If you go from happy motoring to suddenly no gasoline at the station, overnight, you get riots. And probably panic. And likely hoarding of food, and then violence. There's a whole series of bad flowing from the sudden end of the Subdivision lifestyle, to the end of cars. The faster it happens, the worse the reaction by the public and the higher probability of widespread violence. Rodney King riots, everywhere. Like that. And then there would be wars, as nations started pointing fingers and start launching rockets, planes, and eventually nuclear missiles at their enemies.
The Middle East would undoubtedly go up in flames, especially their population centers and their oil fields and ports. Like Gulf War 1, only with more panic. My own studies indicated that at an attack on Ras Tanura oil loading platform near Kuwait made the most sense, was the easiest to seize or blow up, and would take a long time to fix. As terrorist targets go, its ideal for a force multiplier. And its about 15 minutes by speedboat from Iran, or a minute and a half by missile or suicide bomber pilot. Very easy target.
So, imagine, if you will, that this attack finally happens this year. Our president is NOT well liked in the rest of the world. The Islamists hate him, the Europeans hate him, Africans hate him, Asians hate him, half the American people hate him, but he still won the Presidency so he can continue to insult the world. Eventually, there will be consequences.
So say Iran blows up Ras Tanura oil loading platform in the Persian Gulf in retaliation for something Obama says or does. Suddenly, OPEC production is largely cut off, maybe half of it, and we're looking at having to cut back world supply by around 33%, since world militaries are scooping up as much as they can into their reserves for wars they KNOW are coming. I've read the papers on them, the ones in English anyway. They're not even classified. Once its blown up it will take months or years to fix, and most OPEC nations will refuse, if they're still in power. They'll build their own, and leave it in the ground if they go full Jihaad.
Picture the current president, with his empty smile and exceedingly cold eyes, glaring at the camera from the White House Press Room and instituting mandatory national gasoline rationing, lowering the maximum highway/freeway speed limit to 50 mph, and how unfortunate it is that there's really no feasible controls over the price of oil, which has driven the cost of fuel to say... $33/gal. and $240/bbl. I just picked that number out of the air.
Not every station even has fuel. Many are out of business for lack of gasoline. I speculated, during the last big crisis in 2007, that it would make sense to drive the independent gas stations out of business by only supplying gasoline to brand named stations. Why not? Its true. They charge more too.
I also suggested that it would make sense to run the rations through an authorizing credit card, that the card totals don't accumulate further than the end of the week, so it's use it or lose it. Which means people who have lost their jobs in the fuel crisis, or at least got idled without pay, can sell their rations either at the gas station itself to the high bidder or on E-bay or Craigslist equivalent boards. Ebay would likely be more secure. Rich people would be the ones buying the fuel to keep their big cars on the road, to show they're rich, to rub everyone's nose in it. Use it or lose it rations that reset weekly, with saleable authorizations means a new economy for the unemployed, selling their rations to the rich to pay their own rents or grocery bills. And once you have rationing, there's little reason to stop.
You can adjust the ration too, easily, using the credit card, based on fuel access or various excuses. Imagine if your weekly ADULT ration of fuel is merely 5 gallons. That's tough, but you can get the kids to school on that with a small car. You can combine rations for a carpool to work. You can still keep the economy running, it just takes longer to travel with all the stops, but it will sort of work. Now imagine that you can pay a bribe to a politician to get a bit larger ration on your fuel card. Now imagine that's going on all over the place, to the point that there's so many bribes and cheater that non-bribers are seeing their ration cut to accomodate everyone cheating and paying bribes. That's exactly the sort of thing govt is really about, right?
So a year goes by and some kind of trouble hits and suddenly the ration drops to 4.5 gallons per week. A bit tougher. Some people have to fit an extra person into the carpool. Sometimes the kids have to walk to school or bicycle there a day a week. Make it fun. Some businesses go under without those critical people that simple half gallon of gasoline denies.
A year goes by. The ration drops to 4 gallons. More businesses drop out. Some struggle but survive on even more efficient fuel economy. Some employees have gotten apartments near work so they only travel twice a week so the fuel ration works. Or they take the train, which is now offered as an exchange: discount railpass on expanded rail service in exchange for the gasoline ration being given up. Some take motorcycles or scooters because carpooling just doesn't work.
With all this time involved, it makes sense you can keep an economy going this way. It looks like Vietnam out there, but at least there's still commerce, and specialists getting to their jobs. They might be wet in the rain, and some will die in accidents, but its better than everything standing still and everyone dying, like that scene in Serenity.
And the worst thing about this? It is likely to happen. It is PROBABLE. The USA and EU really aren't setup to operate without cars. They CAN, sort of, using fuel rationing to adjust the population to the idea, and with aggressive misspending of emergency funds on solar and wind power to supplement our grid. It WON'T SOLVE the car problem. That can be dealt, in cities, with using overhead cables on main streets and electrified buses and street cars. Think Muni in San Francisco, or the TriMet in Portland.
As for the Electric car? The last model of the Tesla Roadster was around $112K. That's the price of a house. I call that a MOTIVE, with its own getaway wheels. The newer Sedan is around $60K, which is still a ton of money for a vehicle with only daily commute range. The Nissan Leaf is nearly as expensive to make, when you take away the "incentives" and "cash backs", and just as limited. If you can accept the range limitations and get your boss to provide car recharge stations at work, you could commute that way, until you have to replace your batteries. That's going to be thousands, possibly tens of thousands of dollars, since shortages of Lithium means the price will rise, like Gold. By the time you need a new battery pack to keep your car going past the end of the driveway, it might be cheaper to just buy a house next to your work and walk there. Pause and consider THAT. Ergo, the above streetcars really are the best short term solution. Battery technology just isn't there yet. It is entirely possible that our chemistry just can't do it, period. That Lithium really IS as good as it gets, and that only 2 million lithium battery powered vehicles are even possible, and most of that total will be emergency vehicles, ambulances and fire trucks. Who could seriously argue against that?
If you need to travel more directly, and quickly, solo, then you need either a motorcycle or a scooter. Or give up the travel (and likely the job) or move closer to work and deal with those consequences. If you live within a few miles, you can bicycle there. If you live more than a few miles, or up a hill, then a scooter is probably best. Every choice has a cost and a risk and consequences. You may not even like them very much. I don't think you have many years left to come to terms with this new reality. Its already taken a lot longer than I thought it would. We're on seriously borrowed time. The Iranians are desperate. Their population is poor, their govt wants to retain control as their country falls further into exactly the sort of place the 1979 Revolution was supposed to end. They're like a Cult that's failed. And failed cults either commit suicide or explode. They'll probably do both. After all, they've got Nukes. And they want to use them. If we had a different president, we'd be doing something about that, or at least allowing the Israelis and Saudis to do something about it, since they're the ones threatened by a Nuclear Iran. Them and all that oil that's allowing civilization to continue just a bit longer.
Its a shame that we don't have a better electric car battery, because that would effectively DISARM OPEC, make nuclear weapons there pointless because we would be leaving the place to its own problems and taking our money with us. Its not like Arabs are famous for working hard. They sit on their asses and tell everyone else how to behave. Sounds familiar doesn't it? They're not like Europeans or Americans are they. Nor Japanese or even Chinese. We're all being industrious while they demand ever higher prices because they happened to be camped on top of the oil reservoirs. There's good reason the world hates Arabs.
Even if we have a miracle battery, you still have to build electric cars and change out all the existing cars, affordably for around $15K each, so there's no real interruption of the daily commute. Otherwise our economy collapses. Timing. Its everything.
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