The True Cost of Gasoline
June 3rd, 2009
This conversation might be done in the style of a screaming match between myself and a soon to be dinosaur SUV driver who became indignant because my bicycle was in his way.
Convenience = Planetary Suicide
The more convenient a thing is, the less likely we are paying the true cost of using it. Future generations will pay your way for you. Our free lunch comes at the expense of children not yet even born. Put that in your right-wing evangelical pipes and smoke it.
"Give me convenience, or give me death" - Dead Kennedys
I say; "Change Or Die Humans!" or more often; "I can't wait until 7 dollar a gallon gas takes your silly SUV driven' ass of the road!"
It seems to me with all the pontification that goes on around here about drugs and the negative effects of addiction, that people when they get freaked out by my assertion that we will be as a species, using mass transit by 2030 to go everywhere... well, are we just a little bit addicted to our cars? I'm willing to take the plunge into the future, but all these junkies, all of which think they're better than me (on the road size does matter!) I like to call them the zombie hordes, all they want to do is eat my brain! Just for suggesting people walk more and drive less, eating less meat, oh and hugging a tree or two! (Yes, plants are my secret little friends.)
I used to think it was a small thing. But clearly, my riding a bicycle most of my life instead of driving a car is threatening!. I've been riding my bicycle seriously since I was 15. In my 33 years of bicycling I estimate I've ridden about 45,000 miles. Most of these miles were done going to or from work. At 28 mpg that is 1607 gallons of gas saved and 31,178 tons of carbon I didn't dump into the atmosphere. Additionally I saved $2,410.00 (assuming a price of $1.50) during that period and got the exercise so many of us would benefit from.
I used to think this was small contribution. Easily laughed at by those that demand that life be convenient. Well think about it this way; if we enjoy extra convenience, our children and their children will experience less and less convenience. So no matter how you look at it, we're stealing from future generations knowingly and willfully. Think about that. The gallon of gas you don't use is like 999,998 dollars saved for future generations.
"What will be the cost of relocating 90% of humanity?"
And so you continue shouting; "b-b-but give me convenience, or give me death!?!?!?!
Buckminster Fuller calculated the true value of a gallon of gasoline to be one million dollars. This was based upon its scarcity and the long process that it took to create it spread across the human population over time factoring the capacity of the earth to reproduce more. We've used up roughly half the oil on earth in a mere hundred years. It took hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years to produce the co2 (via volcanic activity) and millions and millions of years for the oceans (primarily) and the forests (secondarily) to scrub out of the atmosphere. If we were to share it fairly among all humans including future generations (since we've burned up most of theirs already our contribution must necessarily be to find alternatives) the real cost might just really be a million dollars. Possibly even more!
True cost is a concept that is still coming around to the public consciousness. I have a theory that Buckminster Fuller in estimating the value of gasoline wasn't far off in calculating the true cost of gasoline. If this is true, than my saving 464 gallons of gas during the last 12 years comes to $463,999,072.00 that future generations won't have to pay in mitigation of, or adapting to global warming. You know what they say; "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
I've been riding my bicycle for my entire life. I've been saving that same yearly 38 gallons of gas or more since I was 15 years old. I'm 48 now, that's 33 years of serious bicycling. Assuming I've ridden my bike 1083 miles every year, I've prevented at least (1276 gallons) 24,762 tons of co2 from entering the atmosphere. And if my true cost theory is correct, I've saved future generations 1 billion, 275 million, 997 thousand, 448 dollars. I think I should get a tax break for that. I should at least get a little respect for it. It is no small thing. Remember that next time you're inconvenienced by a bicyclists while driving your SUV.
I'm tired of arguing with these people but I keep riding my bicycle up 30th street hill in Rock Island. I guess people feel threatened by my quite literally spiritual devotion to saving my little piece of the environment for those that will come after me. They have a hard road ahead and I feel it's my responsibility to do what I can to save what I can. That includes a dedication to talking about what I know to be true. This I think is as important as walking the talk. Talking the walk.
