Ethanol hype, which churned to a veritable frenzy over the summer, has cooled rapidly in the last couple of months as a combination of falling oil prices, questions on its viability and news that some ethanol promoters were apparently making outlandish, unverifiable and patently untrue claims to pump their stock for short-term profits.
Even ethanol’s highest-profile (and most heavily capitalized) promoter, Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, now says “Contrary to what you might believe, I think it’s extremely unlikely that in 20 years we will be using any ethanol in cars” —a highly hypocritical statement from someone who, as his frequent critic Robert Rapier has pointed out, has repeatedly and vehemently argued for “massive investments in ethanol infrastructure.”
Nonetheless, it is unlikely that ethanol hype is dead. California is set to pass a proposition which purports to fund alternative energy investments generally, but which has been heavily supported by the ethanol lobby. When gas prices rise again (as they no doubt will, probably by the end of the year) ethanol will make another comeback, and another round of investors will make a killing, until another round of articles show that it is unviable in its corn-based form and not commercial in its cellulosic derivation. (Economically viable cellulosic ethanol, like so many alternative energies, has been “just around the corner” for decades). In the meantime, more precious time will be lost to promoting real, viable responses.
What would those responses look like? New Orleans based consulting engineer Alan Drake recently posted a hopeful and eminently reasonable peak oil mitigation strategy on the Oil Drum. Briefly, Drake offers a two-point proposal. First, electrify and expand freight rail. Second, engage in a crash program to build urban rail. As Drake has repeatedly pointed out, the financial costs and technical obstacles to implementing such a scheme are minimal, especially in comparison to other proposed responses.
The only real problem with his plan is that it goes against the persistent, ingrained American notion that driving everywhere is the only way to live. Call it “the car story”—it goes something like this: once upon a time, people and goods got around by horse and buggy. Then someone invented the automobile and the modern world was born.
Never mind that this is a highly distorted version of history, as Lewis Mumford pointed out fifty years ago. Even if the transportation era that preceded cars had not included trains, streetcars, ferries and bicycles, that would not make building such an infrastructure today impossible. But the fact that all of those elements did exist in the last century should be more than enough evidence that we can do more and better today. Drake points out that
“The United States built subways in the larger cities and streetcar lines in 500 cities and towns (as small as 18,000) from 1897 to 1916. The US had about 90 million people, 3% of today's GNP and primitive technology (coal, mules and sweat). Can we do one fourth as much today with x30 the GNP and modern technology?”
Drake’s most dramatic example, however, is that of Switzerland during the Second World War. Cut off from almost all oil supplies, Switzerland “maintained a decent quality of life with 1/400th of US oil use/capita. Electric transport, bicycles and shoe leather maintained society and the economy.” Even today, Switzerland is ahead of the curve:
“Switzerland today (since 2000) is working on a 31 billion Swiss franc program to replace heavy trucks with (hydro) electric rail. Adjust for population and currency and it is equivalent to the US spending $1 trillion over 20 years improving our railroads.”By itself, this transit solution doesn’t address the related problems of electrical generation and natural gas—problems which are in some ways, much more serious even than peak oil, at least according to Matthew Simmons.
Nonetheless, electricity has a dramatic advantage in flexibility over internal combustion—it can be generated from numerous sources, including solar, wind and nuclear energy, assuming those alternatives are also scaled up at an exponential rate. (Drake also advocates geothermal heat pumps and solar water heaters for home use to displace natural gas and heating oil use—common-sense solutions that should have been adopted on a large scale decades ago).
Can we imagine a future that Drake’s vision would seem to point to? A future in which solar and wind energy had expanded by several orders of magnitude; in which there were few if any automobiles for personal transit and all long-distance freight was carried by electrified trains or boat; in which rail, streetcars and other public transit were ubiquitous; in which most functions of everyday life (shopping, going to school) were within easy walking distance most of the time; a future in which the vast majority of food and consumer goods were locally produced?
To some people, such a world sounds like a paradise; to others, conditioned to a suburban lifestyle of lawns and strip malls, it might seem like hell. But it would certainly be better than the alternative that business-as-usual is pointing toward now: economic collapse, widespread privation and unpredictable, catastrophic climate change—all while society attempts to preserve an infrastructure flawed in design at conception and which by now has more than outlived whatever limited usefulness it once had, so long ago.
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