methods are stuck in the past, and those politicians who believe that more roads equal more votes.
Let’s spend the money on things we actually need: better public transport, walkways and cycleways; an expanded and electrified rail system; better broadband infrastructure; and more robust ways of moving freight and producing food.
Major challenges are ahead. Let’s start facing up to them.
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
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Tim,
Your post is mainly raising questions rather than canvassing solutions. Do you have access to data on average VMT, fuel economy of private vehicles, length of daily commutes, what proportion of oil use is for commuting versus commercial transport? Is vehicle use declining, and if so is it due to car pooling or a shift to public transport? If its the former, a better road system is justified, if the latter a better public transport system.
What sort of vulnerability do you think NZ is being exposed to by importing clothing and medicine? I would imagine that these products do not make great demands on transportation.
Its my understanding that all of NZ is readily accessed by sea transport, which is 20-50 times more efficient in moving bulk freight than road. The roll-on-roll off systems used in Norway may be a big part of the solution to save diesel, but still keep truckers employed.
Its hard to face up to challenges if people don't know what is being asked and how that will change their lives.
One of the most effective wasy of selling any product or message is to ask questions of the prospect and let them come to the conclusion waht the solution is. Once you get to that point the prospect is ready to "buy" the solution you are offering. The peak oil movement, if it can be described as that, is still very fractured about what the solutions should be. All of those so called solutions should be questioned and examined closely as well to ensure that we do not embark on further resource misadventures which will ultimatley end up in blind alleys (bio-fuel, CTL, NG, etc).
This thing is going to dominate the rest of our lives. There are no "solutions" to continuing BAU. We are going to have to fundamentally rethink our physical relationship with the Earth and its resources, and that will require an enormous social, mental and spiritual shift away from high entropy consumer-industrial mobility driven economies. We should not underestimate the enormity of that task, nor should we wilt from it, for hope remains only so long as we continue to ask the questions that will lead us to reconstructed and ultimatley joyful lives.
Termoil,
I can see how that works for say reducing CO2e, by the government adding a cost and letting everyone decide what what they will accept. In Australia it appears people will accept higher electricity prices, but not higher petrol prices, possibly because they cannot see how an extra 5cents /L is going to save CO2e.
To deal with an impending oil shortage, Tim has suggested stop new road construction and invest more in rail transport. This will only have the desired result if no more roads means people can and will use mass-transit. Sydney traffic suggests people will just wait longer in traffic congestion, complaining about traffic. Another possibility would be minimum fuel efficiency standards for new vehicles, that are raised as more efficient vehicles become available or alternative non-oil fuels or reduce VMT( by car-pooling or mass transit or school buses rather than private vehicle drop-off at school, or holiday travel by sea rather than road).
People do not want to make drastic changes to here lives, and if the easy things are not done first you are no going to convince people to do the hard things. Mass transit is not morally better than private transport, its just that it CAN allow less oil to be used. When BEV's replace ICE, that argument would not be valid, but there are other good reasons to promote mass-transit. I maintain we have to have BAU, but change the "usual", rather than decide we need a revolution or we will all be doomed. One change we may have to live with would be fuel rationing either because there of the cost or supply disruptions. People will accept those reasons but not that "driving cars is bad".
Neil,
I understand Tim's reassoning for calling for a moratorium on new motorway construction, which is different from no new roads ever to anywhere. I took his view to be more practical of why build a road for a transport system which may have a very limited future in an oil constrained world? (Again a question). Reading through your reply above I have drawn out all the assumptions you make:
What are you looking at when you say Australians will accept higher prices for electricity but not petrol?
What exactly is the desired result? Moving people to public transport, reducing road congestion, saving petrol, reducing CO2 emissions or all of the above? What is the purpose of all these trips anyway? Could we or should we first look at why people feel the need for such high energy mobility?
Aren't fuel efficient vehicles available now? What moral authority does government have to dictate what anyone should drive? Which alternative non-oil fuels do you propose and what sort of hurdles do you need to overcome to implement them on a mass scale? Waht are the socail and logisitical hurdles to implementing car pools on a massive meaningful scale? Why do we need to travel anywhere for a holiday? Could we not find something stimulating and worthwhile to do in our own patch?
