The farthest we went this Memorial Day weekend was Brooklyn and except for a short subway ride to City Hall, we walked across the Birthday Bridge to get there. Many Americans prefer to drive somewhere though but gas prices are getting in the way of car trips and joy rides in general. According to the Department of Transportation, we collectively drove 11 billion fewer miles this past March as opposed to March of 2007. Thats a whole lot of miles and $4-5 for gas is definitely the biggest factor in that. The thing is, will it continue or can it continue when gas hits $7, $9, or even $15 a gallon?
From RawStory:
Robert Hirsch, senior advisor for Science Applications International Corporation, sat down with MSNBC’s Alex Witt to discuss the possibility of an upcoming oil crisis. Hirsch says that gas could reach $15/gallon within a few years because it is “essentially certain” the world has reached the maximum levels of oil production.
“The problem is that there’s not that much oil left in the ground,” Hirsch says. “What we’ve done is been very fortunate to have oil production increase as our economies have developed over the past decades. And now we’re reaching a point where we’re about to get, or we may be, at the maximum world oil production. After that, oil production will then decline and prices, of course, will continue to do what they’ve been doing recently. So what we’ve got today may be the ‘good old days.’”
Hirsch addressed the timeframe in which the US could see $15/gallon gas: “It could happen within a matter of months. It could happen within a matter of a few years. But it’s essentially certain that we are at the maximum of world oil production. And after that, we’ll go into decline, and when there’s much less oil available, then, of course, the price of oil is going to increase dramatically.”
Fifteen dollar gas might just be the beginning of our oil addiction problems (except for that whole global warming thing). Hirsch realizes and has for sometime that this was coming, yet no one in our government has done much about it. George Bush going to beg the Saudis to increase the supply does not count.
People will still need to go places, you know like work and continue the addiction to everything oil, like the plastic products we all use day in, day out. Yet consumption is largely unabated and despite the increasing prices, we are not doing enough collectively or at the macro, nation-state level. Unfortunately Hirsch's dire prediction of GDP decline will follow the supply levels of oil until we finally switch to alternative, renewable energy sources instead of bowing down and bending over for the oil industry that is mesmerized by their windfall profits.
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