For a more pessimistic (realistic?) position, I recommend this:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
"Farm implements are powered by oil." Sure they are, because oil is cheap. If it's not cheap, then the irrigating pumps and tractors and combines and trucks can be replaced with other technologies. It's not rocket science to build an electric tractor, for example, and my uncle has a farm where they recently changed their pumps from electricity to oil (i.e., in the opposite direction from what you would expect) because of the relative costs. They can be changed back again pretty easily...
Electric busses can move people around and are easy to make and install. Many more people could telecommute than actually do--because companies don't currently have a problem getting people to commute. You don't NEED petroleum based fertilizer to grow crops. You don't NEED a new computer made from energy-intensive silicon chips and plastic cases. You don't NEED all that other plastic crap that's filling up your basement...
There question is logistic, not strategic: how long will it take to retrofit the entire's world food production system to feed 8+ bil people? Can it be done quickly enough if oil continues on a hyperbolic tragectory?
Perhaps to answer this question we would need to know the energy intensivity of food production for various locations around the globe. Obviously western food is produced with huge oil-supported infrastructure. I'm not so sure about Africa and the Far East, though...
European and American farming is optimised for greatest output per man-hour. Japanese farming is optimised for greatest output pr. area. African farming is optimised for greatest output pr. calorie of input.
I.o.w. after the oil crash, Africa will not be any more screwed than usually on the food front (or at least not due to a sudden need to scale back oil use in agriculture). Japan (and presumably much of China, which I expect to be a cross between African-style and Japanese-style farming) will be able to convert, but it may hurt. Europe and the US needs to start last decade. Fortunately, we still have superior infrastructure to pretty much anywhere else in the world, and a substantial industrial base to start from (Europe more so than the US, of course, but compared to rural China it's still pretty good).
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
The hyperbolic price trajectory may ensure that we get to work on the logistics while we can still produce 90 million barrels a day. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
It's not rocket science to build an electric tractor,
Actually it is. 50-100HP at high torque, with enough charge to run for a day or so, on a unit which weighs as much as a small truck? There have been sporadically successful attempts to retrofit tractors, but you always run into two problems - charging time and current, and cold weather performance.
asdf:
Electric busses can move people around and are easy to make and install.
Also, not without some major reorganisation. Take a typical exurb - even if there's a general commute to the nearest city, most of the travel end-points within the city will be anywhere within a 5-10 mile circle. To be viable, busses have to have a fine enough drop-off and pick-up pattern to make them worth using. The finer the pattern gets, the longer the overall journey takes.
Population densities drop off rapidly once you get outside the central area, so you have two problems - you can't run a regular service to every exurb, and you can't take people directly to and from where they need to go without choking the system.
You can solve the second problem with radial access points, of a park and ride type, which offer a network of central access routes. That will work, kind of, although with an enforced change, journey times will be longer.
The first problem can only be solved by increasing population densities, and abandoning some of the exurbs.
In fact decentralisation might work better - move a lot of work out of cities back into more rural areas, shorten food supply lines, and create much smaller units with localised power generation which are closer to being self-sustaining.
Re transport in exurban areas: How did people get around in rural England in the 1930s? By multiple bus lines that ran all over the place.
Besides, electric cars are already practical, just expensive. They're not much different to make from regular cars assuming that customers will buy them.
when a car's battery was full, the panels on its roof could be switched to feed the other emptier ones.
co-operation!
OT; i had a dream the other day where it was the future(!), and we generated energy somehow just using our physical weight while we slept. the bed was attached to microgeared cogs and flywheels, and very slowly descended during the night.
springs were involved...
dream on... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
100 kilos x 1 metre x g = 1000 Joules = 1 kilowatt-second.
So you need thousands of sleeping people to make one kilowatt-hour. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
the most pleasing factor in the fantasy was how all could start to feel useful, even ole folks who don't do much moving around any more.
the principle could extend to dance floors, which would be hinged to see saw, turning flywheels that way..
thanks for doing the calculation migeru.
would heavier people create more energy, or just hit bottom faster?
depends on the gears, i'd guess... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Re: commuting - people did a lot less getting around in rural England in the 30s than they do now. And we had a much bigger train network, which served as the standard long-distance option. People also lived much closer to where they worked. Long distance commuting was limited to a couple of specialised dormitory areas around London which were served by tube extensions and rail. People often walked or cycled to factories because they were close enough to walk to or cycle to.
As for the practicality of electric cars, see the recession watch diary.
"Steam-operated cable plowing developed successfully in England, using a system of two steam engines pulling a cable-drawn plow. The English cable plows were capable of traveling safely at up to 4 mph when plowing through good soil. The length of the furrow was usually measured in 1/2 miles rather than in rods, and the early English cable plows, with their short strings of cable, were grossly inadequate. By 1870, there were 3,000 steam cable-plowing outfits in operation in England and only four outfits operating in the U.S. Henry E. Lawrence, a southern planter, used one of these plowing outfits on his 1,000-acre sugar estate near New Orleans." http://www.steamtraction.com/article/2003-03-01
And obviously we have huge central pivot irrigation systems that reach every part of a field. It's not that hard to dream up possible methods of rigging up a power cord to a tractor...
I can't take extension cords seriously. There are literally miles of fields around this house, and they're easily accessible by tractor - they're ploughed, sprayed and harvested every year. To make extension cords likely the entire area would have to be rewired, at a huge cost.
Nope, not after Cameron throws all the Poles out.
I can't take the idea of extension cords for farming seriously either. I would suggest, though, that the assumptions we're making about battery power could be incorrect in a big way. There's, for example, that technology they developed out in Silicon Valley that increases battery power tenfold. Presumably there are ways we haven't gotten to yet that will allow us to get more juice out of them.
Even getting ten times the charge would get the job done for most people. Then you'd be talking about driving 400-500 miles instead of 40-50. Nobody other than guys driving semis is going to drive farther than that out of necessity, and truck drivers presumably won't mind getting a little more sleep. If push came to shove, you could toss an extension cord or two out the window to charge it up every night. Initially, at least, it's going to be crude arrangements like that before everybody's got electricity outlets on their driveways and stoops decades from now. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
