Mr. President... Is this trip really necessary?

After watching another day of reports concerning hurricane Katrina and what is happening to the poor souls that are finding themselves in a "living hell", I then get to see a short clip of President Bush talking about the "oil crises" that Katrina has caused and that he is going to authorize release of oil the the national reserves.

He then goes on to tell us that we should limit our driving and don't buy gasoline unless really necessary. In order words, conserve and don't use any more fuel than is absolutely required.

Then what does President Bush do... he's going to "tour" the Katrina disaster area.

Now really, do you think that having the President fly over the area is going to help the victims or make them feel better.

And, Mr. President, what about saving fuel... I'm sure that Air Force One and the fleet of helicopters are not getting the best of "miles per gallon", are they?

The trip is nothing but a boondoggle!

The Peak Oil Crisis: Pulse and Glide

Two weeks ago, five guys took a stock Toyota Prius and drove it for 1398 miles on one tank (12.78 gallons) of gas –- about 110 miles per gallon. Considering that a stock Prius going with the Interstate flow gets about 53 mpg and that a even a careful eco-driver going 55 mph can only get eke out something over 60 mpg, there might just be a lesson here. How did they do it?

“Pulse and Glide” is a technique worked out by Prius enthusiasts in which the car is first gently accelerated to 40 mph then permitted to coast back down to 30 mph while keeping the Prius’s electricity generator disengaged.

For those of you without Hybrid experience, it is helpful to know that on a Prius and similar vehicles a battery recharging generator is activated during deceleration. While this recharges the battery, it also cuts down on the distance one can coast by converting momentum into electricity. In the case of pulse and glide, the gentle acceleration does not require any electricity so allowing the generator to cut on during coasting simply wastes gasoline.

The record was achieved by pulsing and coasting, back and forth, over an 18 mile section of 30-40 mile per hour four-lane highway outside Pittsburgh , chosen because it was flat, unimpeded by traffic lights or heavy traffic, and had a suitable speed limit.

After the test, another enthusiast tried out the technique on a Toyota Highlander Hybrid SUV that has a similar engine. In a shorter test, the Highlander came up with a pulse and glide fuel consumption of 47 mpg— very impressive by SUV standards.

All this suggests there may be more fuel economy buried in our current fleet of cars and light trucks than we realize. It just takes a strong motivation and some changes in our driving technique to bring it into the open. While I have no idea if our fleet of some 210 million non-hybrids could double their mileage by careful, ultra-economic, perhaps computer-assisted driving, it just might be worth finding out.

A good place to start would be on a flat, empty road in the middle of the night, so there is nobody around to think you are crazy. Trying pulse and glide on the beltway would have a very short half-life, for you would soon be run over from behind, forced off the road, shot by someone with an acute case of road rage, or arrested for causing a monumental traffic jam.

If we ever get to hyper-economical driving and the millions of barrels a day it might save, there will have to be some strong incentives and help from the government and the manufacturers.

The incentives to drive economically will come as soon as the price of gasoline gets high enough. What is enough? Well, gasoline is currently pushing $7 a gallon in Europe , so $10 per gallon clearly is not enough to induce people to drive 30-40 miles per hour. Let’s arbitrarily take $20 per gallon as the “take pulse and glide seriously” point. At those prices, it would cost $200 to fill up a small tank, $400 to fill up the standard car and $880 to fill up a large SUV or pickup truck. At these prices, it is obvious that nearly every thing related to driving, except the miles per gallon, disappears.

Long before we get to $20 per gallon, let’s hope our various levels of government establish “economy lanes” on our highways where people would be free to drive as slowly as they wish in order to extract the last speck of mileage from their vehicles.

Of course, the manufacturers could help by testing their products to determine maximum fuel economy profiles and adding aftermarket pulse and glide buttons to their cars and trucks. These devices would be programmed to automatically extract every smidgeon of mileage from a vehicle, no matter how it was run.

The concept of a car alternately accelerating and coasting across country at 30 to 40 miles per hour may seem bizarre today, but very high priced gasoline is a virtual certainty before we can transition to alternate forms of transportation. Given the lack of alternatives, “economy lanes” may indeed appear on our highways.

[ source of article ]

A fit of (oil) peak - The Boston Globe

By Chip Giller and David Roberts | September 1, 2005

IT'S THE END of the world as we know it, and we feel fine.

Let us explain.

The last few months have seen a surge of stories on so-called "peak oil." That's the moment when we're pulling as much oil out of the ground as we'll ever be able to pump. Supply hits its peak and begins an inexorable decline, regardless of demand. Hurricane Katrina has shown what kind of damage short-term supply disruptions can do; peak oil represents long-term and permanent supply disruption.

But peak oil is not a matter of economics or politics. It's cold, hard geology.

Nobody knows for sure when the peak will occur. Estimates range from a few years ago to 50 years hence. But expert consensus is closing in on the next five to 15 years.

This isn't a Y2K bug situation; the exact moment we hit the peak isn't that important. What really matters is how we handle the descent. The difficulty it poses is incredibly complex but simply stated: Our entire economy hinges on the availability of cheap oil.

Think about food and transport. Our agricultural system depends on petroleum-based fertilizers and petro-fuel to haul the resulting food over vast distances. And oil powers our transportation system -- not just personal vehicles, but city buses, long-haul trucks, airplanes, and ocean freighters.
Right now, the price of a barrel of oil is hovering around $70. But what's going to happen when it hits $80? $100? $200? Opinions are sharply divided.


