Should President Obama tap into the strategic oil reserves?

I’m always a “wait cause things might get worse” kind of person.

No.
Instead, people should start saving petrol.
Drive less.
Use public transport.
Get a car that is fuel efficient.
Walk.
Ride a bike.
(the latter two are good for your health, too).

You complain about 4 quid a gallon? If i have not screwed up my calculation, that is about 80 eurocent per litre.
That is still dirt cheap.

It wouldn’t make any difference, price wise. The current price spike (and those in the recent past) really doesn’t have much to do with supply and demand (supply is pretty good right now)—it has more to do with the oil and gas investment market, which is thoroughly spooked by the events in the middle east.

Unfortunately tapping into the oil reserves will only keep gas prices where they currently stand which IMHO is still too much. Nevertheless, it seems to be part of the game that the world powers play ‘let’s see who can sit on and hold on to the most oil’.

Nope, it’s going to get worse. People are going to have to knuckle down and drive less, take public transportation, work from at home if possible. Someone at work explained last week that while the US doesn’t purchase sweet oil from Libya, China and Europe do, and the effect of them bidding against us for sweet crude oil in the middle east, creating an imbalance. I suspect the US is paying the world market rate for sweet oil crude coming out of US wells, so it won’t go to China.

Sweet light crude

The sad thing is we have technology now so that we don’t have to use oil but the big business and money makers keep it from going Nation wide. There is technology that would allow us to use the Earth’s gravity and it’s force to solve the energy problems. And because of Libya the prices go up that is not the reason it has to do with money, greed and control of world events.

And for the question yes he should until the other options are allowed.

The spike in oil prices might cause harm to the recovery.
Obama has several choices, including tapping into the Strategic Oil Reserves. This is dangerous, because that oil needs to be available to us should things get much worse.
A better choice might be to temporarily cancel collecting gas taxes. Just for 3 months or so. That would give us time to adjust, and prepare for the hike.
If we stopped collecting state and federal gas taxes, gas prices would drop about 40cents. Some states charge more.

The thing is we have enough oil here on American soil to maintain our needs for 200 years but we need to get away from needing it and start using alternate energy sources.

What we need is for Congress to begin looking into the price spike. Begin a series of hearings. Put the oil company executives on notice that they are watching.

Put the speculators actions under public scrutiny.

That is what brought the prices back down the last time they tried this.

Sure, but with a couple conditions.
1. We must acknowledge the fact that are spending $1.3 trillion per year on a national defense, which if it was a country, would be ranked 38th in the world in oil consumption. This must change, and not by going green, but by ending our nation-building empire that occupies over 100 countries.
2. We must realize that permanently subsidizing a product leads to an unhealthy addiction, that will appear to make cleaner, renewable, and truly energy-independent sources of energy such as solar, wind, or hydro, economically unfeasible. We are currently subsidizing renewable energies, which are competing with subsidized oil production. Let’s focus on one or the other.
3. We must redefine what we have been taught energy independence means. My idea of energy independence is not only to be independent from foreign oil. Let’s take that even further and be independent from energy companies all together.
By taking steps such as energy conservation, such as weatherization and insulating, and combining solar, wind, geothermal, solar-thermal, solar passive design, and advancing energy storage, which will make electric cars more efficient, we can move towards true individual, or better yet, community-based energy independence.

Unfortunately, any one of my conditions would be “bad for the economy,” so it’s an uphill battle.

@chris6137 Great answer and it can go much further. The technology is there for us as individuals to be energy free from the power companies. I’m working on mine now. Thanks for your answer.

As of 030711, no.

No. By doing so, it gives a bad reflection to the rest of the world that the United States is desperate. This is not good.

Tapping oil reserves will be costly for you and I. It may make a little difference, upfront, but those reserves will have to be replaced and this will be expensive. Again, the cost will bear to you and I.

This is like buying a new automobile. The dealer can bounce around money to make a bad deal look good to you. Take off a few dollars here, but add them on somewhere else. Same applies to the oil reserves.

Best bet is for people to cut back on their useage, until the foreign countries settle their problems.

I certainly hope not. The SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) was established and is in place in case supplies of petroleum are “cut off” due to any combination of natural disaster, political unrest, act of war or other cutoff event.

Our supplies of oil are in no way “cut off”, it’s just more expensive. This is how supply and demand is supposed to work, and it is working perfectly. Increases in the price of oil such as we are now experiencing make other “more marginal” forms of energy (such as nuclear and coal) and other supplies of oil (such as deepwater sources in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Range, to name two domestic sources) more attractive to exploration and exploitation.

The SPR should remain as a “strategic” reserve. It was named that for a reason. It’s not a “convenient” petroleum reserve, after all.

Of course, with all that said, I have no doubt that in order to curry favor with voters the President is very close to doing just as you suggest: the stupidest thing that he could do with that reserve.

The current price spike also helps to spur conservation and alternative forms of energy, which posters on this board support almost universally… except when the price of their own fill-up gets uncomfortably expensive, I guess.

There was a huge reserve in California called Elk Hills. Cheney sold it to hid buddies for pennies on the dollar. How much reserves are left?

Tapping the reserve only puts in a few weeks stop gap.

I like the idea that was promoted on Car Talk two years ago- add a 50 cent per gallon tax every six months until we have added $3 per gallon. Why should the oil companies get the profit instead of the treasury? But most importantly, this is an opportunity to get us once and for all off the dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

The crisis in Libya is being blamed, but in fact the global economy outside of the US and the EU are improving very quickly, and increasing the demand for oil. And there are signs the US Economy is starting to improve much more rapidly than in the last half of 2010.

If the USA tried hard to lose its dependency on fossil fuel starting tomorrow, it might have some luck stemming its ability to be royally phcked by gas prices within a decade. Countries that started trying in the 1990s have made progress, but they certainly aren’t close to independent – though they’ll stand an oil shock better than the USA will.

