[vtsnowedin]

.....
...........

So I expect a bumpy ride with prices, which will not provide price signals for most people to downsize their ICE vehicles. [Personally, I drive too little for the high initial costs of a new, or newer, (ev?) car to make sense to trade in my 12 year old car]

Well yes trip avoidance gets the best gas mileage, but when you do have to trade in your old car your choice of a replacement will be affected by the current and projected price of gas at that time.
That is why I am in favor of a slow steady increase in the gas tax that is passed as one law so people could plan ahead and not be caught mid car loan with a big price increase. Something on the order of five cents per gallon every six months would amount to $1.50/gallon over the fifteen years it takes for the fleet to be turned over.
That is not a popular opinion, I realize, with voters acting like rabid dogs over any gas tax increase at all with the roads and bridges crumbling beneath their wheels.

[Pops]

Some randomish observations.
We moved from MO, which has one of the lowest gas prices (low tax, close to Cushing) to CA then WA, both with some of the highest prices. Right now avg price here is $3.33 (over $4 in the summer) and it's $1.85 in MO. Granted, this is a lumber and pulp mill and port town, so you wouldn't expect to see lots of priuses (prius?), But I have never seen as many jacked up coffee-cup-haulers in my life! Full size, long bed, 4x4, Supertuned diesel pickups with big tires, custom wheels, 8" lift, loud pipes—and perfect paint jobs—qualify as coffee cup haulers. They are no more "work trucks" than the mentioned prius but are just as much a virtue signal, only for a different constituency.

My point is the guys here have gotten used to the high price. When fuel jumped from $1.50 to $4.00 in 2005, the cup-haulers in my neck of the woods in MO, especially the vintage models, were parked PDQ in favor of whatever 4-banger could be had.

So I'm thinking it isn't the absolute cost much as the rapid increase that causes a pinch in the budget forcing the decision. You might say it's like a frog in slowly heating water, yeah!
.

[vtsnowedin]

The single guy with a good paying job can and will waste money on a fancy cup holder as you call it or down at the bar. The family guy with a couple of kids and a mortgage has a much tighter budget and will be driving a Toyota corolla to work with one or two co workers. There used to be a lot more family guys then singles but the numbers have changed a lot. National policy has to take both groups into account as they both get to vote.

[Ibon]

As we draw down from that plateau it will not solely be economic forces that determine how we draw down the remaining fossil fuels. In times of war we rationed.

Think of the work a liter of fossil fuels can do in a chain saw or in a back hoe and compare this to the wanton and frivolous way it is used today. At some point as the remaining supplies become the precious commodity Matt Simmons always reminded us of we will then be forced to ration its use to maintain the stability of civilization.

Yes that means capitulating to government regulation.

The civilization that survives will be socialized to agree to live under increased government regulation.

Think China.

America? It depends on how we wean ourselves from feeling that being an energy hog is an entitled birthright.

[jawagord]

Some randomish observations.
We moved from MO, which has one of the lowest gas prices (low tax, close to Cushing) to CA then WA, both with some of the highest prices. Right now avg price here is $3.33 (over $4 in the summer) and it's $1.85 in MO. Granted, this is a lumber and pulp mill and port town, so you wouldn't expect to see lots of priuses (prius?), But I have never seen as many jacked up coffee-cup-haulers in my life! Full size, long bed, 4x4, Supertuned diesel pickups with big tires, custom wheels, 8" lift, loud pipes—and perfect paint jobs—qualify as coffee cup haulers. They are no more "work trucks" than the mentioned prius but are just as much a virtue signal, only for a different constituency.

My point is the guys here have gotten used to the high price. When fuel jumped from $1.50 to $4.00 in 2005, the cup-haulers in my neck of the woods in MO, especially the vintage models, were parked PDQ in favor of whatever 4-banger could be had.

So I'm thinking it isn't the absolute cost much as the rapid increase that causes a pinch in the budget forcing the decision. You might say it's like a frog in slowly heating water, yeah!
.

A decade of wage growth and lowest unemployment rate in 50 years makes for a lot more people who can afford $3.50 a gallon gasoline than in 2005.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46072979

[Outcast_Searcher]

A decade of wage growth and lowest unemployment rate in 50 years makes for a lot more people who can afford $3.50 a gallon gasoline than in 2005.

And with gasoline approaching $2 in the US, and now tending to be under $3 even when it is "expensive" (peak oil price in 2018), the idea of the collapseniks that people "can't afford oil products" is just an old doomer fantasy -- unless oil gets to averaging MUCH higher prices.

[Outcast_Searcher]

The single guy with a good paying job can and will waste money on a fancy cup holder as you call it or down at the bar. The family guy with a couple of kids and a mortgage has a much tighter budget and will be driving a Toyota corolla to work with one or two co workers. There used to be a lot more family guys then singles but the numbers have changed a lot. National policy has to take both groups into account as they both get to vote.

Great post. One correction though -- with a huge proportion of women now working, a like proportion of families now have two earners. This allows for a lot of the luxuries (as opposed to actual needs) to be had by lots of such families. So with two incomes, it's a lot easier to pay the mortgage on a house with an extra bedroom or two, for example, than it is for a single income to pay for a house for a bachelor.

I think the reality of the proportion of middle class people who waste lots of money, vs. those who claim they "things are tight" is huge. Thrift (even moderate thrift) can be a huge resource, which seems to be largely lost since the greatest generation. Just like an effort at energy conservation can "find" a lot of useful energy for society, an effort at thrift and savings could find a tremendous amount of money (over a career) for a huge number of first world families who find things "too tight" financially.

I still think frugality and awareness of things like budgets and investing, along with a good work ethic were by FAR the greatest things my parents of the great depression era left me.
Even in the 80's, when I made my start in the full time workplace, real frugality was seen as kind of "weird" by the vast majority of people with good professional jobs, even in a relatively rural red state like KY.

