THE VINE JUNE 3, 2010
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Thanks to the fiasco in the Gulf, there have been more and more discussions lately about how the United States can start weaning itself off oil, and both Craig Severance and the Center for American Progress have some useful, concrete suggestions on this score. One big-picture thing that's worth pointing out, though, is that our crude dependency isn't just a question of our love affair with gas-guzzling SUVs. Here's a chart from Charles Komanoff, based on EIA data, that shows how we actually use oil:
As it turns out, passenger travel—planes and cars, mainly—only accounts for 47 percent of our oil use. This is probably the trickiest item to fix and needs to be attacked from a whole bunch of different angles: ratcheting up CAFE standards, rolling out electric cars, bolstering mass transit, developing alternative fuels like clean diesel or some sort of futuristic and actually sustainable biofuel, plus smart-growth measures that can reduce the number of miles people need to drive in the first place. Higher gas taxes could help, too, though members of Congress act like they'd spontaneously combust if they ever proposed such a thing.
But that's only half of it. There's a lot of other oil use out there that may be easier to tackle in the short run. About eight million buildings, mostly in the Northeast, use oil for heating, and this accounts for 15 percent of the country's crude consumption. Renovating these buildings so that they can get their heat from natural gas or electricity would be a worthy endeavor. And there's no good reason why we should still be burning oil to generate electricity during peak-demand times—smarter grids or even solar power could help whittle that down.
Then there's freight, another 18 percent of oil use. I've noted before that it makes an enormous amount of sense to shift a good portion of freight from long-haul trucks to rail, especially electrified rail. As Philip Longman detailed in this Washington Monthly piece, moving 85 percent of the trucks off the road would U.S. curb oil use by as much as 22 percent while boosting the economy 13 percent by 2030 (thanks to better efficiencies), and lead to fewer traffic accidents and less congestion. What's not to love?
Point is, there's a lot more out there than just cracking down on SUVs. And yes, most of these measures would cost money: shifting all that freight to rail, for instance, would require investments of $250 billion to $500 billion over 20 years. But if the government needs funds, the obvious move would be to repeal some of the tax deductions and preferences that oil companies currently enjoy. Obama's FY2011 budget proposed saving some $45 billion over ten years this way. That wouldn't affect oil production much, as Alan Krueger has argued, but it is money that could be usefully spent elsewhere, and if the White House wants to eliminate those subsidies, now's the time to go for it.
4 comments
We already have that futuristic biofuel, it's the oldest biofuel: http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Oil-Gas-Methanol-Economy/dp/3527324224/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275598548&sr=1-1 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo801260f
- vips73
June 3, 2010 at 4:56pm
We desperately need to ramp up huge expansion of our rail systems, both freight and passenger. In the early '50's, the lobbying efforts of the Big 3 auto industries and Big Oil, along with the trucking industry created the Interstate highway system, using the threat of nuclear annihilation to justify the expenditure. The Law of Unintended (or was it?) Consequences then kicked in, paving (pun only partly intended) the way for suburbs, the death of the inner-city, and the Wal-Martification of America. What no one ever seems to remember about that 'golden era' was that taxes were much, much higher than they are now. From 1950 to 1955, for example, the income cap was $400,000.00, which is the equivalent of (averaged) $3,430,178.33 in today's dollars. From 1950 through 1955, the (averaged) income tax rate on the highest income brackets was 90.250933%, topping out in 1952 and 1953 at 92.0 18 %. That, it might be noted, was mostly under the Eisenhower (Republican) administration, and was also before the advent of Fox 'News'. A viable and vibrant mass transit travel & freight option would go a long way toward reducing those percentages outlined in your graph. It would also get many of those pavement-pounding, behemoth trucks off the Interstates; freight moved by truck should only be between rail hub and destination. Add into the mix 3-Star Amtrak Hotels at every major terminal, along with car-rental agencies, and you'd have many, many people opting for this vastly more economical method of travel and freight shipment.
- YellerKitty
June 3, 2010 at 7:40pm
I can envision a future where we can replace oil as fuel (heating buildings, generating electricity, transportation) with something else, be it biofuels, nuclear power, natural gas, etc.. What I don't know how we'll manage is the 13% of oil consumption for products and pavement. Petrochemicals are deeply woven into our lifestyle and economy. Plastics, fabrics, coatings (aka paints), pharmaceuticals, etc. all need petrochemicals, and all are deeply woven into our modern economy. That is the question: how do you replace all of those products? I can easier see a car/truck running off of electricity or biofuel than I can see a replacement for polymers derived from petroleum.
- tnmats
June 4, 2010 at 12:30pm
That's why I pointed out that we have a biofuel which can be used to replace petroleum as a feedstock in the chemical industry. Methanol has a whole chemistry worked out which could make the polymers we use now, without petroleum. George Olah, the author of the book I linked to, is a Nobel Prize winning Chemist. He's described how we can use methanol to completely replace petroleum as the basis of our economy. The advantage of methanol is that is can be produced from cellulose now, unlike ethanol. Methanol can even be produced from CO2 in the air with electricity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Andrew_Olah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy
- vips73
June 5, 2010 at 7:23pm