Oil Oy Vey

My eco-article on the cost of oil got several interesting responses. Below are some insightful comments from Dan Ziegler that provide fuel for thought. Hah.

I would like to draw attention to some of the more insidious problems lurking in the wings. As a society, we have a huge addiction to trucking in an indirect way. Even though most citizens would not have many positive things to say about trucking, we still buy the cheapest goods we can find, rather than locally grown or manufactured items, and we don’t press our legislature for an overhaul of the transportation industry. That means buying things made in China, Mexico or India, and shipping them vast distances over land and sea. Just the amount of travel that the freight incurs in once it reaches our borders is staggering, as it moves across country to the consumers. The amount of fuel used to move that freight is tremendous. According to the American Association of Railroads, in 2007 the rail industry moved a ton of cargo 438 miles per gallon of fuel consumed. That’s about 300 miles farther than the average for the trucking industry. If we displaced only 10% of the truck freight onto the railway system, we could save more than a billion gallons of fuel per year, and reduce our CO2 generation by 55 million tons.

"Another point to consider is that there is much liquid fuel used to generate electric power. Liquid fuel should be reserved for mobile consumption (i.e. planes, trains, ships and vehicles with tires. Central power stations should only use the more complex, or difficult to manage fuels like coal, nuclear fuel, solar, wind and biomass. It’s far easier to control emissions and environmental impact at the scale we see in most modern power plants than it is to control emissions on a truck or car. Plus, liquid fuel is the least costly to transport to the ultimate consumption point since it has the highest energy per pound transported… Of course, the politicians and environmentalists up East that rely so heavily on fuel-oil-generated power would not like to be forced into new coal plants, even though they would actually be cleaner than the old oil-fired plants they would replace…

"Lots of things to make a difference, but without central policies to guide and direct us toward them, the market always takes the least cost route, without considering the collateral costs and damage. Having been to China, and seen for myself, the giant awakening, I can tell you that we are in for a rude awakening as the impact of our addiction to low-cost “stuff” actually runs up the costs to society after we factor in the rising steel, coal, oil and other raw material costs as a result of the in-efficiency caused by globalization of our manufacturing and food production. After all, there was a time when people figured out that it was actually cheaper (all things considered) to build manufacturing plants across the US to avoid moving raw materials and finished goods back-n-forth across the US… now we are moving things back-n-forth around the globe."

Any response to Dan?