SUV Sales Rise Due to Cheap Gas

What’s that old quote about those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them?

Trucks and SUVs will outsell cars in December, according to researchers at the automotive Website Edmunds.com, something that hasn’t happened since February.

Meanwhile the forecast finds that sales of hybrid vehicles are expected to be way down.

link

Anyone who had any doubts about the short memories of the American public can use this news as Exhibt A.   I guess the time to get that Prius you’ve had your eyes on is now.

As I mentioned in a comment recently, the global economy swirling the drain will cause lower demand for many commodities, including oil.   Most of the countries that export oil rely on the income from those sales so heavily that they will continue to pump out plenty of the stuff for the time being.  When the choice is pump oil or have the poor, unfed masses rioting in the streets, the calculus regarding how much oil to pump in a falling market gets a hell of a lot easier.   This will cause a glut for a while most likely.  It will also kill off or delay some of the proposed or planned production that was relying on $60-$80 oil to be profitable.

Some pundits are expecting low oil prices to be around for a while.  We may enjoy lower gas prices for some time to come, but keep in the back of your mind that those low prices are caused by the global economic crisis.   If the economy comes roaring back in a few years’ time and in the meantime we have consumed more cheap oil while simultaneously delaying exploration and production of ‘non-conventional’ plays, where do you think we’ll end up?

Yet Another Volt Post

I apparently must be one of the few bloggers that’s been taking shots at electric vehicles…

My last post on GM’s Volt concept vehicle was linked to by another transportation-related blog a few weeks back noting my criticism of both the Volt and electric vehicles in general, while the writer was in favor of such developments as a useful add-on to public transit in its various forms. I thought about posting a reply on her blog, but wasn’t quite sure how to frame my response, and then life got busy for me and I forgot about it for a few weeks.

GM to Begin Testing the Volt Next Spring

General Motors is continuing to make progress in its attempt to bring an all-electric passenger car to market. CNN is reporting that GM plans to start road testing the Volt in Spring 2008, assuming the new battery packs they are due to receive in October live up to their expectations.

As I’ve written about before, I’m not a real big booster of the Volt. It’s an interesting concept, but it has a lot of limitations (40 miles per charge being the big one), and it will perpetuate the mindset that we can continue the current motoring/mobile lifestyle that has dominated our culture and urban planning for the last 50 years or more. The lifestyle has flourished thanks to a growing supply of cheap, high-quality oil, and that in the future oil may be high-quality, but it will not be cheap, and the supply will definitely not be growing.

My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we probably hit the peak of conventional oil production sometime in 2005 or 2006… production rates have been slowly falling since then, and while there will be upticks in production in coming years, the numbers projected by CERA, the IEA and other groups regarding future production capacity are pure fantasy. Unfortunately, those are the numbers policy wonks in DC and most other captials are relying on in their decision making.

Oil is still easy to acquire, even if it’s not as cheap as it used to be, and I think we should use this time to start improving our public transit infrastructure, both locally and nationally before it becomes really expensive to do so. This is an uphill battle as it is, but it only gets worse when faux panaceas like the Volt are trumpeted as yet another techno-fix for our dependence on a depleting resource.

Ugh

Thanks to the collapse of the 35W bridge just northeast of downtown Minneapolis, all of us in the Twin Cities will get to figure out just how stressed our transportation network can get when one major traffic artery is shut down. It’s bizarre to see a bridge that I’ve driven over hundreds (if not thousands) of times littering the bottom of the river. Highway 94 will get a hell of a lot more traffic on it for the next year or three while debris from the old bridge is removed and the new one is constructed.

I’ll be really, really curious to see if this event causes state & local governments to promote ridesharing and bus transit to try and take pressure off of 94 and other area freeways.

My personal work commute doesn’t leave Washington County, so I feel lucky that I’ll get to experience this as a spectator rather than a participant, as it’s going to be ugly for quite a while. My sister, who works at the University, won’t be so lucky I think.

The Convenient Price Manipulations of SuperAmerica

One of the local news stations ran an expose on local gas prices, which fluctuate wildly compared to most of the rest of the nation. It’s not uncommon now for prices to jump by 15-20 cents in a day and then slowly drop over the next week. While gas price trends are similar to most of the US, the graph of price changes is a lot more jagged & jumpy versus the smoother curves seen elsewhere.

The apparent reason? The Twin Cities area is one of the metro regions lucky enough to be dominated by the Marathon/Speedway/Super America chains. They have enough market presence that they set the gas prices for most of the metro and appear to have a business strategy of jacking prices way up right before high-demand weekends (holidays, fishing opener, etc.) to increase their profit margins on gasoline from around $.01 per gallon to $.15 or $.20. But that’s not price gouging of course…  If you watch the video, you’ll get to see where SA management refused to comment live, but claimed that their gas pricing strategy was ‘business confidential.’

