This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Considering buying hundreds of diesel buses rather than replace your electrics? Spend some time with this article from Grist and reconsider.
One Reply to “Good update on peak oil”
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This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Considering buying hundreds of diesel buses rather than replace your electrics? Spend some time with this article from Grist and reconsider.
Comments are closed.
A couple of angles the Grist article didn’t explore too thoroughly-
First, some feeling that oil producers are afraid that if we think the oil is running out, we’ll develop alternate energy sources, thus producing competition and driving down (or holding down) the price of oil. For that reason, and also to keep stock prices up, the producers over-estimate the amounts of oil they can still pump.
Second,, part of the rice run-up was the increasing worldwide demand for oil. With the collapse of the economy worldwide, the poorest countries could no longer buy oil, part of why prices haven’t gone up again. When the economy recovers, demand will increase, prices will rise, and the economy will fail again. Because the US is the world’s largest economy, it seems possible that prices will steadily rise, but not spike as they did in 2008. (In case you missed this, in 2008 the Bush administration was encouraging rumors of an attack on Iran, and this case of the war jitters is blamed for a considerable part of the spike in oil-future pricing.)
I totally do not understand how anyone can look at what happened to KCMetro finances in 2008 and 2009 and still think more diesel buses are any kind of transit solution.