Ty
Elio Addict
Self restraint while posting? That's more than... Kidding... no political posts here.
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If Oil Prices Rose, Would Elio Rise With Them?
Donnyboy
Elio Addict
The bottom line is the Elio will save us money no matter what the price of gas is. My gas bill will be almost 1/3 to 1/2 of what it is now. I spend about $32 every week to fill up my car, so I'll be saving between $15 to $20 per week! But even though the gas savings is attractive, I think the low base price is what's most attractive to most buyers.
Exactly my point. People need to conserve no matter what the price of oil is, but it's a hard sell. The comment by "gottemfeathers" is the attitude of too many Americans. They can't think more than a few years into the future and see money as a magical resource unto itself.
Vague talk of technology is just a way to ignore oil's finite nature. It's scarcer in the ground every second, no matter how much tech we throw at it! People see themselves as optimists but they tend to be denialists when it comes to finite resources (countless ghost towns built on mining and drilling attest to this, and you just have to extrapolate it to a global scale).
Oil sources like shale and tar sands are only being extracted (with lower ERoI than conventional crude) because the easy, free-flowing oil has peaked in many parts of the world. See: http://peak-oil.org/peak-oil-reference/peak-oil-data/production-and-peak-dates-by-country/ (outdated only in that it doesn't account for the temporary shale boom, and I emphasize temporary)
The U.S. shale boom requires frenetic drilling rates and high costs, and is tapping a relatively small amount of oil, but people want to be "optimistic" and ignore the math. I posted this link earlier which describes what most people don't want to talk about or flat out deny (in parallel with global warming denial).
There's also confusion between oil-bearing shale and kerogen. The latter is just a precusor to oil and must be superheated to yeild anything usable, which results in terrible ERoI, but people keep pretending their are "trillions" of barrels in kerogen by ignoring what's needed to get it out of the ground, including all the water and environmental damage. There's also huge environmental damage from so-called clean energy, especially wind power, which takes over landscapes and kills birds and bats in greater numbers as more turbines are installed. That too, is treated as a panacea to cure all our energy problems.
The point of my post is that most people only care about their own needs and ignore nature's signals. The only way a car like the Elio will sell (well enough) is if people are forced into it by oil prices. I call that foolish behavior.
Your mindset is exactly why I posted this topic. Most people don't care about anything that doesn't suit their immediate wants, or makes them uneasy. They are much more interested in feeling good than doing what's really needed. Notice how quickly people have forgotten the very legitimate concerns about Peak Oil, which get fundamentally more serious every day, just masked by short-term gains from shale fracking and overproduction by OPEC, Russia and a few other plays. People have very short attention spans when it comes to finite resources, tending toward denial of the very concept.
In the case of things like timber and food, we're able to temporarily stave off depletion because trees and crops regenerate (though population growth makes it increasingly ineffective). Finite fossil fuels don't regenerate, but people abstract them down to money, thus pretending they're not truly finite (a mind trick). Entire civilizations have failed because of such thinking, with Easter Island being one of the most famous. The whole Earth is dealing with constant depletion but it's spread out so much that people see finite as "never really finite." Julian Simon still has many adherents, even though his math was nutty.
If anyone reading this can prove that there isn't less oil in the ground every second, I'd like to see their scientific case. Abiotic oil is essentially a conspiracy theory. When people say things like "oil production is growing" (for the most part barely keeping pace with demand) it has nothing to do with the sum of all possible wells that are being depleted around the clock. It's like covering a water cooler with a black cloth and pretending it will never fully drain because you can't see the water.
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gottemfeathers
Elio Addict
Sounds like someone needs a nap
Those numbers (with no real context) do nothing to disprove that oil is finite and that there's less of it in the ground every second. They just reflect a desperation to extract as much oil as possible because the world depends on it. For example, a "billion barrels of oil!" sounds impressive until you realize the U.S. can burn it in under 2 months. When that's pointed out, the average person will persist in pretending "we'll just find trillions of barrels!" e.g. the false promises of fracking and especially kerogen. My point is that a lot of people aren't dealing with reality, just as with their global warming denial.
Fossil fuels are capital, not true income. Depleting a savings account is a good analogy but oil is much worse because you can never get that "money" back. Everything depends on energy, so where's the sanity in using any more of a finite resource than we absolutely have to? People just don't think it through.
My motive for ordering an Elio was to conserve fuel first, and save money secondarily. I was hoping others had the same reasons, but I wasn't expecting much.
booboo
Elio Addict
Not political IMO, just a caring educated human opinion.
As is this.
"Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open, localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions. Such societies will no longer have to “grow or die.” Material accumulation will no longer hold a prime position in the population’s cultural imaginary. The primacy of efficiency will be substituted by a focus on sufficiency, and innovation will no longer focus on technology for technology’s sake but will concentrate on new social and technical arrangements that will enable us to live convivially and frugally. Degrowth does not only challenge the centrality of GDP as an overarching policy objective but proposes a framework for transformation to a lower and sustainable level of production and consumption, a shrinking of the economic system to leave more space for human cooperation and ecosystems." -degrowth.org
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Sorry JCar...I've heard all that "peak oil" rhetoric before...
I'm not too worried that fossil fuel shortages will be the demise of human society... I'm confident that human ingenuity will allow us to continue innovating numerous alternative energy sources...
Lots of things keep me up at night... but the shrinking inventory of fossil fuel is not one of them...
I'm not too worried that fossil fuel shortages will be the demise of human society... I'm confident that human ingenuity will allow us to continue innovating numerous alternative energy sources...
Lots of things keep me up at night... but the shrinking inventory of fossil fuel is not one of them...