All this emergency type experience is enough to drive votes and demands for action on TV. So say Congress authorizes major post-oil infrastructure, assembled in quick war-time fashion, no excuses, move it or more people die kinda rush.
How's that work? The first thing would be natural gas conversions for food trucks and ambulances and firetrucks. And next would be bicycle cops patrolling neighborhoods instead of cruising large areas in cop cars. There'd be a lot of burglary, especially with the lights out due to saving power since so many plants run on oil. The coal would keep going, as would the natural gas and hydro and nuclear, but it takes 10 years to safely build a nuclear plant, and 7 years to build a Chernobyl accident plant. Too long.
One of the discoveries our Peak Oil community discovered is no single alternative energy plan would work. You have to use pretty much all of them to get back enough power to hobble along without fossil fuels. That means wind, PV solar, solar concentrators heating steam boilers, Co-generation gas and water plants, nuclear, hydro, PV on homes with hybrid thermal backing going to big hot water sumps and battery sheds, all to get the lights working, radio, low power TV (not plasma), computer, and Fridge most importantly. Heat the water for bathing and home heating. Those are the big things people need to survive. As soon as people start dying of cold inside their homes or staving, you get revolution, and that helps nobody.
Solve the home heating and lighting issues after you keep the food going, you've solved the worst of it. Then you have to deal with moving people to work and back on low energy renewable power. The quickest option is natural gas powered buses. They've got limited range, and will waste a lot of natural gas, but its the cheapest option in the short term. Longer term, you need to put in streetcars with overhead electric wires to run them. They can be powered from any electric source, including solar panels of the nearby houses or fields of the things anywhere you can put them down. The flatter the run, the less energy the streetcars need to move. Lighter is better too. There would be a huge demand for engineers to build these in fresh startup companies with access to steel, aluminum, electric motors, and welders to put it all together. The streetcar tracks would be cut into the street, and that's a lot of steel that needs to be emplaced, cubic money, and tons of labor. The wires overhead would probably be aluminum, assuming the contacts don't destroy them. I'm sure there's engineering specs on the right materials to use.
Step up Heavy Rail passenger and freight trains to replace long haul trucking and passenger planes. Say goodbye to overnight shipping. That was a luxury of the airplane age. Build lots of solar panels along railroad right of ways and pay people to maintain them, yet more jobs, and electrify all heavy rail. This gets liquid fuels out of trains and makes them renewable. Very expensive, but electric locomotives already exist in rail yards. They aren't built for long-haul runs, just moving freight cars around. Hybrid engines exist, have for decades. Electric motors have lots of torque for pulling trains into motion. Expand on this and eventually electrify the freight lines so goods can move renewably. Passenger trains exist for heavy rail, some of them nice. The Capitol Express runs from Emeryville to Sacramento, and there's also the ACE through Altamont from San Jose to Stockton and Manteca. Those are fast and comfy trains. Just build more. And rehab the old passenger trains. More jobs. Rehab the stations so there's more nice places to stop along the way. More jobs. Rebuild the warehouses along the station yards, the ones that are hair salons and mortgage insurance companies now. Turn those back into storage. That's more jobs moving stuff around in the warehouses and guarding them after hours. Electric forklifts are common. Pallet shipping is easy on trains.
So now you can heat homes, keep the lights on, keep the fridge cold, bring in food from elsewhere, ship goods and medical supplies, run emergency services, and transport the population to their commuter jobs or for travel, if slower than before. Its not the Jet Set lifestyle, but its renewable.
A pity that Al Gore was focussed on death and misery from global warming instead of describing all the jobs building renewable railroads and infrastructure to overcome peak oil would create. He's really negative, isn't he? And he picked the wrong problem. With all the renewable fuels there's less carbon and water vapor in the air so global cooling is possible. Human caused global cooling. The glaciers could slide down the alps in switzerland and crush towns again. The next ice age. Sea levels would fall, ports needing to be dredged just to stay open. Early snow falls could kill crops. Late snowfalls could kill all the blossoms on fruit trees. We could have a summer without pies or jam. Think of the pies! Doom! Doom!
The big problem for the above plan is nobody pays for post oil transportation until the whole world loses oil supply, and not little bits at a time but in a big nasty disaster. The whole world will want high quality steel for rails, and railcars to put on them and billions of PV solar panels, all at the same time. That's not going to happen smoothly. Right now nobody wants to pay for it and we don't even have the infrastructure to provide more than a couple percent of needed raw materials. Sort of like the Tesla relies on electric batteries using Lithium which is rare and in limited supply and must travel 26,000 miles before your car can take its first charge. We don't have enough high quality steel to build all the streetcar rails fast enough. If you use cheaper steel you have to replace it more often. And you get derailments and wrecks.
This is why I encourage everyone to get interested in bicycling and scooters. While govt and heavy industry is adapting to the hard reality of Iran blowing up the oil supply in some posturing jihad, the rest of us will be fending for ourselves. Scooters are 100 mpg. We'll have those streetcars eventually, but we'll have bicycled for a year, sometimes in the rain, to get to work while we saved up on the waiting list for a scooter, which we then ride on what alt fuel we can get, so we're not pedaling a bike in the rain, merely riding in it and trying not to die of exposure, surviving until such time as the streetcars are in the ground so we can ride to work out of the weather.
This is the actual future, I think. Even with California's Monterey Shale full of a Saudi Arabia of oil for the Fracking, which will be billions in court fees and yet more energy needed to extract, much of it will sell to the rest of the world. To places like China, currently the world's biggest polluter and the actual target of Al Gore's attacks.
If Al Gore was president, would he order the US Military to bomb China to stop coal burning and end global warming? The same Al Gore who accepted $330,000 in campaign contributions from a Chinese buddhist monastery during the warm up to Clinton's second term? Which was in the news as a big scandal all those years ago. The common people in China burn coal so they won't freeze to death in China's icy winters. You can't hit power plants to stop this because the poor don't have electric heat anyway. You have to bomb people's homes, which would make them catch fire, causing even more CO2 and sulfur smoke. Making it worse. If he gave the Chinese electric heaters, where would they get the power? Its not like they've got a grid. And they would just sell them to South America and buy more coal anyway. Gore is an excess of stupid, remember. No Arctic Ocean sea ice by 2013, remember?
So the rest of us? We should be thinking hard about if/when the oil runs out suddenly because Iran is crazy how we're getting to work and if our job can survive no transportation fuel and how we can salvage our civilization from this utter dependence on fossil fuels, fuels that run out. The above electrification plan is necessary, very expensive, and will take years to get into place. The more renewable transit is working, the less we will be harmed by Iran and their Poseur Jihad. Now, back to Top Gear.
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