[Newfie]

When I got to making $100k/year I was thinking “Damn, that’s a lot of money, more than most people make. I should be able to live well off that.” So I started to take time off. I worked a deal where I got 5 extra weeks vacation a year. Then latter I went to a job that was explicitly part time. I ended up working a 3 day week, bunched it up so I was really working one week on and one week off, roughly.

I had wanted to retire at 55 but could not do that so this was a compromise.

All of that took budgeting and planning and delayed gratification.

At the same time I saw coworkers making more that I per annum go into debt, borrow against their 401k, and whine that they could not do what I did.

So extrapolate that out to humanity. These years are our high earning years, we have lots of cheap oil. But this flush with calories period is coming upon late middle age. We SUOULD be thinking about how we are going to transition out of this current mode to one of sustainable fixed income: e.g. alts. Keep some oil back for really high need uses, slow our economy down, invest in conservation, learn to be happy with what we have.

But that’s not the way of our species.

[Ibon]

All of that took budgeting and planning and delayed gratification.

At the same time I saw coworkers making more that I per annum go into debt, borrow against their 401k, and whine that they could not do what I did.

I recognize the planning and budgeting and delayed gratification. But there is something more fundamental. It has to do with what you value. And how centered you are.

You can say your coworkers lacked budgeting skills, had poor planning or wanted instant gratification. Although that might be true there is again, something more fundamental. It's about what they valued. Or didn't

If I reflect on this there were values that I developed early in life that recognized material pursuits as empty. I went down the path of frugality and planning in order to gain time and freedom and financial independence specifically to pursue my deep love of wilderness and nature. Next to that all the material pursuits truly seemed empty and although this may sound arrogant I saw the sea of humanity around me chasing stuff as folks who lived diminished lives.

All this chasing of material objects and driving yourself into debt is all about attempting to compensate through materialism a spiritually impoverished life.

More important than planning and frugality and budgeting is the underlying values that lead you to be frugal, to plan and to budget. That which took you to being on your boat in the Caribbean with all this time to contemplate the beauty of the open seas and ponder the human dilemma.

Most folks live mediocre and diminished lives because they never got touched spiritually early in life with deeper values.

Most of humanity is trash.

[Plantagenet]

Most folks live mediocre and diminished lives because they never got touched spiritually early in life with deeper values.

There is also the problem that half of humanity has an IQ below 100, with ca. 16.5% having IQs of 80 or less. People with low IQs tend to be less functional then people with higher IQs in coping with everyday life, and people with very low IQs are much less functional, and have very limited ability to understand things like the deep spiritual values to found in nature or complex abstract ideas and scientific theories like peak oil and global warming.

Most of humanity is trash.

I won't go that far, but there is an awful lot of mediocrity out there.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

I don’t know about the IQ argument, most of my coworkers were pretty high achievers.

But your probably right that about half of humanity is below average.

Worse is that folks receive their “news” from the MSM. Which probably has a lot to do with how we are reacting to the plateau.

Tanada mention the price of gas locally. It got me thinking it’s like $4 in Canada, $5 in Europe, and 10¢ in Venezuela. To some extent the price of gas is what the local politicians set it to be. Not completely true but true enough.

Cog goes in about price discovery in medicine, and he is right. We should also have universal price discovery on gas. And include the associated costs of highways and airports. And include the cost to decommission rigs and cap old wells, even deep water wells. And throw in the future costs of damage to the environment. Then let’s see what it costs.

Without looking at the true cost of ff we are artificially bending and shaping the slope of the plateau. But again I think Cog is correct, we will burn every molecule available.

[vtsnowedin]

But your probably right that about half of humanity is below average.

.

You have some doubt about that?
Which half are you in?

[GoghGoner]

So back in 1997, Campbell published a book on peak oil that put the peak date near 2000. In a sense he was exactly correct and world food prices clearly show the relationship between oil and food. We now have higher oil prices (even $40 oil was unthinkable two decades ago). Oil prices cannot stay low for long. A temporary low and unconventional supply additions will stop and those high decline rates will cause a huge imbalance in the fundamentals causing the next price spike. With oil prices averaging $74 in the 2010s, food prices will not be allowed to drift down to where they were at in the 80s and 90s -- that next drought in the corn belt will trigger another wave of global instability and take off quite a bit of oil supply.

[vtsnowedin]

On a more serious note:
The IQ you are born with is one thing , what you have left of it and how you chose to use it quite another. Many a person has fallen victim to mind altering drug or alcohol abuse and today function on what is much less then they started with. Others born into a life of leisure spend there days amusing themselves making no effort to advance so their IQ plus or minus makes little difference.
On the other side of that are smart people born into poverty and class discrimination that are held back. A genus hoeing corn has just as long a row to hoe as the idiot beside him and gets the same meager pay.
But to get back on topic the high IQ people will deal better with peak oil and will find ways to get the low IQ people to do the work for them that fossil fuels presently do.

[asg70]

Most of humanity is trash.

That's a rather misanthropic and elitist thing to say.

The only thing people seek in life is happiness, and frugal ascetism doesn't do it for most. It doesn't make them lesser beings. It makes them human. I'm not one to judge if makes them happy (unless they fly around the world while claiming to care about AGW the way Plant does) Different strokes for different folks.

[Ibon]

Most of humanity is trash.

That's a rather misanthropic and elitist thing to say.

Yep.

[asg70]

So Plant should have gone to Cuba...by car? Maybe in one of these? Point being that he didn't have to go there at all. It was discretionary travel.

But no, let's all get ouraged over politicians flying to climate conferences instead. Do as I say, not as I do.