As oil and in turn gas, prices continue to increase and no action or plans in sight that suggest any near term reduction, I’m seeing articles and comments along the lines of, “It’s not uncommon in Europe to pay $7 for a gallon of gas. If they can stomach it, so can we.”
An example of this logic is in this opinion piece by Paul Krugman. Krugman takes what is otherwise a thoughtful argument i.e. all the talk about speculation driving an “oil bubble” may not be based on well reasoned economics but rather on wishful thinking, and destroyed his credibility with:
The consequences of that (oil) scarcity probably won’t be apocalyptic: France consumes only half as much oil per capita as America, yet the last time I looked, Paris wasn’t a howling wasteland. But the odds are that we’re looking at a future in which energy conservation becomes increasingly important, in which many people may even "” gasp "” take public transit to work.
Why is this kind of logic silly? How about a quick geography lesson.
France has an area of approximately 250,000 square miles, about the size of Texas which is approximately 269,000 square miles. France has a population of 64M people which means they have a density of approximately 256 people/Sq. Mi. Texas has a population of 24M people which means they have a density of approximately 164 people/Sq. Mi. Beginning to see an issue? Let’s extrapolate that to the entire United States. To be generous, I’ll exclude Alaska and Hawaii. The continental US has an area of 3.2 Million Sq. Mi. The continental US population is approximately 302 million people. That translates to a density of only 94 people/sq. mi. I won’t even drag you through the densities that exist west of the Mississippi and east of the Pacific coastal states. To suggest that a European country that is a fraction of the size of the US with a population density nearly 3X the US is comparable in energy use is naive at best and dishonest at worst.
OK, let’s try a different tact. Let’s assume we could get rid of all those nasty, hydrocarbon burning, carbon dioxide spewing personal vehicles. If tomorrow we banned the use of all personal vehicles we would at most, reduce our oil per capita consumption by 40% (it would be less than 40% because of course, we’d have to provide transit solutions for those people and many of those solutions involve petroleum as the fuel). Even with a 40% reduction, we’d still be using 10% more per capita than France.
My point in all of this is that trying to compare the US to a European country, especially one that is a fraction of the size of the US with a population density nearly 3X the US, as comparable in energy use is naive at best and dishonest at worst.
The only way that we are close to being comparable to Europe is in the taxes and other costs waiting to be imposed to “solve” our energy “problem” by forcibly removing our need for oil. Oh, and another way that we’ll be like Europe, we’ll be heading for our own “Dark Ages.”
Amtrak can’t make money in the most dense part of the country, the Northeast Corridor. If it can’t do it there where can it make money?
I take mass transit around Washington, D.C. It sure beats the hell of driving. But the transit authority mismanages funds and ends up raising fares. They’re on their way to raising them so high it will be cheaper for people to drive and deal with the traffic. That helps no one.
Sean rumor is that the Japanese found a way to make their high speed trains self-funding. If this is true then we should study their model. It’s true that in many areas we are still low density but that is changing as more people move into the city and as old shopping mall and old cookie cutter subdivisions in the suburbs become replaced by mixed use developments.
Amtrak is only one example. The last time I looked, there is no mass transit system in the US that supports itself through its fares. And now you have the catch 22 of a need to raise fares just to keep the subsidy at the current level and that is going over like the brown log in the punch bowl.
As to high speed trains, they could fill a niche, mostly along the NE corridor with a couple of outliers but in the scheme of things would not change oil consumption much and would likely be just as driven by the air congestion in that part of the country.
So what if they don’t pay for themselves? their purpose is not to make money, their purpose is to reduce road pressure.
The same argument could be made about the public university system.
If the voters vote to build them, then build them.
Again, the ignorance of the populace is no verification of whether an idea is sound or not…again I’ll take you back to each of the states whose populace voted to secede so as to maintain slavery. It’s the same ignorance that is bringing us down the path of Gorebal warming solutions like carbon credits which do nothing but reallocate imaginary “costs” between industries that some government group likes and ones they don’t.
Shoe. We went through this before. I already told you about the TTI report. ANd it said that both transit and roads must be part of the solution, both! Not one without the other. You are welcome to read the report again if you want.
There is a lot of ambigious science behind climate change. Thus the right solution is to address it in economically sound ways just in case it is real.
I am very excited about solar spray on cells.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0114_050114_solarplastic.html
Sharp is investing $700 million in a solar cell factory. What does that tell you?
No problem with solar or other forms of “renewable” or alternative energy sources, as long as they are economically viable and not subsidized to get there. There have been some pretty significant advances in solar the past few years.
I for one do not believe you can build your way out of congestion with roads, the most common example that gets used is the city of Atlanta and the lessons learned there. Interesting article on how the National Highway system was funded and built, also who the political party was that opposed it and who is credited with breaking the logjam to make it happen, Al Gore Sr.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/01/26/358835/index.htm