nanocompendium

Most Americans won’t notice these lost opportunities. They don’t get out much or realize America’s growing backwardness. They don’t comprehend that a modern rail network, including high-speed rail, is a given is every populous advanced nation. They are stuck in 1970, when gas was cheap, when we had 100 million fewer people and less congested urban areas, when in many places it was like those car ads on television that show only one vehicle on an empty road. Somehow they think highways and airlines aren’t subsidized; they think many things that are not true, including this. Every transportation system is subsidized. In our case, we just have fewer choices. It’s an outrage that there are not frequent and fast trains linking, say, Phoenix and LA, Phoenix and Tucson. No, they’re happy to spend a huge portion of our lives stuck in traffic, changing the planet for the worse. Too bad that reality, in the form of oil scarcity and higher prices, increasing congestion and, ooops, climate change, will throttle these American delusions.

— Rogue Columnist (via azspot)

Peak oil doesn’t mean “we’re about to run out of oil.” Even defining it as “demand outstripping supply” is incomplete. Peak oil means the world has reached a point where half of the planet’s oil has been burned up (see, “climate change”). The remainder will be increasingly hard to reach and more expensive to refine. America hit its national peak in the early 1970s. The North Sea has passed peak. Several of the world’s giant “elephant fields” are near or past peak. This is a simple fact of geology about which there’s no disagreement among most experts (the outlier: the oft-quoted and highly-paid-by-industry Daniel Yergin). Peak oil was being used in ads by major oil companies and speeches by their CEOs in the mid-2000s. As with climate change, the debate is over details; in this case, when will peak hit and what will be its effects?

— Rogue Columnist (via azspot)