Tim Heilman ([info]v3risimilitud3) wrote,
@ 2008-06-13 12:48:00
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I Like Graphs, Yes I Do, I Like Graphs, How 'Bout You?
This is about energy! Not the chi/prana kind of energy but the kilowatt-hour kind of energy.

I just thought it would be neat to find a graph like this one and just put it out there and see if anyone wanted to talk about it. How does this graph make you feel? What conclusions do you draw from it? Discuss. :)


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[info]emtel
2008-06-14 05:17 am UTC (link)
I feel... I feel an impending sense... of DOOOOOM!

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[info]emtel
2008-06-14 04:28 pm UTC (link)
Ok, ok, I'll post a real answer too. Observations:

1. Its a bit hard to tell just from looking at it, but it appears that the only energy source with significant variability in consumption is oil. The conclusion I draw from this is that oil demand is much more elastic than a lot of people think. I also think we will have another downward trend like we saw from 78-82. I don't think it will be a terminal decline, i.e. I think we will see an undulating plateau for a while instead of a peak followed by steady decline.

2. My, but nuclear has grown.

3. Can it really be that natural gas consumption hasn't gone up much since the 70s?

4. Unrelated to the graph: I am now hearing people turn their engines off at red lights when I am riding my bike. This is a pretty small change in behavior, with pretty small savings, but boy, I bet the people doing that are not going to buy another Yukon when they replace their car.

5. Also unrelated: Interestingly, I have not observed much of a drop off in traffic on highway 85. Certainly more people must be carpooling now but perhaps it is still a small fraction. I will be interested to see what things are like when we hit $6 a gallon.

6. Also unrelated but interesting: http://cargoblimp.com/

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[info]v3risimilitud3
2008-07-03 10:54 pm UTC (link)

1. Its a bit hard to tell just from looking at it, but it appears that the only energy source with significant variability in consumption is oil. The conclusion I draw from this is that oil demand is much more elastic than a lot of people think.


Yes! I agree. While the elimination of heat and electricity generation using oil was part of the "demand destruction" at that time and we continue, by and large, to generate neither heat nor electricity from oil, so this sector of demand is not present to destroy this time 'round, far more of the "demand destruction" back then resulted from federal policy decisions effecting conservation of motor fuel which, as soon as the crisis was lifted, were swept under the rug like last night's Corrin floor treats. In a sense, that we scrapped/got-around CAFE standards and other federal policies enacted in the 70's and 80's means we have established a known buffer of demand for oil that shouldn't cause too much economic havoc to destroy, lending credence to the idea that oil remains more elastic a commodity than many pundits warn. My only concern in this vein is that market forces alone will be insufficient in the event of a bumpy plateau to destroy the demand with the permanence necessary not to magnify the downward portions of the growth/recession yo-yo. In order for market forces on their own to do this, it is not enough that fuel consumption become a significant portion of the total cost of ownership of a car (assuming Joe Consumer even has the math skills and foresight to perform such a calculation - we are referring to the public here, after all) - it must also seem likely to stay that way. (During the crises in the 70's, I don't think we had strategic petroleum reserves and nobody knew how long the crises would last.) I long for pre-emptive policy decisions but suspect that, alas, they'll only become politically possible in the event of a steady decline, in which situation they could be economically unnecessary.


2. My, but nuclear has grown.


Yes, it's the only complicated energy source we've actually grown to meaningful portions of our energy income, where by complicated I mean something other than chopping down or digging something up and combusting it. Oh and large-scale hydro doesn't count: the sites are essentially exhausted. Yay Nuclear! Except for that pesky waste... different topic.


3. Can it really be that natural gas consumption hasn't gone up much since the 70s?


Thank you for pointing that out! I didn't notice it but yes it does strike me as odd.

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[info]emtel
2008-07-03 11:07 pm UTC (link)
Something interesting I saw since writing the above comment:

http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2008/06/363-peak-demand.html

Joe Consumer is indeed changing his behavior. I don't think it takes a lot of math skills to notice when your gas spending has doubled.

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[info]v3risimilitud3
2008-07-03 11:20 pm UTC (link)
Interesting! So much of fuel efficiency debate centers around making the fleet more efficient rather than simply having people drive less. To improve the efficiency of the fleet by market forces alone, the consumer must be (at least unconsciously) aware of the portion that fuel prices contribute to their total cost of ownership of the car. Simply driving less, though, accomplishes the same savings in motor fuel without the need for that specific (at least unconscious) calculation, and this is laudable!

However, I think the thinking goes that driving less, without an even longer-term infrastructural solution (than turning over the auto fleet) of a redesign of our population centers' land-use (i.e. dense-ifying), means contracting the economy. And we can't have that! (Not that our current wealth makes us any happier than we would be with slightly reduced wealth - we still can't have it! Again, that's another can of worms; see Growth Fetish.)

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[info]emtel
2008-07-03 11:44 pm UTC (link)
There are plenty of forms of driving less that don't require the economy to contract:

1. Carpooling.
2. Making one trip a week to the grocery store.
3. Riding your bike to work.

I think there's also a great deal of densifying that doesn't require a redesign of our infrastructure. Consider the thought experiment of evicting everybody from their homes, and then performing the optimization that keeps everyone in a comparably sized and appointed home, while minimizing the commute-to-work distance. I doubt we are anywhere near the optimum layout right now - people in the past have weighed factors other than commuting much more heavily in their decision of where to live. Obviously we won't reshuffle, but fat will be slowly trimmed out of the system (i.e. we'll gravitate towards the optimum) during the normal course of people moving to new homes, if they put more weight on commute distance when selecting new homes.

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[info]v3risimilitud3
2008-07-04 06:41 pm UTC (link)
Certainly there are these forms of driving less, and I am all for them, although I think that has more to do with my inexplicable antipathy toward the automobile than any peak oil concern. I just suspect that, in the real world, changes in aggregate VMT aren't nearly so much influenced by these (entirely *possible*) forms of driving less, and are in fact much more closely linked to changes in both employment commuting and discretionary spending. I dug up the Staniford post that (what parts of the stats I could understand) impressed this notion upon me.

As far as housing swaps, sans any new housing development, being able to reduce aggregate commutes, it's an interesting idea but on its face I'm not convinced. My suspicion is that employment density so greatly outstrips housing density that the benefit to be had by enforcing optimal housing swaps wouldn't buy all that much, even in the thought experiment, and that increasing the fuel efficiency of the vehicle fleet would be much more effective and timely in the real world anyway.

Support for the point that the drop in fuel efficiency since the 70's has provided a buffer of demand to be destroyed with minimal economic impact, since very modest gains to our many popular very-low MPG vehicles (e.g. 18 to 28 MPG) result in much more drastic decreases in fuel consumption than, e.g. 34 to 50 MPG: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/the_miles_per_gallon_illu.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

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