Don't you mean if? Again mass transit may not be needed if we ask oursleves why we are travelling on it in the first place and is it important enough to warrant massive capital expenditures on it? Couldwe use that money to make local communities more resilient and self reliant?
Thats the whole point. What is it that we want "usual" to be? Don't we first have to rethink and imagine what sort of future we want before we cans start building it? Don't we first have to check our assumptions nd validate them? Should we not sek first the answers to the things we know that we don't know and open ourselves to the possibilities that we have not even imagined yet?
What impact would fuel rationing have on our society? Be it by price or limited volume, do you think that this would change the economic relationships that exist amongst us at the individaul, family, community, regional, state, national and international levels?
Termoil,
Thanks for taking the time to answer in great detail.I will try to respond to a few of the issues in your reply.
The modeling reported for electricity prices was a 16% rise in retail price first year if carbon cost is $20/tonne CO2e. Electricity prices are less visible than petrol prices, and perhaps people can understand that there are lower CO2e ways of generating electricity. People may also feel they have more control of electricity use than petrol in the short term. Alternatively people may not have noticed yet.
A TOD post a few months ago showed that motorists use vehicles only 23% of vehicle driving time for commuting to work, so even if a lot more people switch to mass-transit for work commuting there will be many other activities many that can't be met by mass-transit.
Having fuel economy standards is very effective at improving new car fuel economy, but takes time and should be continually raised as better vehicles become available. Its a win-win for everyone.
Some may be in favor of getting rid of the car, but most cities now are designed around a private transportation. Also you may have noticed people like having cars. They could be steam cars, electric cars, petrol, NG, etc it doesn't matter. When oil becomes very very expensive cars will have to run on a cheaper and available energy. We know electric/battery powered vehicles work now and should work even better in the future. We know wind power works now and Australia and NZ have lots of wind resources with back-up hydro so there is absolutely not reason why in the near future ALL motor vehicles cannot be BEV rather than ICE.
I am not saying there is no role for expanded mass-transit it just cannot be the entire solution unless we are able to totally redesign and rebuild our cities, an even then people may prefer to use BEV for most travel.
Probably mine. Only about a third of all car trips taken are non-discretionary and unavoidable. Two-thirds are discretionary, and can be avoided or bundled with others.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that mass transit is only physically capable of travelling between "work" and "home". Do you imagine that it's impossible to make it run to and from shops, community centres, gyms, residential areas, and so on? If so, you need to have a look around - plenty of cities do it already.
But even without public transport, the average Western car user can roughly halve their car use.
As noted by the World Health Organisation [1Mb pdf],
More than 30% of trips made in cars in Europe cover distances of less than 3 km and 50% less than 5 km.
That's walkable.
But as well as short trips, at least two-thirds of trips are discretionary. You can do without them. The following is the data of purpose of journey by car from 1992, the most recent year available for such data for Australia as a whole. [source, ABS]
* Shopping, 25.7% of all trips, 13 minutes average trip time
* Work, 22%, 31'
* Social activities, 18.7%, 20'
* Voluntary & community activities, 9.3%, 18'
* Active leisure, 7.4%, 32'
* Child care, 9%, 13'
* Domestic activities, 5.4%, 16'
* Education, 2%, 22'
* Personal care, 0.5%, 16'
* Passive leisure, 0.1%, 22'
We have here figures for the percentage of all trips taken for that purpose. The average time spent driving each day is 1hr27'. The average time per trip in each category doesn't add up to this 87' because not every trip is done every day; but when the trip is taken, that's the average time of it.
Only about a third of trips (work, child care, and possibly education) are non-discretionary and more or less unavoidable, assuming zero public transport and not able to bike, walk, etc. The rest can be set aside ("passive leisure", driving just for fun) or rearranged for efficiency - shopping from distant shops can be done weekly all in one go, etc.
So that even with zero public transport and bike-unfriendly streets, we see that the average car user could roughly halve their trips taken and distance driven, and thus fuel used and emissions created.
