Wildwell wrote:killJOY wrote:Ever hear of "concision"? [*he says as he hits "stop watching topic"*]
Yep, sorry it was a bit long, but a lot of important points contained there that debunks a lot of the stuff on this site and brings PO bank firmly into a transport problem.
This has been my feeling all along, but then again I have been a fan of Bernie Cohen for 20 years and own a couple of his books.
The way I see it is thus, civilization comes from a few things but the first is communication. The US Constitution even recognized this by authorizing post offices and post roads to be built at gpvernment expense to promote communication within and between the states.
Once you can communicate you can share knowledge about better ways to accomplish things, warn about pitfalls of other approaches and so on and so forth. Communication promotes growth of the knowledge base that every other aspect of civilization grows from.
Communication is more important than even transportation, for most of human history travle was arduos and dangerous, therefore bussiness was handled by writing instructions and sending those instructions to trusted agents for implementation.
Once travle became cheap and easy the bussinessman became a travelor, going in person to conduct bussiness. This made for fewer misunderstandings but the energy cost was huge compared to written instructions and trusted agents in place.
With modern teleconfrencing the need for trusted agents has been removed and the need for travle is more psychological than actual.
The only things which NEED to travle are goods and tourists in the bussiness realm, in government travle will stay pretty much the same because they get the top of the heap in resource demands.
People are addicted to travle to and from work, but for bussiness executives there is no reason they can not all work from home and telecomute.
For manufacturing you will still need workers to arrive and depart on schedual and safely, but if fuel prices for private transport are too high then local workers will have to be hired to replace commuting workers. The market will adjust.
Walmart and other chain stores that depend on cheap good manufactured far away and shipped cheaply to the consumer will suffer a very big hit, the price of transportation will offset part of the gain in buying cheap foreign products. Globalization is driven by cheap transport, if oil remains the primary driver of transportation then globalization will die.
On the other hand the USN and foreign navies have a large experiencial database on building and operating nuclear propelled ships. If oil gets too high to burn as bunker fuel nuclear powered shipping will replace it on the seas of the world.
Air travle depends on cheap oil, but some oil can always be had. If I were in charge of a major airline like United I would have seriously considered investing in internal supplies of fuel. If United bought an oil company and used its own oil without the profit margin from world oil price increases they would not be bankrupt today.
Every problem has a solution, they might not be solutions we want or like but most of them will get us through the rough spots.
I hope