The best thing you can do for yourself in the mean time is find a way to live car-free, or at least with minimal car use.

The best that could be hoped by tapping the Stategic Oil Reserves would be to provide a minor and temporary relief in the upward pressure of prices.

The SOR aren’t not a true supply source. I expect the effect of introducing SOR into the market would actually be negligible in the short term… and likely negative – that is, raising prices on average – in the long term.

As mentioned several times above, the SOR is meant to supply the country with oil in the case of a real disaster in which there’s a serious interruption of supply… like when Hurricane Katrina damaged oil refineries on the coast. It’s meant as a way to simply keep supply flowing, not as a hedge against market forces.

If we tap into the SOR, eventually that oil will have to be replaced. In other words, there would necessarily be an increased demand down the road which would slow the lowering of prices for everyone.

Republikans should sell the strategic oil reserves. Keeping them is socialism!

No.
Instead, people should start saving petrol.
Drive less.
Use public transport.
Get a car that is fuel efficient.
Walk.
Ride a bike.
(the latter two are good for your health, too).

You complain about 4 quid a gallon? If i have not screwed up my calculation, that is about 80 eurocent per litre.
That is still dirt cheap. X2

No doubt those tirelessly philanthropic speculators are doing their utmost to keep the market fluctuations consumer friendly :)

Lets examine the name, Strategic Oil Reserves, wheres the strategy in using stored oil for peoples hummers, that oil is reserved for the last of the last, its to ensure we are the last nation with a functioning military, thats why it exists, us paying $20 a gallon is not a priority, get a bicycle or carpool.

I am with @Austinlad here; the real problem is speculators. Hey, what happened to the $65 trillion in wealth that used to exist in the futures market?

It won’t help, and I doubt we are anywhere near the complete spike of prices.

As Americans, we must make changes in how we live, get around and survive. I am in the, “worst is yet to come” category, like @janbb.

The real problem would be speculators, except where are the speculators? Where are they keeping all this hidden oil to dump on the market later? (Face it, the closest thing to speculation we have here are the strategic reserves.)

@bolwerk You don’t actually need oil to speculate on it. All you need is a bet on how much oil will be worth. That is the great thing about trading a commodity that is still buried somewhere. I mean, we don’t really know how much oil there is, and some of it is bought before it is pumped, so you can imagine the turmoil if a field runs dry sooner than expected. Add in the fun of OPEC playing with production and it’s one of those things that would be funny if it were fiction.

@jerv: I know what options trading is. But it’s just a bet on the price. It’s small time and doesn’t affect prices much (pessimism could even be driving them down, if anything). The real problem with oil is, as you seem to understand, supply/demand pressure.

@bolwerk

While crude oil production in Libya, which provides 2 percent of the world’s oil, has been disrupted – the world is still producing more oil than it uses every day. “The loss of supply from Libya has been made up to a certain extent with an increase in supply from Saudi Arabia,” Andy Lipow said.
So, why then are oil and gas prices soaring again? Sean Cota of the Petroleum Marketers Association of America said “it’s unbridled investment money that is dominating the market, to the point where supply and demand doesn’t matter anymore.”
Cota says pension and hedge funds have been pouring into the oil market, and bidding up the price. Last week, two-thirds of all oil traded was not sold by oil companies, but by investors.“The total world energy supply is bought and sold everyday about eight times,” Cota added. Source

As for small time, hoo boy! I guess billions really is small time. I mean, if I sell to you and you sell to @cak and @cak sells to @robmandu who sells to China, I am pretty sure that the price will go up more than once before we even hit lunchtime on teh first day of trading. Keep it up for a few months and a penny a barrel here, two cents there, and next thing you know, you’ve added a few dollars.

Also, pessimism is a double-edged sword. If there is pessimism about the future supply then prices will spike regardless of whether the future supply is actually in jeopardy!

@bolwerk @jerv It isn’t the options trading, it’s the futures trading. Speculators anticipating delivery problems buy contracts to take delivery in March or April. Increased demand for futures contracts drives up the price, even though there is no increased demand for the actual oil.

There has been an anomaly in the futures market the last few years between the closing settlement price of a futures contract and the actual spot delivery price on expiration day. The oil exchanges can’t explain it other than that the total amount if oil under contract is at multiples of actual oil use.

No, we should all drive less and get over ourselves. Oil and gas are just way too cheap right now. The only way we’ll ever move beyond this dirty fuel is by letting the market determine the price, instead of constantly relying on policy to keep oil cheap.

@Mamradpivo The same market that prefers SUVs over cars, and large cars over more efficient things like even the Corolla or Civic? I don’t think you have to be nearly as cynical as me to see how that will fail. I mean, I would love to see people embrace cars like the Tesla Model S or even the 65 MPG diesel Fiesta but people would rather roll down the road in their living room and are willing to sacrifice almost anything to do so.

@jerv: billions on hundreds of billions or trillions, yeah, kind of is. I’m not saying the price changes are trivial, but the effect of that derivative speculation probably is fairly trivial – certainly not causing a skyrocketing price by itself, is all I’m saying, unless something changed. And, doesn’t it sound a bit convenient the Petroleum Marketers Association would be blaming speculators instead of the people marketing the petroleum? :-p

@zenvelo: I suppose you may have a point about the futures trading, but there’s nothing unusual about that kind of speculation. If your second paragraph is true, it would hint at a broader speculation issue. Or some other kind of corruption.

@Mamradpivo: In theory, the market determines the price quite well. In practice, the transportation market is skewed towards really cheap car usage – driven in part by a low market price for fuel. Gasoline taxes were in theory to pay for roads, but these days they don’t cover much better than a bare majority of the costs (somewhere north of 50%). This all, of course, constitutes a huge subsidy for the hyper-entitled suburban “middle class” – one unlikely to go away without a fight.

