If motor transport hadn't been 'invented' we'd still be living in an insular, agrarian society where people seldom left the villages they were born in...
I'm far from a tree hugger - due to work I guess I'm in the top 1% of the site here in terms of carbon footprint
- but I don't see that no car = insular society. If anything being shut away in individual cars isolates us far more, as well as the pace of modern life limiting opportunities for personal growth.
It's a moot point, since we can only speculate on what has never been, but it's a hell of a leap to say the car has responsible to save us from such a fate.
Almost everything we consume is delivered by road since the collapse of the canal and rail freight networks and to reconstitute them to the extent needed as a viable alternative to road transport would be prohibitively expensive.
Well, the rail and tram network collapsed BECAUSE of the (then) relatively lower cost of road - it wasn't that they collapsed and roads were needed to replace them. As for being prohibitively expensive, it depends. With oil at $30/barrel? Yes, rail is expensive. When oil reaches $300/barrel? Road isn't going to look too cheap if that's all we have.
Our economy, in the simplest sense, is a mechanism by which energy is turned into goods is turned into money. If we stop the growth of energy via oil, we either reduce the size of the economy and realign the "cost" of everything, or we shuffle our energy sources. I can't imagine any economist would claim we can grow the economy and continually reduce the energy input into that economy.
Motor Transport is what we're stuck with for better or worse and all that remains is to keep it running as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Tax-breaks on fuel for hauliers and those who drive for a living (maybe on a sliding scale for sales reps etc) would be the obvious answer and higher fuel tax for other non-trade motorists to off-set the cost.
I could not possibly disagree more. If oil will last forever, we have no problem, and no need for the above measures. If we acknowledge that oil will not, no one group of people has a right to use it, especially not people using simply because they currently drive for a living. No-one has any "right" to make a living. The price of oil at that point will (is!) determining which industries are sustainable at the prices going forward, and which will be realigned to what we can afford. Too expensive to transport out of season fruit from Africa by 'plane and truck? Fine, then we can afford to eat only what's in season.
If there is only a limited number of years of oil, we should be treating as though it were precious - not giving tax breaks to sales reps.
The government is often heard mooting additional motoring tax options to reduce traffic - fuel tax is the easiest way of doing this - the more you drive the more fuel you need and the more you pay. No need for GPS trackers to monitor mileage, no need for 'smart' cameras to record license plates, no need to spend more money on additional infrastructure...
Here we agree, although the government surely won't! Governments crave more power - such monitoring systems are the wet dream of any government, hence UK's obsession with CCTV, DNA, car monitoring, databases - anything that shifts power from the people to the state.
Oil is going to get more expensive as time goes on - it's a fact of life...could it be cheaper? Probably. Will it get cheaper? Probably not. The oil business is a business, not a charity organisation...just because we as a society have tied our entire transportation to one type of fuel isn't the fault of the oil producers, it's our fault.
Here I also agree, although I don't think oil could get cheaper in the "long-term sustainable lower price" sense. There is speculative money in the oil price now, and if that were withdrawn we could see a dip down. It would be temporary though. The two problems are ;
1) Supply/demand. Supply has been 85 mbpd for two years, on a plateau. Demand has risen to meet and now exceed that, and is projected to hit 120mpd. I've seen no sensible projection of how we are ever going to bring that rate of extraction online, especially alongside the crashing decline of extraction rate at major sites such as Cantarell, North Sea etc.
2) Money supply. A huge part of the problem is the rate of expansion money supply (i.e. literally printing money, or conjuring up on computers). Money today is created as debt, and with the huge expansion in debt as well as derivatives and futures markets, there is a HUGE expansion in money supply, especially dollars. As more dollars are printed, their value goes down (we call it inflation). It's not only oil - EVERYTHING is going up in value relative to the dollar - oil, gold, wheat, other currencies, you name it. If you measure the price of oil priced in gold, silver or wheat, it hasn't changed much at all. So the problem is very much to do with money supply.
The US currently owes more money than any other country in history, the amount is rising by about 3 billion dollars per DAY, and on top of that are unfunded future obligations such as social security, medicaid etc. It means the money supply is unlikely to slow, and is why the dollar is currently sinking at such a rate.
With the dollar sinking, oil is simply repricing into new, lower value, dollars. With that background, plus demand increase, in the long term I don't see any way for oil to be cheaper.