As a species, humans have a choice: become stewards of the earth or remain parasitic and continue to suck this place dry at the expense of our children whom we love dearly. I suppose I shouldn't expect much in the way of compassion for people in other parts of the world when we can't even give up a little convenience for a more certain future for those we love the most. Pretty goddamn sad though if you ask me. Yes it makes me curse to think that convenience (or the love of it) is killing our planet and dooming our children to what fate we do not know.
So, right about now, according to climate scientists, we have used up half of the carbon dioxide we are allowed to emit (going out to 2050) if we are to expect to be able to keep the average temp increase for earth below the two degree Celsius mark (highly recommended by climate scientists). If we continue using as much fuel as we have we will have used all that allotment by 2020 and we'll be faced with using zero gasoline for 30 years or we'll just keep right on dumping carbon into the air and bump the planetary thermostat up 4 degrees Celsius. The climate models predict that this will very likely result in carrying capacity of the earth being significantly reduced. In fact, it is estimated that under this scenario the ability of the earth to support humans will be limited to about 1 billion people who will live at the arctic and antarctic circles. Now I don't know how many of you have looked at a map and thought about living at the arctic circle ( I have) and there is not much land there. Inuit Indians live there and it is reputedly the most alive place on the planet which is why whales like it there.... but we're not whales. I know that we are perhaps sea apes and on our way back to the ocean but I think this will be way more abrupt than most organisms can generally handle when it comes to adapting.
Regarding our legendary ability to adapt to change
Hunter gatherers work an average of 18 to 26 hours per week gathering the necessities of life according to anthropologists. Over the years I've brought this up frequently and still no one gets it. The truth is that this machine is working us to death. We've grown up believing that the modern world is better and easier than we've ever had it. I believe this is a lie. I think that indigenous man in his mere 40 years of life has more moments of pure joy than industrial man could have in two lifetimes at the grindstone. Ever since I heard that statistic about hunter gatherer tribes I've been building to a critical mass of ideas that cut at the very root of what is wrong with things in our oh so interesting times.
Quite a few years back I decided that if my heart wasn't in it, that I shouldn't do it. You can call it amotivational syndrome if you like, lots of people do. Never mind that they're idiots, they're in charge. It is widely known among psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners that the validity of amotivational syndrome as a condition is questionable at best.
I would argue that even outside "cannabis induced amotivational syndrome", that amotivational syndrome is the invention of an industrial workaholic society. We laid back hunter gatherer types don't always fit well within the framework that we are born into when it happens to be an industrial society. We currently view these "conditions" (ADD, ADHD, etc.) as aberrations when they are very likely adaptive behaviors established long before the 40 hour work week. Yes, we are a nation of workaholics and if you don't have that disease you're a loser, lazy or possibly have amotivational syndrome. So please give me a break, I love working when I love what I'm doing and what I'm doing is good for the world rather than just an abuse of mother nature. It is necessary, if one is to live life mindfully, to think about the impact of our actions upon the world around us. The less I need, the more simply I live my life, the less damage I do. I'm happy with a good conversation. So I agree with the hunter gatherers of the world and I don't want to feed the machine any more than I absolutely have to in order to live. More importantly, I feel a deep need to do it in a way that will leave a lasting legacy rather than live life on the deck of the Titanic. I am goaded into action and I have come to the conclusion that everything comes down to conservation. We need less not more. The machine has us trapped and it's broken and we know it.
