Six Hundred To One

As the story goes, in 1960 my co-worker earned $10,000 a year and gasoline was $0.40 a gallon. Today he earns 10x as much, and gas is 10x as much. At four dollars a gallon, he has to work the same amount for a gallon; about one minute and fifteen seconds each.

That's a pretty fair return, eh? For one minute and fifteen seconds of working, he'd be able to purchase a gallon of fuel that could power a tractor auger that could drill 62 post holes. He'd spend three days' effort if he had to do that by hand, creating about a 600:1 ratio increase in human productivity. That's a pretty good return for four dollars.

But...we're bitching about the price because we don't just use oil for productive uses, to take advantage of that 600:1 leverage. No, we instead squander that leverage to work like hell in the country to live in the city, where we work like hell in the city to live in the country, and all the while we commute 49 miles a day in an oil powered vehicular unit for that privilege.

We built our infrastructure on cheap oil. At work, I've created a special protection scheme to protect an underground 230kV electric cable underneath Carmichael that was installed in 1976. We find the cost of replacing this cable to be so prohibitively expensive that we absolutely have to do everything we can to keep it in service as long as possible. The problem is, there is no way, no way, to reduce the level of service this cable provides from, say, an "A" rating to a "B" rating or lower. It has to remain in service; without it, another outage somewhere else could outage tens of thousands of customers for extended periods.

The same thing would occur with our highways -- if we reduced and deferred maintenance on them at even a slightly lower level than today (which everyone thinks is already pretty fucking low), they would deteriorate at an exponential rate -- they need to be maintained at a high level of service at all times, or else one more chink would make it unusable.

A nation like the U.S. needs cheap oil, because we overbuilt our infrastructure, our mega-schools, our fleets of school buses, and most perniciously, our insatiable demand for private automobiling. We need cheap oil because so much of the energy we burn is used simply to keep the system maintained. This is not yet the case in developing nations who have fewer paved roads, smaller schools where kids can walk to instead of being delivered by mom every morning in the minivan.

The supposed nuclear renaissance in the United States ended this last March 11th with Fukushima. We won't build another nuclear reactor here in my lifetime, methinks. If we are to be expanding our economy, we need power to do it. Expanding power won't be coming from nuclear; indeed, I would argue that renewables might not expand at a fast enough rate to even offset the decommissioning of existing nuclear plants over the next few decades. Do you have any idea, any idea at all, just how many wind turbines would be needed to replace the energy production from just one San Onofre reactor?

Which is somewhat too bad in my opinion, as I still believe that nuclear energy will eventually become the only true non-intermittent resource we have 125 years from now; oil, coal, and natural gas will all be substantially reduced in that time frame, and what do you suppose will then power all the tractor-trailers and heavy equipment needed to maintain the electric grid, bridges, and roads?