Thi I agree with and this is what I see as the low hanging fruit. It's not necessarily about the fuel efficency of the car, but the fuel consumption of the driver measured as a total volume over time, not distance travelled.
We already have fleet of cars that if they were driven much less than they are now, would still be going in 10,15 or 20 years time. With some serious rethinking about how we use the cars, rather than the type of cars we use, we could achieve that same or better fuel consumption over that period without having to spend an enormous of capital (energy) to replace a perfectly good working fleet of cars. The oil savings that are made could be redeployed into making our walkable neighbourhoods places that are worth dwelling in, as opposed to the rather dead lifeless palces that most sprawl uburbs are.
Kaishu,
Thanks for posting that data again, its very valuable to help understand how we use oil now. You are correct that in an emergency(either long or short) we could drive a lot less than we do now. I live only 1Km from shops, but usually drive, because my arms tend to stretch carrying home dog food, milk, potatoes,wine, beer etc. I wouldn't stop driving these short trips even if petrol was $3/L, because it really doesn't use that much. Now commuting 15 Km to work by train without any transfers, and 1Km walk at each end, that's easy. In an emergency though I could easily buy smaller amounts and shop more often or go by car less frequently and buy a freezer or a larger fridge.
Social activities often involve weekend and late night trips and usually 2 or more in the vehicle, so again mass-transit not a good option. Sydney trains stop running between 1-4 am ? each morning.
Voluntary activities such as dropping off groceries, taking elderly shopping, picking up kids for soccer; if mass-transit worked for these trips wouldn't need be volunteering.
So I really see the best role of mass-transit to replace single passenger trips, over longer distances such as commuting to work and of course interstate trips between capital cities.
You are correct that some cities are designed to work on mass-transit, such as Paris, Venice, London and other European capital cities that were build by great empires, well before cars. We could re-build our cities to be like that buts its going to take several life-times, and most of our mineral wealth, meanwhile if BEV's become widely available, a lot of people are going to use them for that 65% of "non-essential" trips including those "walkable" less than 3km trips that Europeans drive now even though they have a good mass-transit system.
You're in luck! Just yesterday someone invented a brilliant device which puts the weight on your back instead of your hands and arms.
And if you are infirm, there's also,
Every day an 84 year old man with arthritis squeaks past my house with a similar trolley/walking frame, walking 1.6km to the shops and 1.6km back. If he can manage it so can you.
I wouldn't stop stabbing you with a pencil even if you said "ow" really loudly, because it really doesn't injure you that much.
With resource depletion and climate change as strong threats to the quality of life of the world and generations to come, every little bit counts.
I leave casual dismissal of your other excuses for driving to other more patient people.
This is really our problem in a nutshell, ain't it? We are asking people to give up mobility, convenience, and status all in one hit, and in support of concepts (PO & CC) that they really do not - or do not want to - fully understand.
Until the personal use of cars is demonised sufficiently, or until the price of petrol just gets high enough to force behaviour change, I don't think we will see it.
my 2 bits.
Mash
Father, Doomer, Farmer, Engineer, Drummer
Or until people have decent alternatives.
If we make our cities more walkable, bikable, with work areas closer to residential areas (even - gasp! - mixed use!) and put in decent public transport, then people have alternatives.
It's not enough to say, "this is bad, m'kay?" you have to give them something good to choose instead.
Public transport for example is like any other business. If you provide a frequent, reliable and pleasant service, people will use it. If it's infrequent, unreliable and unpleasant, they won't. And price isn't even that important. Consider two bus lines: one is 45 minutes of waiting at a dark and cold stop in the middle of nowhere, but is fifty cents a day; the other is a service every 5 minutes in a well-lit and covered area, but is ten bucks a day. Which do you prefer? People are quite happy to pay for frequent, reliable and pleasant service, and are unhappy with infrequent, unreliable and unpleasant service even if it's free.
Give people a decent alternative and they'll use it.
Kaishu,
I don't want to sound too much like a broken record, but as you know some cities do have a very good mass-transit systems and with the exception of Venice, these cities are still packed with cars.
I think the biggest mistake we can make is to promote the idea that the private motor vehicle has to go, instead of the FF fueled ICE has to go.