@bolwerk Given that the price of a barrel of oil has risen considerably just in the last few days I think that just about anything dealing with the price of oil is non-trivial at this point.
But yes, I don’t think speculation is the only cause here; merely a bit more major than you seem to think.

@jerv: speculation has a long history of not being a major cause – and maybe even stabilizing prices. Given what’s going on in the Arab world right now, I somehow don’t see why speculation would suddenly magically become the driving problem. (Maybe it’s a secondary problem, as speculators respond to forecasts. Maybe.)

The world will change how our energy needs are met so yes we should tap the reserve.

So the strategic reserve should be used just because fuel prices are a bit high.
If that is not the ultimate sense of entitlement, I do not know what is.

@ragingloli Not all emergencies are caused by war, just as not all casualties are caused by combat. Strategy isn’t strictly a military thing; if it were then businesses would not have any guidance/plan.

@jerv
High fuel prices does not nearly qualify as an emergency.

@ragingloli High fuel prices lead to higher prices on things that need to be shipped, like food. It also raises energy costs slightly, so anything made by someone using electricity or heavy equipment may pass their added costs on to the consumers. I would say that anything that raises prices practically across the board qualifies as an emergency, especially with unemployment high and incomes low.

This almost definitely happens in large cities and traffic-congested suburbs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if low fuel prices simply raise the price of food. A truck burns several times more fuel than a POV, and requires a laborer aboard the truck, and congestion is about the most wasteful way to spend your fuel. Every unnecessary moment he’s sitting in traffic, he’s taking more time to make a delivery – but he’s still wasting fuel and still getting paid. That ridiculous and pointless cost is almost certainly passed onto the cost of every consumer good there is.

Indeed, food is likely a bit cheaper in Europe. At least healthier food. Gas prices could be a factor in that. (Of course, that might also because Europe has a pretty advanced intermodal freight system, whereas the USA has a pretty lousy truck system coupled with a congested freight rail system.)

@bolwerk Food is more likely to be more local in Europe and not need the sort of shipping it gets here. Also, trucks mostly avoid congested areas for a number of reasons. Why do you think many stores get their deliveries at hours when most people are in bed, or at least during non-peak traffic times?

I fail to see your logic behind low fuel prices raising the price of food. Maybe you need to learn a bit about how trucking works here in the US. Also bear in mind that when fuel costs rise, owner/operators get priced out of business, and the laws of supply and demand raise the cost of shipping stuff even more than the fuel costs themselves.

@jerv: Food may on average travel less far in Europe, but it still travels far. Of course trucking companies try to avoid congestion, but they can’t only work between 10am and 4pm and 6pm and 8am, and many metro areas are congested for most of the day. And really, supply and demand is already the problem here. Fuel and labor costs are incredibly high for trucking companies because of waste, and all that is passed on to the consumers.

Maybe you should learn a bit about how road financing works. The logic behind low fuel prices raising the price of food is simple and pretty indisputable. The only thing I’m not sure of is the extent of the effect. USA road funding formulas emphasize minimizing low fuel costs, which in turns means high operating subsidies of highways. People in POVs are effectively encouraged to drive, that supply and demand thing, because they don’t pay the costs of their own driving at the pump or in tolls or congestion fees. That certainly encourages a great deal more congestion than necessary, makes public transport less economical, and, at the risk of repeating myself, means both the driver and vehicle are costing a lot and not bringing a return. Raising fuel taxes to a sensible level means fewer people driving fewer miles, less congestion, less fuel wasted (=> money saved), and most critically for the trucking companies, better return on their labor investment as more deliveries can be made in a shorter time.

An extreme example of this problem can be seen in northern New Jersey, as trucks stuck in traffic (or creating their own congestion) back up for miles, no doubt doing wonders for prices in Long Island and New York City – and for the air quality in North Jersey.

@bolwerk Indisputable? Umm…

I wasn’t even looking and I found that. I’ll post a couple of excerpts relevant to recent comments; the rest of the article is more about earlier posts.

“Cast your memory back to the summer of 2008, before the financial crisis and in the heat of the presidential campaign. That summer, oil hit $147 a barrel and gas hit above $4 a gallon; airfare went through the roof and nearly every single major carrier came very close to declaring bankruptcy. Food prices shot up as well, with wheat trading up 137 percent year over year in July 2008, and corn 98 percent.”

“In the wake of the price explosion in the summer of 2008, a bubble that extended to all kinds of commodities, including copper and wheat,”

@jerv: Are you reading what I’m saying? In 2008, congestion didn’t especially drop. The only factor that radically changed was the price of fuel and, yes, it skyrocketed – that’s very different from what I’m talking about. People didn’t even have time to adjust their commuting, living, and driving habits. Of course, maybe the thing that screws the USA compared to at least much of Europe is there isn’t another mode to switch to for passenger or freight transportation. If fuel gets more expensive, it needs to be done so that other efficiencies exist. Time and labor are huge costs too.

As for this speculation hangup, yes, speculation happens. Everyone knows that. But attributing all this doom and gloom to speculators is an awfully (for now) convenient way to avoid the truth: we’re using oil fast, it’s getting harder to find, harder to extract, and more expensive to deliver. If anything, speculators are doing us a service if they’re driving up prices – maybe the little less we use will give an opportunity to do what really needs to be done, and start building alternative transportation modes and energy sources.*

* This would really stick it to the speculators too!

Adjust our living habits? Last I checked, humans ate; that is a simple fact of life. Not much adjusting there unless you are talking about cutting out other things (like rent) in order to continue eating. Yeah, there are some people that started eating less fancy, but for people that were already on beans and rice by financial necessity… well, there were times where I had to take unpaid time off of work because I blew my gas money on food that was considerably pricier than it was a month previous.