If people think I don't want to work they are wrong. What I want is something more than a job... I want a life! A meaningful life. That's all. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I have long argued that we as a society have been duped into mindless wage slavery for corporate profit. A tiny handful on Wall street and in Washington have profited. The collapsed economy and the bailout represents the theft of most of the wealth hardworking Americans have accumulated over the last 30 or 40 years. Really! The numbers don't lie. What they have done would take thousands of years of petty thievery to accomplish. Or perhaps the equivalent of ten thousand years of welfare moms churning out babies for profit. These bankers are giving out million dollar bonuses for a (heck of a) job well done! Why do they think they did a good job? Because the whole game was to move as much real wealth out of as many hands as possible into as few hands as possible. They did this by stripping value which to the wealthy is nearly as good as having more of it. To the little guy this means 5 dollar a gallon gas or a wage and hiring freeze, or a bailout for the bankers who did this (at our expense) but nothing for us.
So for a long time, I've been on a kind of deep strike. I've been looking for a way to get around money or the lack thereof to the state of being that I want and need. My problems are many. I have several nearly debilitating diseases and no health care plan. I have 12 years to go before I get social security. I don't even believe that it will exist when I get to that age. I believe it is possible that life in America will have changed radically by then. We are clearly at a very interesting juncture as historians will likely look back and say. Either we will meet with great success or great failure and there is no middle road here. It is do or die. We change or die.
To get your mind around it, think of this: We humans have taken something (Co2) which took hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity to produce, millions and millions of years for the oceans and forests to scrub out of the atmosphere back into the atmosphere in a mere 100 years. We'll actually, we've put about half of that back in. The other half is guaranteed to become insanely expensive to extract in increasingly hostile places. It is likely that at some point there will be rationing of gas. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you! My point is this: We have really deeply changed things on earth and put things in motion that we might not be able to stop. Even more interesting is that we've changed the rate of change that you might normally experience here on earth. This change in the rate of change probably exceeds the rate of change that we are capable of adapting to either biologically or institutionally. Which I think is simply amazing to think about since humans are, after being pushed out of niche after niche during our evolution, adepts of change itself. We truly are the undisputed masters of change. Let no man suggest that we don't like it, lets just say that we like it to continue at a precise pace. Not too fast, not too slow.
So apparently we've secretly orchestrated a major test for ourselves. Just how adept at change are we? People want to know. To me it makes perfect sense that we would come to this juncture. That becoming the dominant species would ultimately lead us to the ultimate self sabotage of extinction. Or soylent green. Reading the news these days(Seafood Threat 2048), particularly if you pay attention to the environmental (tree hugging) news, thoughts of that scene where they're talking about the soylent corporations study on the oceans which pronounced them dead and led them to find the mortuary / meat processing plant come to mind. In reality, the oceans are acidifying and we have used half the oil allotted us going out to 2050 oil. That is if we expect to keep the earth from warming up past the 2 degree centigrade mark which scientists that know, highly recommend. If we continue doing as we have done, then by 2099 the earth will have warmed on average 4 degrees centigrade which will probably reduce the worlds carrying capacity to a mere 1 billion human beings. That's a pretty steep die-off I'd imagine. The oceans at that stage would amount to algal blooms rather than the great repository of life that they should be. Algal blooms and the great garbage vortex twice the size of Texas(s). Algae will most likely benefit from the increase in co2 but as we've seen in the Gulf of Mexico, algal blooms due to too much fertilizer generally upset the natural balance of things or worse.
Interestingly, the worst case scenarios that climate scientists are coming up with in their computer models are actcually coming true or in many cases being exceeded! In other words, the computer models have come closer than was expected to being acurate. We've had a few years to use the models to predict things. Now we can see that the predicted rate of change according to the models corroborated in the field.
Another dust bowl in the Midwest is a common feature of the climate prediction model. It is already prone to several 10 year droughts and one 30 year drought every 100 years or so, according to climate scientists, this will change for the worse. What's that mean? That perhaps many of us will have to leave our homes in the Midwest as the American Empire falls into its decline and find our way to fresh water and game.
and we're at the half way mark on the earths big tank is the point at which conservation strategies are like money in the bank.
The future money and energy is in that which we do not use.
Besides, how inconvenient will it be to relocate 90% of humanity?