Today’s Strib Editiorial

Some truth-telling from the editors at the my local paper this morning:

Upon even a little reflection, it’s Pawlenty who has lost touch with the deeper reality. Everyone knows the world market is pushing gasoline prices inexorably higher. The days of cheap gas are over. Gone. Prices of $4 and $5 are on the horizon. Drivers already have paid the equivalent of a nickel gas tax increase many times over — but have received nothing for it! They have enriched the oil companies and helped oil-producing countries abroad. But higher prices at the pump have not purchased them better roads.

…

The more important part, and the real message that high gas prices deliver, is this: Minnesota needs to start investing in other ways for people to get around — not just poor people, but all people living in metropolitan settings. That means transit. These systems take decades to build. Federal help is available, but not until Minnesota finds a reliable source of local matching money. The bipartisan transportation bill offers a way: Counties could choose to band together in a joint-powers board to pass a local half-cent sales tax increase to, in essence, extend the success of Hiawatha light rail to the rest of the metro region.

 

Good stuff.  I can only hope that the rocket scientists at the legislature can come to an agreement and overcome the veto coming from a lame-duck governor who still shackles himself to an ideologically-motivated “no new taxes” pledge.   To me, the promise of a veto on an expensive but necessary appropriation,  shows that Governor Pawlenty obviously has his sights set on higher office, since he continues do what’s good for his base and career instead of what’s good for all Minnesotans.

 

 

Back From the Road Trip

I spent the weekend in South Dakota visiting an old friend of mine. Not much exciting to report other than it’s interesting to see the proliferation of wind turbines popping up in Southwestern Minnesota. I counted a good 20-30 turbines that I could see from I-90, and I know there’s a bunch more in the Buffalo Ridge area north of Worthington.

While I was coming home today, I had the cruise control on and spent a few moments just watching the pavement rushing by my car. Here I was, sitting comfortably doing very little while my energy slaves were conveying me home quickly. What used to be a long journey from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls a century ago was completed in just four hours. The amount of sheer power at my control (at a reasonable price to boot) is amazing when you think about it, and when the price of gas becomes too expensive for many of us to take such car trips anymore, the road trip may join other past forms of travel like flying boats or passenger ships as romanticized icons of ages gone by.

Kunstler: We Must Imagine a Future Without Cars

Alternet has posted a transcript of my favorite peak oil pundit’s latest speech to the Commonwealth Club of California.   This is the latest variation on Kunstler’s usual stump speech about peak oil and whatnot, so a lot of the information is old hat to some folks, but there’s some new stuff in there as well.

There’s also an MP3 of his speech available here.

Imagining a future without cars seems both pleasant and scary at the same time.  Having grown up with cars in suburbia during the heyday both, I’m very comfortable with car culture even as I recognize it’s limitations and ultimate decline looming in the future.   Recognizing the need to change one’s culture and actually doing so are two very different things.    I’m slowing moving to action where I can.

HT: Carolyn Baker 

New Low-Cost Bus Routes for the Midwest

For those of you in the Upper Midwest aspiring to be car-free, or at least reduce your use of the automobile for long-distance trips, here’s another option for you – Megabus. A one-way trip from Minneapolis to Chicago for $25 is pretty good. You’d have trouble driving there that cheaply, and it’s less than half the price for riding Greyhound…

Unfortunately, Minneapolis is the northwestern-most city Megabus serves, with the hub of their service network located in Chicago. It appears that they are expanding their operations as time goes on, and another inexpensive option for public transportation can only be a good thing.

HT: Ran Prieur

Shifting to the Downscaling Paradigm

I’ve been reading a lot of interesting items online recently that for some reason seem to be coalescing into a common thread in my brain.

• Fellow Groovy Green contributor Miranda has an interesting post on our culture’s sense of entitlement, and how it’s furthering our destruction of the planet and leading to overconsumption of our non-renewable resources. On a personal scale, we buy into the incessant marketing of non-essential crap that we are programmed to think we ‘need’ to live the ‘good life’ and show others how hip and wealthy we are. On a macro-economic scale, nations are treating commodities in a similar way, with the additional twist that for them, it’s a zero-sum game. Regardless of whether you look at oil, grain, industrial metals, freshwater or other resources, there simply isn’t enough of anything to go around anymore, and the dominant economic nations of the world have embarked on a mad scramble to secure what they feel they ‘need’ to thrive. With the exception of Iraq, most of these activities are happening under the media radar so far; how long that will remain the case is anyone’s guess.