We know where mass-transit works well; moving large numbers of people at predicted times and places,ie too and from CBD, 6am-7pm, to special events etc. Its not good for moving people across low density suburbs, at times of the day when few people want to travel, because you cannot maintain a 5-10min schedule.
If you accept that most people have a need for a car, beyond what can be provided even by the best mass-transit, then the real challenge is to ensure that while we are stuck with oil-burning ICE vehicles, we strive to have the best fuel economy available, and to ensure that we move to PHEV and BEV's as soon as possible. This can be a win-win-win, because we can save the environment, save money, and save our investment in the suburban living life-style.
It does depend on the future generation of electricity by renewable sources. That's the big issue post peak oil.
Please define "packed" with cars. What percentage of all trips taken by private car counts as "packed"?
I mean, Copenhagen and Amsterdam manage 33-40% of all trips taken being by private car, compared to 80-90% for Aussie and US cities. Now, maybe you'd call 33-40% of all trips "packed"; but you must agree that this is less "packed" than Melbourne or Detroit.
If we could go from 80-90% to to 33-40%, we'd use only one-third to one-half the fuel for private transport we now do. Which is just what I said earlier, that individuals and cities as a whole could without a great deal of trouble halve their fuel use.
Now, I think we can and will have to get below that level in the long run - the next few decades. But it'd be a bloody good start. If such efficiencies were carried out across the economy we could be self-sufficient in oil, close down half our coal-fired stations, save billions on new highways, halve our total carbon emissions, and so on.
No, I don't accept it, because it's not true. Most Aussies and Americans have the desire for a car, and are accustomed to having and using one, but considerably fewer need a car.
Of course, when you tell me that you need to travel 1km to the shops by car, we could be using different definitions of the words "need" and "necessary". I suggest we use the words as commonly understood, as expressed by the dictionary.
As the figures show, only about one-third of trips are unavoidable (assuming utterly unwalkable and unbikable neighbourhoods, and zero public transport - a wrong assumption, but let's be generous to the "needy"); about two-thirds of all trips taken by car are discretionary or could be rolled together with other trips. In my "immodest proposal" article I suggested that everyone keep a logbook in their car and for a month write down every trip and for what purpose it was taken, and after that month sit down and have a look to see if the trip was necessary, could have been bundled with another, or taken by foot, cycle or public transport without great inconvenience. I don't know of anyone having actually accepted the challenge, though.
Perhaps they were worried at what results they might get.
There's a difference between what's necessary and what we're accustomed to. You're accustomed to driving 1km to the shops; but if your car broke down, you would presumably not go without food because the journey is impossible to take by other means. It's simply that you're accustomed to doing this.
I understand. For my part, I only got my driver's license recently, so that whenever I have to travel somewhere I get out the map and the train and bus timetables. And occasionally my woman says to me, "it'd be easier to take the car, you know." And I say, "oh... I hadn't thought of that." It simply hadn't occurred to me that the car was an option, because I'm accustomed to walking and public transport. Likewise, long-term car drivers, it simply doesn't occur to them to walk or use public transport, because they're accustomed to driving.
Custom thus becomes a "need". When people's customs in travel, in diet and lifestyle are challenged, they often assert "need", insisting that things must be this way. But in fact there are a zillion ways to live your life, and if you just get your caca together you can change the way you do things.
You cannot really expect the government to pass radical laws about carbon taxes or trades and invest billions in public transport and renewable energy if you will not even make the enormous, painful and stressful effort to walk 1km to the shops.
If Australia or NZ had to suddenly manage with 50% petrol( which could easily happen), we could manage and adjust fairly easily by reducing that 60-70% of non-essential driving. If we started on a massive ramp up of mass-transit it would take decades to approach was London or Paris has now, and even then would expect to still have 30-40% of travel by car ( as occurs in cities with good mass-transit), and still have the roads packed with cars( ie traffic jams as occurs in London and Paris). Thus our economy would still depend upon a substantial use of private motor vehicles, because we cannot total re-build a city in one generation. With almost no additional cost, most cars in one generation could be getting twice the fuel economy by legislating vehicle fuel efficiency, and with the expected technical improvements and a modest cost, could have a fleet getting x4 better fuel economy or be substantially BEV and PHEV in one generation. That could solve out oil shortage problems permanently, and allow us to focus on replacing coal and other FF with renewable energy.