As for commuting/driving habots, they had enough time for SUV sales to drop while sales of smaller vehicles (often involving the trade-in of a gas-guzzler) rose.

BTW, do you even own a car? If not, do you work someplace that is even remotely near your home (or at least a transit line) or are you like me; either drive >20 miles at odd hours to a place far from any bus lines and with no nearby co-workers to car-pool with? Or are you like I used to be with no bus lines within an hour’s drive, no stores within 15 miles, and no pavement within a mile? I just want to know what your experiences are so that I can figure out whether you really understand the POV transportation situation.

I won’t argue that we need some infrastructure changes here, but consider the transition costs. Say that we go the EV route; are you going to foot the bill for charging stations? (Actually, you will pay for them through price increases before they are even built, companies won’t spend their own money when they can spend yours.) Or say we go diesel, at least as an interim measure; the same applies to increasing distribution for diesel fuel.
This on top of the cost each consumer will have to pay to replace their vehicle… unless they can’t afford to. And before you reply to that line, you should know that I drive a 23MPG car because I can’t afford a more fuel-efficient vehicle. The newest car I personally ever owned was 12 years old when I bought it (I can’t afford any car built in this century; my current ride is an ‘85), so unless you are willing to subsidize vehicle replacement costs, you will still have a lot of cars like mine out there. Trust me, if I could afford a Nissan Leaf, I would snap one up in a heartbeat. Hell, I wish I could convert my current car to an EV with a 60-mile range at highway speeds, but that isn’t free either.

Lets look at the public transportation option. For that, we have to look at state and local budgets which are already strained so we can’t drive up costs too much. And since there are many people like me who work jobs that conflict with bus routes/schedules, and adding routes is out, think what that will do to the labor force and the other ripple-effects there. Driving prices up while forcing people out of work is insanity, so you have to come up with a cost-free way to avoid that. BTW, I am not moving as we are close to where my wife works, and I can’t get a closer job (in this economy, getting a job at all is a bitch) so one of us is stuck with a long commute either way. In that, I am sure I am far from alone or unique

Change would be nice. In fact, we need some. However, look at it pragmatically and I think you will see why I can’t help but think that such thoughts of change are idealistic at best.

Obama should do the exact opposite: Raise petroleum taxes !

Or even introduce variable petroleum taxes. In 2012 one gallon should cost $4.50, in 2013 $5, in 2014 $5.50 and so forth.

Why? It makes planning and major investments in alternatives easier. Investors for renewable energies are always faced with the problem of temporarily decreasing oil prices.

The tax is a premium for overusing our atmosphere. This resource on which 6.7 billion people depend cannot be free. Using it must have a price.

@mattbrowne

Raising taxes on fuel and other things is an old idea, and if the money could somehow magically be sequestered or invested or used to pay the things it is nominally collected for, it might be a good idea.

The problem is that the more revenue the government collects from us, the more mal-investments it makes (or outright giveaways) and the deeper we go in debt, without any better solution to “the thing that the money was supposed to be collected for”. This has happened with Social Security, with Medicare, with “war taxes” and every other big and little tax that government has ever collected from us. It’s not a physical cause-and-effect, but it’s certainly a political one, that “the more we give, the more in debt we become”.

So the net result of a policy such as this would be more misery for drivers, more temporary cash for the government, and ultimately an increase in public indebtedness.

@WasCy
In my estimation, the point of taxes on fuel is to put pressure on the industry and consumers to develop and use alternative energy sources, to develop more efficient engines and to use less fuel in general.

@WasCy – The government should not collect more total revenue. Instead it should offer people tax deductions for investing in energy efficiency (building insulation, solar thermal installations, photovoltaics, hybrid cars and so forth).

I am in the solar business. There’s an easier answer. We could reduce our dependence by using renewables.
PG&E just reduced their rates in California, basically eliminating the top tiers. They have a mandate to get 25% of their power (in California) from renewal sources (I can’t remember their deadline.)
Instead of embracing the inevitable and working Towards a renewable future, while generating the economy at the same time, they reduced their rates so they will have more leverage against the small investors who want to build solar farms. They negotiate the contracts on the artificially deflated rates, and as soon as they reach their mandates, and have under priced contracts in place they are going to raise the rates through the roof again, screwing the consumers and the investors. The only hedge is to create your own power, and stop relying on the big corporations for our very existence.
Buy local, buy only what you need, and be as self sustaining as possible. Our fairly recent ancestors did it, we can take a few lessons from them and take the best of technology and create a better more sustainable world for our children.

@mattbrowne You overlook the cultural differences between us and Europe. Even if such a tax were financially feasible (which it isn’t), it wouldn’t work. Europeans already have the answers to many of our problems, yet those problems remain for decades. I remember similar issues in the ‘70s yet three decades later…

@jerv: are you being deliberately dense? I didn’t say anything about not eating. But if you’re going to play economics cards with me, at least understand the implications of what you’re claiming. Okay, since transport economics are hard for you, let’s try food. What happens when the steak you like gets too expensive? Do you stop eating, or do you buy chicken or something instead? Maybe stop eating meat? I dunno, it probably varies per person. You are absolutely right that “they had enough time for SUV sales to drop while sales of smaller vehicles.” Indeed, this effect started to occur. However, thanks to a generous injection of government subsidies and bailouts, it was nipped in the bud. What people generally did not have enough time to do was make longer-term alterations: move somewhere with transit or at least a shorter POV commute. (Though The New York Times had an article that discussed this.)

I have considered the transition costs. You should consider them too. Compare the known costs of doing something now to unknown but extremely high cost of doing something later. Hell, just about anyone versed on the subject of transport or energy economics has been considering them since the late 1970s, if not before. We should have been transitioning off oil in the 1970s, not subsidizing it. I’m personally suspicious that EV (if you mean electric vehicles) are especially viable, and I can think of a lot of reasons why they might be a bad idea. They don’t lower energy use much, though they could move it to cleaner sources when those become more available. Perhaps even worse for society, they probably just punish energy efficient people who live in denser areas by continuing the current policy of subsidizing suburban driving habits.

