[Peakoil] (1) The end of mass motoring (2) the decline from peak oil (3) Matt Savinar

[Keith Thomas]

For the few people out there who still believe motoring in 2012 will be 
the same as it is in 2009, here's an extract from James Kunstler's 
column this week:

=========================
...,the first "die-off" of The Long Emergency will not be one of human 
beings but of our beloved automobiles.  Personally, I think the car 
die-off will come on with stunning rapidity as a combination of factors 
merge to make these colossal traffic jams staples of nostalgia in 
decades to come.  As usual, the public is clueless about this, gulled 
by a cretinous news media into the earnest expectation of endless 
techno-miracles.

     The funniest of these lately are the glad tidings from ("The New" ) 
General Motors. They came out last week with a laughable hype-fest for 
their proposed electric car, the "Volt," scheduled to arrive in the 
showrooms around 2011 (about the same time that all the 
mortgage-backed-securities sitting in Wall Street's vaults melt into a 
monumental puddle of radioactive goo). We're told the Volt will get the 
equivalent of over 200 miles-per-gallon, at less than 25 cents a charge 
from the plug on your garage wall, blah blah.  They estimate that it'll 
cost about $40,000.  Do we detect a little problem right there?  Like, 
the whole adult US population is going to rush out and buy new cars 
priced the same as today's Mercedes Benz?  Good luck with that, GM, 
especially when money for car loans will be about as easy to get as a 
royal flush in online poker.

And good luck with changing out the battery for ten grand a couple of 
years down the road, so to speak. And good luck also with your 
expectation that the roads and bridges will remain drivable in the 
years ahead, as every municipality, and county, and state slides into 
bankruptcy and the paving machines sit rusting in the DOT marshaling 
yards.

     What is wrong with our brains?  Are they turning to yeast?

     And even if it were possible to continue torturing ourselves in 
three-hour traffic jams, is that something we would want to do?

     I'm serenely confident that we're in the twilight of Happy Motoring 
now.  Without debt service there is no auto industry, and we're toast 
where debt service is concerned.  All we can do now is give cars away, 
or give US citizens free money to buy them -- which we are obviously 
already doing with "Cash for Clunkers" -- which is additionally 
hilarious in the same nation that is deeply paranoid about the 
government giving anybody free health care.  What a nation of morons we 
have become.
=========================

More here:

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/the-first-die-off.html#more

=========================
And here's a snippet from an e-mail I received this afternoon from an 
acquaintance in the US:

"... available energy use is falling due to peak oil. I don't believe 
that falling EROEI is necessary for collapse. I expect fossil fuels 
will be used at close to the current rates until they are 
exhausted--not a symmetrical peak but a plateau then exhaustion. I find 
this to be more pessimistic than a sloping decline. 
   
Oil will be exhausted in about 60 years. Gas and coal resources will be 
exhausted in the areas where they exist in ~100 years. Areas without 
raw energy resources will experience very quick reductions in PCE.
   
I have no idea how the world will handle the coming crash."

As Matt Savinar (http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/) says when he 
signs off his weekly e-mails: "Good luck".
--------------------------------------------
Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
--------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 3659 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://act-peakoil.org/pipermail/peakoil/attachments/20090817/d531a199/attachment.bin