I think most people in developed countries will accept a reduction in vehicle use in an emergency, and support mass-transit where practical, and even abolition of cars from CBD, but would not accept either a abolition of vehicle ownership or being forced to relocate from suburbia to a down-town high-rise. Only a dictatorial states have been successful in replacing private transport 100% with mass-transit. If you can recognize this is the reality, then the highest priority for resources should be going towards solving the use of oil by ICE vehicles. Walking or biking short distances is a fringe activity thats not going to make a substantial difference to our economies oil dependence, look at Canberra.
I don't get it Neil, you want the government to legislate away the ICE but not have any regard to the planning and development regimes which have shaped and beeen shaped by the mass ownership of cars in the last 50 years!
There is a lot to be said about letting markets operate without governments messing it up. The price of oil is doing its job in alerting the market to a problem.
If cars with ICE's become too expensive to keep on the road then they must be replaced by something else and the range of options is from walking to your BEVS and PHEVS.
Walking is a proven and reliable mode of transport that existed long before the wheel, so I think we can safely count that as deliverable. BEVS and PHEVS?...not so much. I'm going to reorganise my life around living much more locally, and I'll hang on to my ICE car for as long as possible, driving it as infrequently as I possibly can. There is an old bloke in my town who is filthy rich, but he still drives the same XA Ford Falcon that he bought new from the showroom in 1972. If he can get 36 years from an XA then I reckon I could get at least 20 from VZ Commodore thats bought and paid for. I'm simply not going to buy an electric car with dubious battery technolgy and non-existent savings when comparing total cost of ownership.
If there is an energy crisis and people have totightne their belts, many of them will do the same sums and decide that an EV is just going to be an expensive novelty that won't replace the ICE car. The market will speak and the manufacturers will respond by not making them. Then what?
Hi Termoil,
You are distorting what I said, how is legislation to improve vehicle efficiency x2 "legislating away the ICE"?.
Walking was the only method of travel in the European middle ages, so villages were generally spaced 3 miles apart, because a 6 mile round trip was considered about as far as most people would be prepared to travel. Now some people walked across Europe, but they were the exception.
Our cities cannot function as they exist now or could exist in the next 25 years without some form of individual transport and some mass-transport. Both are needed. At best we may be able to go half-way to having a city-wide Metro in 25 years. So we will need at least 50% of the VMT that we have today, based on cities in Europe with much better mass-transit than is likely to be build in Australia or NZ, and higher population densities.
If you think we will have 50% of todays oil supply available in 25 years you are very optimistic.
If you want to keep a Commodore parked for the next 20 years, that's your choice. I sold my 1989 model Commodore a few years ago for scrap, because I couldn't afford a vehicle using 14L/100Km, and replaced it with a 6L/100 Km vehicle. If you think petrol is going to be 50cents/L, I made a poor decision, but if its going to be >$2/L it was a good decision.
The least painful solution for a post peak-oil world will be to replace ICE vehicle transport with electric. I doubt that there is going to be much choice, it will be electric vehicles, electric trains/trams, bicycles or walking. Then again, we could go back to good old reliable wood and coal burning steam cars or horse drawn transport! I wonder how I will manage using my Lap-top on unreliable Li batteries?
Neil,
The steam driven car was never that popular and I think it is a useful analogy for the electric car. It couldn't compete with the horse for either range or versatility and therefore never really achieved the mass market it needed in order to scale up production and bring down costs. The electric car may be doomed to the same fate. The old technolgy may simply be too dominant to defeat and people may adapt to travelling a lot less, reorganising on a scale that is adapted to the available fuel supply or simply abandoning the living arrangements that require them to be dependent on personal mobility.
I like you reference to European villages. In some way we are going to have to re-create our villages even if they exist within a larger city. I like to concentrate on what can be achieved rather than wishing and hoping for a techno fix (electric car) that has so far proven illusive.