And I get that state transport budgets are strained – but having people actually pay at least more of the cost of their driving will ease pressure on transport budgets. The real answer is a mix of transit, walkable communities, POVs, and hopefully eventually a practical transition to electric POVs.

And in response to your criticism of @mattbrowne‘s point, I think you’re right that it might not be federally feasible. However, a large state, or even a smaller one that is a critical transportation way-point, could easily raise the tax on fuel and do itself a lot of favors. Although the real reform necessary is an increase in metropolitan area fuel taxes, where congestion actually happens.

@ragingloli: the point of fuel taxes is to pay for the costs of the highway network.

@WasCy: the problem with your argument is the highway system isn’t even paying for itself. The parts that could be regarded as “user fees” cover a fraction of the expenses, and even with tolls thrown in there the system is ~$95B (that’s billion) short. The federal highway tax contribution would need to roughly triple for that shortfall to be made up (you can do the math yourself). Social security, at least, pays for itself. Driving does not, and never has.

@jerv – In this case the market is our only hope. Once the barrel costs more than $200 things will change even in the US. Global demand will continue to grow espectially in Asia.

@bolwerk If by “deliberately dense” you mean favoring my own observations over the theoretical or idealistic rambling I have heard thus far, then maybe I am. Maybe I’ve just seen too many fucked up things and too many good ideas gone awry to ever agree with either you or @mattbrowne.

I would like to discuss the EV issue with you at some point, but not here and definitely not tonight. Suffice it to say that I don’t think a technology that has a theoretical maximum efficiency of ~30% and an actual efficiency considerably lower than that to be better than something that has an efficiency of 80% and runs off of an energy that can be obtained many different ways and uses technology that has existed for over a century.

@jerv: Your own “observations” are either myopic or from a NIH or NIMBY attitude. I’m not talking about much theoretical stuff here. Most of it has been implemented in various parts of the world to varying degrees of success (yes, ranging from a little to a lot). Even when I touch on something theoretical, the logical thing is to test it – not complain it might not work. Congestion pricing has certainly proven successful in London and Stockholm, despite whiners. Fuel prices in Europe haven’t stopped Europeans from having a standard of living that meets or exceeds that of the USA it’s just pushed them to have it efficiently. In the real world of USA2011, drivers are still stuck in traffic they were in 1970, and labor really is wasted because truck drivers have to sit in the same traffic you do. The sucky American freight system is decades behind in all kinds of ways. Even the tax policy behind freight is bad in the United States, encouraging the less efficient modes and discouraging investment in more efficient ones. I mean really, what’s theoretical about that? (Answer: why the American implementation should work is theoretical. Why it doesn’t work is practical: the supporting theories, intuitively “obvious” as they might be, are naive.)

Don’t take me the wrong way about EVs. I like the idea of EVs, with some reservations. There are risks and implications that aren’t even considered when people (environmentalists?) demand them. In the mean time, they really are years if not decades away from being practical/widespread, so there’s little they can do to solve pressing problems like reducing emissions and traffic congestion. (Also, keep in mind that efficiency is achieved once the energy is delivered to the vehicle. There is a lot of inefficiency lost in the production and delivery of electricity – however, this is far from being a show-stopper!)

Please, people, realize that our ‘strategic’ oil reserves are planetary.
We are already tapped into our ‘strategic’ oil reserves, and at, or past peak oil.
We used oil to fertilize and transport our food supply.
Exponential supply increase is over.
Now, only the price of oil will increase exponentially.

@bolwerk I admit that America is behind in many ways, hence my skepticism. In some ways, it is backwards in a way that makes transition to a more sensible and efficient system unfeasible unless you are proposing massive changes to our culture that will be actively fought and may cause a spiteful pendulum swing in teh other direction. I mean, we are talking about people who build monster trucks just because we can! Now, if you want to tell Bubba Joe Jim Bob that he can’t have his lifted F-350 then I would wager that he would introduce the Second Amendment into the argument.

Fun fact from a consumer standpoint, and why public transportation wasn’t an option for me even when I worked someplace only about a ten-minute walk from the nearest bus stop; the bus cost me more than my car. Sure, I had to pay about two months worth of bus fare up front to purchase/register/insure said car, but the cost-per-day is about half. And now that I work someplace where there is no public transportation option, the freedom a car grants is actually essential to maintaining even my modest lifestyle (living indoors, eating frugally…). And there are many Americans that value that type of freedom enough to shoot anybody who wants to take away their cars, so we have to accept that private vehicles are non-negotiable.

Yeah, walkable communities would be nice, but they are not exactly practical unless/until all jobs are office jobs. Do you want to live next door to a casting foundry? What about those who work in shipyards; it’s pretty costly to live anywhere near the waterfront. I take it for granted that many (most?) Americans cannot live close to their jobs, and by “close” I mean somewhere that can be reached without some form of motor vehicle. Many are lucky to even have bus routes that go between their home and work without at least a mile’s worth of walking, often more. The best I managed was a route that involved >2 miles, and often in bad weather. Sadly, I don’t see “walkable communities” as viable unless I am seriously misinterpreting what you mean by that.

Now, I personally favor smaller cars and do my best to consolidate trips and avoid traffic jams in order to conserve fuel and avoid spewing pollutants without actually going anywhere, but many people prefer to drive around in their living rooms sofa-sized third-row seats, in-dash DVD players…) and don’t want to bother learning alternate routes (or learn anything at all) so even getting us to drive smarter would be an uphill battle.