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Good news and bad news at the dawn of petrocollapse

Written by Jan Lundberg

There is good news and bad news at the dawn of petrocollapse:
To the rescue!
- Bike stations and Library Bikes as victors over oil!

However...
- Inevitable: New Orleans as victim of oil

There is more than a double whammy at play in the U.S. Gulf as to the energy supply picture. Besides the devastation of the general infrastructure, Katrina has inflicted two accute shortage situations as never before experienced simultaneously: oil (and refined products), and natural gas.

Gas was already in very tight supply, as has been oil. Today's sudden and heightened supply tightness can feed on itself, as history has shown. To say the least, this country is going to have a recession that could be rather dark by winter. "

A national and global economy that is not built for conservation and efficiency cannot accept "Stop! no more" from Mother Nature. Hence, the possible onset of general petrocollapse and the toll on consumers, even though for now consumerism still rides high everywhere in the U.S. except in the areas directly disabled by Katrina. But according to airportbusiness.com,

"Airlines and oil companies are working on plans to supply jet fuel to at least ten U.S. airports that could be shut down due to a lack of jet fuel caused by refinery and pipeline shutdowns from hurricane Katrina." The report from Aug. 31st makes clear these are not Gulf area airports hit by Katrina, and they include Atlanta and Washington Dulles. "

This may be the biggest oil-supply shock since the 1970s. We are now in the days of reckoning,'' said Cambridge Energy Research's Daniel Yergin after Katrina hit the petroleum sector. As a reader of the Lundberg Letter in the late 1970s, Yergin knows that our forecast of a 9% shortfall of gasoline in 1979 -- that we accurately predicted would trigger "days of lines and hoses" -- can apply today.

I hesitate to say that based on a possible 20% shortfall from Katrina that the U.S. will positively and immediately enter into its third (and last) major oil shock, because the rest of the world does not have the same shortage. But that could change due in large part to the wounded colossus trying to suck up ever more petroleum for its wasteful applications.

Unfortunately, being in the pay of the petroleum industry, Yergin is acting as the main nay-sayer of the growing consensus that the world is now or very shortly will be at peak extraction of oil. As this column has repeatedly explained, the other side of the peak does not look anything like a gradual reverse-growth scenario. The market will act as its own executioner by running up prices and creating shortage, regardless of geological reserves of oil and fancy consultants' assurances.

It may already be happening now: stockpiling and hoarding mean that tremendous "tertiary storage" (two hundred million cars’ gas tanks) is topped off, ultimately creating paralyzing shortage. Katrina may teach wasteful U.S. petroguzzlers far beyond the Gulf that nature bats last and that the unnatural works of man -- including the vast, vulnerable petroleum infrastructure -- are short sighted.

If this is the dawn of petrocollapse, so be it. If the dawn has not yet come, it is nevertheless close. The lesson of Katrina should be less sensationalism and more reckoning of our unsustainable lifestyles and foreign policy. Were it that Daniel Yergin's "reckoning" is such.

Michael Ruppert told Culture Change on Aug. 31, "I think (Katrina’s impact is) about a 20-25% hit on US (oil) supply for as long as 3-4 months maybe longer. The economy may not recover."

Truthout.org’s Kelpie Wilson wrote on Aug. 31, "If we had a president who was a leader, he or she would start by asking us to do our part by staying home and not driving our gas guzzlers this weekend. They are going to need lots of fuel down in New Orleans because once they get those levees rebuilt they have to pump all that water out of there. It's sure not going anywhere by itself - most of the city is six feet below sea level."

J.H. Crawford, author of the book CarFree Cities, writes:

"If New Orleans... must be relocated to higher ground... we should make the point that a new, carfree city to house the refugees would cost less to build and emit fewer greenhouse gases than any other alternative that might be considered.

"Whatever happens, we should be prepared to address the fact that, should New Orleans be destroyed, the event is largely the responsibility of the United States for releasing staggering quantities of greenhouse gasses during the past 150 years and for failing to even address the need for reductions. This event could be the wake-up call for America. It could turn out to be a disaster that far overshadows September 11th in terms of both loss of life and property damage.

"This disaster has been inevitable for a long time, but it seems likely that people are simply going to rebuild the city in harm's way, again. The interval to the next disaster will likely be a lot shorter than the last interval."

Where Mr. Crawford may be wrong is that if Mike Ruppert is correct and petrocollapse has begun, there will be no rebuilding as commonly supposed.

How about "New Orleans: victim of Big Oil"? Suffice to say that it's in our face that our petroleum lifestyle has immense drawbacks such as irreparable toxic spills and global-warming-charged hurricanes. Yes, the oil giants exercise extraordinary power. But they are not in control when it is the people who may or may not give them their money. Yes, oil prices go up. Due to subsidizing petroleum in a dying culture that guzzles poison hootch like a drunkard, we are actually paying many times the price that's recorded (over $10 per gallon).

If this is the point in our history when one may say in the future in retrospect that Katrina touched off petrocollapse and the transition to sustainability, will our behavior start to show some collective intelligence before Katrina’s big sister -- total petrocollapse and climate distortion to the max -- visits us?

The suffering in the Katrina-hit Gulf Coast ecosystem includes millions of people who did not ask for this disaster. That they unwittingly helped bring it on -- via unsustainable land, air and water practices -- is an unkind thing to suggest at this tragic time. There are lessons, however: the SUV photographed in the flood and crushed by nature reminds us that no one species is all-special. Our new cars are not invincible, nor are we. And nature is slamming the motor vehicles to remind the universe who is boss -- errant children in the guise of modern society are running amok with machines and energy on the way to and after achieving overpopulation.

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