Gasoline inventories sink dangerously low

[McC]

1) Historically, CAFE standards have applied to new car sales. They are not retroactively applied to old cars. So sharply increased CAFE standards would not take existing cars off the road.

This was prompted from what Duchess said. She actually separated the thoughts out -- one was to impose new CAFE standards, the second was to ban all cars with < 18 MPG ratings. I don't think anyone was under the impression that CAFE governed all vehicles...

[aerius]

So it's just a manufacturing standard, rather than a technological one?

Why is there a disconnect between manufacturing standards for U.S. car distribution and European/Japanese distribution? Isn't that more expensive for the car companies? Or have I misunderstood?

Well, it basically comes down to this. Gasoline is a hell of a lot more expensive in Europe & Japan, so cars there are a fair bit smaller and a lot more fuel efficient. We in North America have cheap gas, and we want big cars with lots of horsepower, naturally, fuel economy goes down the shitter. So in short, it's not a technological problem by any means.

Doesn't the on/off of the engine introduce a lot more engine wear? This is something I've often wondered about, stuck in traffic -- does it make more sense to just shut off my car at a stop light, and turn it on when the light turns green, or would that be bad for the health of the car parts in the long term?

Once the engine is warmed up, stopping & starting it won't put much additional wear on it. On a long stoplight I'll usually shut the engine off if it's safe to do so, same thing with railroad crossings.

[McC]

Well, it basically comes down to this. Gasoline is a hell of a lot more expensive in Europe & Japan, so cars there are a fair bit smaller and a lot more fuel efficient. We in North America have cheap gas, and we want big cars with lots of horsepower, naturally, fuel economy goes down the shitter. So in short, it's not a technological problem by any means.

Huh. I always thought that car makes were the same across countries, with demand for type being the only difference.

Once the engine is warmed up, stopping & starting it won't put much additional wear on it. On a long stoplight I'll usually shut the engine off if it's safe to do so, same thing with railroad crossings.

Really? Cool -- I'll start doing this, then.

[Alferd Packer]

It's an easy way to save gas if you're going to be stopped for longer than three seconds or so. Just make sure you can get the car started and back in gear quickly, though...unless you like hearing car horns.

[Admiral Valdemar]

They teach such economy measures in the UK driving theory exam now, because it also affects the environment.

[Illuminatus Primus]

On a personal note, and please forgive the rant, it always bugs me when the Peak Oil and similar threads come up, because people are all too happy to doomsay and provide completely unrealistic "solutions," without actually trying to suggest how things could feasibly get better. "Ban all cars under 18 MPG" may solve the problem, but you can't implement it without huge public outcry (not to mention the issue of actually enforcing it), so why even bother suggesting it? (Obviously, you didn't suggest it; nor am I attempting to attack Duchess -- it's just sort of a generalized question)

Simple. Its their way of saying how late it is to do anything and how unlikely anything is to be done effectively and substantially before hand to preserve the most of our modern economic regime that perhaps we could. Basically we're at the mercy of how our government and the people react - as in after the fact - and the physical constraints like when peak will happen, how steep of a drop off, how weak will the economy be, etc. Preparation and mitigation should be tried, but its so late that it looks every bit as infeasible and bleak as Duchess says. I mean yeah, we all know no American consumer/voter or politician will go for it. But that's what we'd need to put some meaningful margins of failure for our economy in place ahead of time. So it just won't happen, and people will have a further vested interest in denying the people before it happens because they've already decided to do nothing but Band-Aids. Hopefully we'll get somesort of 11th Hour Manhattan Project on Energy and Sustainability, and hopefully the post-peak situation will play out gradually enough in the beginning that it won't get too bad. But that's all hopefully. No one likes hearing bad news, but just hoping and wishing is not the path of prudence or reason, and essentially the cornicopians and wishful thinkers are setting up modern, post-industrial, high-and-improving-living standards human civilization to cram for a final exam it can't afford to fail. We all wish, Duchess included I'm sure, that it wasn't the case and that we had something more feasible-sounding and timely and also meaningfully effective. No one said that the world was going to make things easy.

[Enigma]

Once the engine is warmed up, stopping & starting it won't put much additional wear on it. On a long stoplight I'll usually shut the engine off if it's safe to do so, same thing with railroad crossings.

I do enough starts and stops when doing deliveries. Doing the same at the traffic lights would only triple the wear and tear on my starter. But here in Ottawa we've passed a by-law prohibiting people from idling their cars for more than a minute when the temp is between 5 to 27 degrees.

[Darth Wong]

The thing is, if you implement the kind of measures which are necessary to stretch out our fuel supply and make it last longer, people will grouse and complain. They won't recognize the need to limit consumption until they start seeing the harmful consequences, at which point it's too late.

It's like rationing food in a survival/starvation situation. Unless people can actually see the cupboards emptying out, they'll just think you're a tyrant and boot you out of office. They won't recognize the need until they're already starting to starve, at which point it's too late.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Which is why benevolent dictatorships are best and always fail. Caesar can try and do as much good for the people to last generations as he can, but if it looks bad and harms some people in a minor way in the present, he must be deposed.

The people will whine if we try to protect the planet or our way of life for the future generations because it means less fun in the here and now. The people will whine when their homes are under metres of water and they have nothing to burn but soggy wood.

People are stupid. A person is smart.

[Edi]

The thing is, if you implement the kind of measures which are necessary to stretch out our fuel supply and make it last longer, people will grouse and complain. They won't recognize the need to limit consumption until they start seeing the harmful consequences, at which point it's too late.

It's like rationing food in a survival/starvation situation. Unless people can actually see the cupboards emptying out, they'll just think you're a tyrant and boot you out of office. They won't recognize the need until they're already starting to starve, at which point it's too late.

This is basically the problem with solving any serious long term problem. I saw a saying once that went something like

"The solution of serious long term problems is always deferred in favor of solving urgent short term problems and nobody pays any attention to them before they become urgent, at which point it is too late to do anything about them."

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That's pretty much it. Taking every single vehicle that makes less than 18mpg off the road (except for trucks owned by farmers, basically), and forcing all new vehicles to be built with an average of 55mpg as their fuel efficiency (diesel hybrids could easily meet this and then some), and slapping a flat $5.00 a gallon tax on gasoline in addition to existing taxes, would considerably reduce our fuel consumption at the same time that it forces a huge number of people into using public transportation, which would have to be rapidly expanded to meet demand. All of this in short would start preparing us for what Peak Oil is going to do, and therefore moderate the actual effects of Peak.

The money from the gas tax could be put into massive public transportation improvements, and then all the money currently tasked to road maintenance and expansion could be diverted to massive expansion of electric trolley bus systems, streetcars, light rail, interurbans/subways, commuter rail, etc, while forcing cars off the road could allow sections of major highways to be converted for rail operation.

If we implemented those standards right now, we still might be able to mitigate peak to the point where the average person is just taking a train instead of a car to work and not all that much else has changed--standards of living would probably fall to what they were in the 80's, too, but that isn't incredibly bad or anything.