As for EVs, I regard the current crop not as a cure-all, but as a stepping stone; an interim measure worthy of research and refinement. I am aware of the risks and implications, but I think that they can be overcome or at least mitigated through technological advancement. Unlike my friend, we cannot all have our own power generation setup in our back yard (he has his own wind turbines) but there are ways to increase efficient power delivery as well, and we need to work on that anyways even without the vehicular considerations.

@MajorDisappointment Very true. Why we aren’t making more serious attempts to wean ourselves off of dead dinosaur juice is something that boggles my mind.

@jerv: I don’t think there’s any debate about American culture needing to change. It will change, either by embracing change and making the best of it, or being dragged kicking and screaming into a new status quo. (My guess, knowing Americans, it will be somewhere in between – assuming without a disaster intervening.) Anyway, there are places that are ripe for change today too, if only local governments weren’t so obstinate. Transit in rural monstertruck land is and probably always will be silly, but there are densely populated places all over the USA that are literally spending more by not spending the money to get a sensible transit system going.

As for how stupid American transit can be, I know. Considering a well-run transit system is pretty cheap to operate when done sensibly, and has better cost-recovery than the American highway system, it’s quite amazing how much even places that depend on transit fcuk it up (I’m looking at you, MTA and WMATA). I think people tend to miss the point about transit and walkability. Not all trips need to be those things, and that would be expensive to achieve. Those things need to be increased though, and that would be cheaper than the current transport regime to achieve – especially when coupled with more sensible pricing for autos.

@bolwerk In the Seattle area, bus fares have nearly doubled in the last two years alone, as have tobacco taxes. There are quite a few other taxes that have increased/been enacted, and as far as I can tell, that hasn’t gone to transit (except for a relatively short light rail route that doesn’t get much use). Regardless of whether a disaster intervenes, I see much wailing and gnashing of teeth; worse than the bitching post-Katrina when gas went over $4/gallon the first time.

In order to get government to stop being obstinate, they will need to be educated, and they would also have to cease having anything to gain by maintaining the current system. For the first, bear in mind that they still have no idea about the Internet (“A series of tubes”), and much of their lawmaking regarding automobiles is rather dated or just screwed up. Sure, MTBE was bad, but Ethanol (E10) decreases MPG and certain cars are actually harmed by running it, yet that is what the lawmakers force us to put in our tanks. And the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution had to be redesigned for the US because the intercooler is technically part of the engine and stuck outside of the frame, thus making it fail crash test regulations. (If you knew what an intercooler is and what it does, you would know how fucktarded that is! But they didn’t/don’t know, so…)

Many people have been saying the same stuff you have for at least my entire life, yet here we are. I think you can see why I am pessimistic/cynical.

@jerv: Much of your life, of course, has been spent quietly dismantling other modes while ever increasing the clandestine subsidies automobiles get. Reality is we’re not running out of oil (yet), but extracting it is getting more and more expensive – nevermind the military and political costs of it – and more and more people are demanding it. These aren’t speculators, but the burgeoning suburban middle classes in places like India and China (pic to give you an idea). I’m not talking about the doom and gloom scenarios, though the precise effects of climate change and stuff are pretty scary too – they’re largely out of American hands though,* which is why I didn’t mention them in this thread. It’s a constellation of China, India, Brazil, and perhaps a reduced United States that will be dealing with those problems. I, for one, see improving transit and walkability as the optimistic approach. Forget the doom and gloom, and keep in mind that it will also reduce the number of people run over by cars, the amount people have to spend at the pump every month, and the lost opportunity of better investments than sitting in traffic. Heck, even things like car payments represent income represent opportunity costs – healthier food, renting/buying a nicer home, other leisure activity.

I don’t know the Seattle transit system very well. Buses often suffer a similar problem to delivery trucks though. They are stuck in traffic, which wastes a lot of fuel. Then the fact that they’re slow and stuck in traffic depresses ridership, requiring them to have more subsidies. Bus rapid transit solves some of those problems.

* Local air quality isn’t out of our hands though, and it’s worth addressing for its own sake.

@jerv Why we aren’t making more serious attempts. . . because WE are consumers.

Corporatocracy decides what we wage slaves will consume, and what price we will pay
for it. Artful seduction by supply-side exploiters make our voices entirely predictable.

We are programmed, to believe that we deserve our fraudulent, corporate sponsored,
Black Magic Life$tyle. We sensationalize encasing ourselves in 4000 pounds of steel,
glass, rubber, paint, and plastics, for our ride to the theater; where our little princes and
princesses pay for the privilege of consuming the latest exploitative programing, first.

Corporations have owned U$ wage slaves for generations.

We are being psychologically groomed, to become isolated, fearful, individual, weaklings;
unable to oppose any fate Corporatocracy may choose, for us to abide. The momentum of
our mass psychosis is used to draw true wealth and power from inmates of this madhouse,
for use by those impaneled to wield it.

As reckless and callous corporate competitors perpetuate the devastation of our planet,
in pathological pursuit of the power to manipulate profit, hideous struggling and suffering
are becoming our, new normal.

The takeover of our government by Corporatocracy was completed so long ago, they
no longer bother hiding it from anyone. It donen’t matter who knows we are their wage,
or campaign fund, slaves.

There is NOTHING we are allowed to do about it!

Corporatocracy utilizes [victimizes] everything available, people, wildlife’s resources,
our world. Other than profits, nothing has a real meaning for corporations. Competing
for profit, corporations think like HAL: Salvation > illogical. Corporations have no soul.

Corporatocracy, is implemented by the elite, for the elite.

The creed of Corporatocracy:
From each, everything that any secret strategy may optimally extricate.
To each, only minimal compliance with hard fought court judgments.

This is only the beginning [beg inning]. Job begging, union busting, hardship.

Powerful People made the Sub-prime Mortgage Backed securities game pay off, double,
as in, Emergency Crisis Management. Corporations set up world economic failure traps,
for their own profit enhancement, and pretend that they couldn’t know collapse is coming.

