Quote Originally Posted by thehotelambush View Post
Ok, but gas is already that expensive in other countries. I suppose the U.S. might collapse financially due to expectation of growth, but the kind of post-technological transportationless scenario you've written about seems less likely, no?
I'm describing above the trend for the next 10-20 years. Of course, existing fuel supplies in Canada and the U.S. itself are sufficient to power the "actual needs" of the economy, though that's a kind of abstraction. The problem is that a large amount of rebuilding needs to take place to allow the economy to function well on a much lower fuel supply, and there's not enough energy (money, resources) available to undertake the rebuilding. I'm not prepared to say what kinds of transportation will be in use in 20 years, but it seems almost certain that the West Coast will seem much further from the eastern half of the U.S. than it has in the past 100 years. I'm also uncertain as to how industries will manage at downsizing. In other words, will the airline industry be able to gracefully downsize and offer basically the same services as today, but with far fewer flights, or will it simply collapse and be unable to offer any services at all because of financial issues.

At some hypothetical level of gas prices a mandatory restructuring of society will take place. The threshold for the U.S. is lower than for Europe because our infrastructure is more automobile-exclusive. It seems likely that prices above $4 and certainly $5 a gallon will initiate another round of the financial and real estate crisis.

Quote Originally Posted by FDG View Post
your messianic tone is annoying. take it from someone who doesn't own a car, tries to use bike + public transport as much as he can, and has voted the green party. so if I think it's annoying, it really must be.
I'm sympathetic, but there's really no messianic tone here, and I'm not suggesting any solutions or political action, or even personal action. I don't own a car either, but I'm still far from a "model ecoconscious citizen," which I don't aspire to be because it's impractical until the economic incentives change on a large scale (where I am at the given moment). I personally love to travel and fly often. I buy goods that are tossed out and not recycled, and contribute through my personal habits to pollution, land degradation, and global warming. I'm not preaching anything here, just giving my prognosis for the foreseeable future. My dramatism is because the moment itself is dramatic; it's a historical inflection point in many different ways. Sorry, my background is the U.S. where it is still a battle just to get people to acknowledge things that are already beyond obvious to most Europeans.