We live like kings

We really do.

This past week I had the chance to visit the home of someone who lives somewhere on the Wasatch Back where the real estate prices are steadily climbing. His house would have been considered a mansion by the standards of pretty much any other time in history. The man has his energy consuming house, and fuel consuming automobiles and recreational vehicles that go along with living in a sprawled out recreational area.

A hundred years ago, someone living in the same location would have had to grow their food there, and travel would have been much more limited. People wouldn't have had the luxury of spending so much time waterskiing in the nearby reservoir, or driving into the city on the other side of the mountains.

What we (including myself) forget is that for most of human history, life was hard. Diseases wiped out entire villages, people labored from sunrise to sunset, and rarely did you leave the place in which you lived and worked. People didn't watch Oprah, or spend time reading self-help books on how to be happier. People didn't have the time for such luxuries; they believed that they would get their reward in the next life.

Who knows what the future holds in store. Maybe our condition will drastically return to something like what I've described, or maybe not.

It does give one pause...

Preventing peak

What could we have done to prevent ourselves from the corner we've backed into?

I wonder how different our lives would be if the very first people to extract petroleum commercially in the 1800s had said "Hmmm, the Earth only has so much of this stuff, we need to be careful how we use it." Instead, we've carelessly wasted so much of a precious resource. It gives you a sick feeling in your stomach when you think of all of the petroleum wasted because of traffic jams, people going on recreational drives, tanker spills, carelessly planned communities, and our buy-cheap-plastic-junk-and-throw-it-away-six-months-later society.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that even as late as the 70s, we could have saved ourselves from the s*&#storm that may be on the horizon. It would have required us to radically alter our lifestyle that we had been enjoying after WWII, but it probably would have been better than the dilemma we now find ourselves in. But no, after Carter left office everybody pretty much fell asleep as far as energy issues go. So we partied on for another 25 years, and now we're going to have to pay for it.

I just wish I could have been born 20 years earlier so that I could have had more time to enjoy the party.

I hate to burst your bubble, Senator Hatch...

Ah yes, another story in the paper about energy that doesn't touch on the nitty-gritty scientific realities of energy.

There was a story in this morning's Standard-Examiner about Orrin Hatch wanting to "wean the U.S. from dependency on foreign oil" by producing oil from Utah's shale and tar sands.

So why hasn't this already happened? It's simple economics.

I quote from Wikipedia:

"A critical measure of the viability of oil shale is the ratio of energy used to produce the oil, compared to the energy returned (Energy Returned on Energy Invested - EROEI). Oil shale typically has a very low EROEI: Royal Dutch Shell reported a figure of about 3:1. That is, energy equivalent to one barrel of oil was used for every three gained, on its recent in-situ development (which uses electric heating of the shale up to 500 degrees fahrenheit while it is still in the ground, while also creating a frost shield around the mining site), Mahogany Research Project. This compares to a figure of typically 5:1 for conventional oil extraction."

On LATOC, Matt Savinar also explains why tar sands and oil shale being the energy savior is mostly a pipe dream. According to Savinar, we currently need about 83.5 million barrels of oil per day, but "the most optimistic reports anticipate 4 million barrels per day of oil coming from the tar sands by 2020."

This is all like the insane belief that if we just drilled in ANWR, all of our energy problems would be solved and we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

If only our leaders would stop with the hype about alternative energy and admit the unpleasant realities.

Legacy Highway

A lot of Legacy supporters also believe that the population of the Wasatch Front will just keep getting bigger and bigger, with no end in sight. They say that we need the new highway (or parkway, if you want to get picky with terminology) to accommodate our current needs, and because we're only going to "grow" (i.e. sprawl) even more.

So then, my question is this - if we really are just going to keep growing indefinitely, then what are we going to do when we have regular traffic jams on both I-15 and Legacy? Where are we going to build a new highway? On Antelope Island? Through the Great Salt Lake? Will we have to condemn a mile long corridor of buildings through Davis County for a new highway? Maybe have a tunnel highway under Legacy or I-15?

But the reality is that Legacy might be one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer money in the history of the state of Utah. Five years from now or sooner, the price of a gallon of gasoline could skyrocket to something that would make $3 a gallon look really cheap. At that point, people really would be forced to move closer to their jobs, get new employment closer to home, take mass transit to work, or form car pools. And since population growth indirectly depends on oil production increasing, it's possible that Utah's population will stagnate or even decline, since a decline in worldwide oil production will also mean a decline in food production and the fuel needed to transport the food.

With the number and duration of car trips being reduced dramatically, we would probably be just fine with one major route through Davis County. I know that's hard to believe, but if gas cost you $8 a gallon by the summer of 2009, you probably wouldn't be driving from your house in east Layton to your office in downtown SLC five times a week anymore.

It's not a pleasant thought, but it could happen.