We struggle, as sperm in a condom; billions of manic consumers consuming
temporal, temporarily; in this rat race maze, run for corporate power and profits.
Corporations enhance their profiteering by steadily buying our government people,
and all the information about U$, that our governments control. U$ taxpayers pay
Corporatocracy slicks to drain us. Conglomerates too big to fail, extorted a trillion
dollars from our government. They laugh, because they own U$.

Our elected scapegoats and minion bureaucracies conveniently get successfully blamed
for all the discrepancies, allowing the guilty, U$ consumers, to so totally avoid accepting
any serious personal responsibility for the defective outcomes; of their/our ‘faulty intelligence.’
Citizens’ [consumers] denial of responsibility, for unacceptable government response,
to corporate profiteering, will cause us to continue allowing unacceptable responses
to be made; in the public name. . . our name.

We are being very irresponsible, when we accept no responsibility for the governments
we produce, for what our governments are producing, and failing to regulate adequately.
Our complicity is not well hidden by willingly following the pronouncements and decisions
of the Powerful; accepting and commending their unregenerate choices, when it pleases us,
and then screaming angry epithets, as we await trial; for rage against an optimized machine.

We are taught, and convinced by our ego, that we are God’s Perfect Servants,
Created in His Own Image. We believe that we are only temporarily favoring
this evil wretched world, with Our Glorious Presence.

Weakling humans, addicted to comforts we create with the powers of fire, will die off
quickly; unable to endure the harsh natural consequences, of living our comfortable,
Black Magic Life$tyle, for 300 years now. After our egos realize that a dead planet is no
longer biologically useful to us, we will trade it, to amazing aliens, as a welcome relief,
from our crushing guilt, for selfishly extinguishing all of the other higher life forms, especially
our trusting and affectionate domestic animals. When our planet sinks, alien enslavement
will be the going price for our rescue; and even that. . . will only be, a Hollywood dream.

Natural Law is unable to pardon us; for creating carbon dioxide overloads, with our Black
Magic Life$tyles. We have only recently gained partial control of our living environments,
thanks to life’s 3 billion-year struggle. In cosmological time, life on this planet has only just
recently crawled out of the primordial mud, from which it arose. Because we are a young
species, human greed, the need for conformity to beliefs, and the ostracism of diversity,
is apprehensible.

Humans are now poised to fail, reversing the tenacious advance of life, and fall;
back into the proverbial mud. We will stifle and perish, along with all the other
higher life forms. Humans have created conditions that humans can not survive.
We blame and evade our own personal responsibility for this imminent disaster.
Rather than avoid extinction, we avoid paying, to remove the excess atmospheric
and oceanic carbon dioxide, we created; immediately.

As in driving over a cliff, just slowing down will not avoid the eventual plunge.
Only by REVER$ING the flow of greenhouse gases, out of, rather than into,
our environment, will we avoid going too far, passed the invisible tipping point;
the one we are told to believe is still a ways off, somewhere in our future.

TALKING, about making cuts in greenhouse gases is a tactical ploy, the creators
of these gases use, to avoid making real lifestyle changes. Con$umer demand
creates greenhouse gas. Denying our real responsibility by blaming our scapegoat
leaders, for not making the tough choices, ensures the worst possible consequences.

STOP buying more greenhouse gas[oline]!

Without con$umer demand for better public solutions than reductions. . .
the best answer to the global warming situation, will be a nuclear winter.

We will only survive Global Warming long enough to experience the comparatively mild
beginnings of the permanent damage we caused, and are recklessly continuing to cause
to our, one of a kind space ship; the biosphere. “Faulty intelligence”, will get the blame
for another deadly mistake, and rightfully so, this time; because our intelligence is so faulty.

Destruction of the natural environment by humans will END: here on this dying planet,
as we assist to create our own hideous extinction. Our love of power, $trife, and conquest,
will not spread throughout the galaxies. The Universe will be left in peace. . . once again.

Ability, we have not; to see, The Empire of Evil, we are.

@bolwerk The money I would save on gas would be more than offset by the loss of income from not working. The same is true of many Americans; the ability to have work and home in close proximity is uncommon at best. My wife is lucky enough to have a bus stop literally twenty feet from where she works and we live about 50 yards from two more. As for me, I am only lucky in that I head North when most people are heading South and vice versa, so barring road-blocking accidents, I can do the speed limit to and from work; my commute rarely takes more than 35 minutes. In that, I am actually average.

One thing I think may be muddying the waters here is the fact that we are energy dependent. The fact that we rely on oil for much of our energy (especially transportation) is a separate issue, at least to my mind.

@jerv: and because it is so, it should never change? Policymakers have had 35+ (arguably closer to 50) to see exactly where this is going. Now our options are transitioning towards less car dependency or being painfully lurched towards less car dependency. I would prefer to the less painful of the two very painful options myself. The former involves more costs now. The latter involves continuing to subsidize stupid transport habits and having less to invest in the future.

@bolwerk Something will replace cars. As long as some jobs cannot be done by telecommuting and food cannot be produced within a mile of EVERY house, there will be many cars around. And until we connect damn near every point of interest by relatively simple routes with few transfers, public transport is not a viable option.

I can take the 348 and the 358 to many places I want to go, but not always at the time I need to, and “many” does not mean “all”, especially since they don’t go 25 miles North at all, let alone by 7AM, so commuting to work requires that I have a car.

Are you willing to relocate jobs, homes, and transit routes in a way that allows everybody easy access to work, home, and food? How would you do that? My wife and I work in vastly different locations, and noe of my coworkers live within 15 miles, so how would you enact your solution? Assuming it is even possible, how much would it cost? Not just in dollars either.

I think that the solution you are looking for is transporter booths. However, since we are a long way from Star Trek technology, cars are going to be around for as long as people need to move more than a mile. You are correct that we will be forced to transition towards less car dependency, but that is almost akin to saying that a drowning man needs to transition to less oxygen dependency.

That is why I like things like the Tango You can drive them two abreast on regular roads, park them in places where even a Smart ForTwo won’t fit (four Tangos fit in a regular parking space), and do 0–60 in under four seconds all without gas, and has crash safety and rollover ratings comparable to an F1 race car. Unfortunately, it costs more than twice what the Tesla Model S does; the cheapest Battery/drivetrain option is $13K on top of the car’s base cost of $108K, for a total of $121K. Still, it is cheaper and far more likely than the alternatives you seem to want but fail to detail.

@jerv: I don’t think cars will ever be entirely replaced. The problem with cars isn’t that they exist, it’s how wastefully they’re utilized. But cars aren’t really necessary in the delivery of food – trucks are used for that, and given the distance food travels even that’s kind of silly for many trips. Cars mostly come into the process at the retail level only, where it’s necessary for suburbanites to drive to their supermarkets* – they can’t do the obvious thing: walk. “Damn near every point of interest” isn’t going to happen. What’s going to happen is, points of interest are going to change, and a lot of car-dependent housing stock is going to become more expensive to sustain.

I don’t know what the 348 and 358 are, but my familiarity with public transport in the U.S. is mostly limited to large east coast cities and San Francisco – these are places where it’s adequately usable, but usually hardly better than a secondary option. Even in NYC, it’s kind of only better than the roads because the roads are so woefully inadequate.

I don’t know what you mean about my being “willing to relocate” things. I don’t have much say in the matter. However, if you mean that central planners could theoretically do something like that, then sure. That’s exactly how we ended up with the clusterfuck of highways and subdivisions (or housing projects, in big cities, for that matter) we have today in the first place. The price tag was only in the hundreds of billions, I guess. I don’t really see why a reversal is so necessary.

The obvious policy solutions I can see are quite modest: first of all, land use reform. Mixed use is practically universally illegal. How are we going to ever build walkable communities if that’s illegal? Stop subsidizing parking. Get rid of parking minimums, common even in the densest of cities. Parking lots should be regarded as missed opportunities for higher-value cultural and economic activities – not tax writeoffs for Wal-Marts. Secondly, have drivers pay for more of the costs of their driving; anywhere traffic congestion is the norm, have them pay for the complete cost – the external benefit: tens of thousands of barrels of oil immediately saved every day, and much less lost economic activity as people sit in government subsidized traffic. Transport modal reforms: get rid of FRA regulations making it impossible to economically run rail freight in passenger settings – including local “light rail” ROW. (This is actually largely the reason why HSR won’t work in America, despite the billions being thrown at it.) Give transit agencies a say in land use decisions.

And, the analogy about oxygen is outright silly. There is no need for human beings to depend on cars, trains, or anything but their own two feet. We’re just better off with cars, trains, planes, boats, and stuff – but only when we actually use them intelligently.

Re Tango, I suppose another big problem is the sheer size of vehicles in the USA. That makes scarce parking even harder to provide. Compare an NYC residential street to the parking habits on a residential arterial street in Cologne, Germany. The big cars are about the size of the small cars in NYC. And Cologne better provides a full range of modal options: rail, auto, bike lanes, and pedestrian sidewalks. New York, at best, provides occasional grade-separated rail, poorly designed buses, or walking – or sitting in traffic, most of the day.

* Yes, for simplicity’s sake, I’m ignoring things like farmers markets that probably get serviced by SUVs or pickup trucks on the retailer side. But that’s a niche market.

By “points of interest” in this context, I mainly meant home, the workplace, and where one shops for even the necessities. I currently work more than 20 miles from home, my wife works 3 miles the other way and has totally different hours so w can’t carpool like w used to when we both worked 15 miles from home and from each other, but I still drive 60 miles a day most days. But there are few people who both live and work near where I do, making a public transit route either wasteful or useless.

more later, back to work…

Public transport is pretty good at inducing demand, if land use policies fit. Early interurbans often ended in empty farmland – which transformed into places like Queens.

Have you ever tried to move a steel mill or a shipyard? Some things are where they are for a reason, and people don’t live near certain things for a variety of reasons. If we all worked retail or office jobs, you would make more sense to me.

BTW, you are aware that rents also play a role here, right? For many, the few dollars spent on gasis more than offset by the hundreds they save on housing each month.

I don’t see why you’d harp on shipyards and steel mills when most people are working in paper pushing or McDonald’s – the USA has had a service-oriented economy for generations, moreso than most places. Nothing I’ve said means moving steel mills, factories, or (in a micro sense) anything else. If anything, I’ve only pointed out more effective ways they could get their products to market affordably. And developed countries that actually emphasize products and commodities often are less car-dependent than the USA, so why would this be a challenge? Cf., Rotterdam to Chicago.

And yes, rents do play a role. However, I suggest tallying up (housing + transport) costs major U.S. metro areas* and comparing to (housing) only costs to test your claim. You’ll find that the city with the most expensive housing in the USA, New York, goes from being the most “expensive” city in the USA to live in to kind of average because, for many people, transport costs are a fixed cost of $104/month (the price of a monthly transit pass) per person or less. Coincidentally, New York is the only city with comprehensive if far from perfect public transit.

Amusingly, a similar effect is seen with violent death. Treat violent death as the kind that happyns in a car accident or a murder, and tally (murders+car fatalities) and compare to what we usually call violent death (murders) alone. Such shows the chances of dying a violent death in a big city to be similar or even lower than outside. I believe Seattle was originally investigated to make this point (linked there, though I didn’t have time to dig around and find the original research – I last saw it years ago).

* just stick with the few dozen that account for ~90% of U.S. GDP if you want