Oh my hell...

Everyone needs to read the following Wikipedia article:

General Motors streetcar conspiracy

I won't summarize it here, but it hits home that National City Lines (which was sponsored by GM, Firestone and Standard Oil of California) bought out streetcar systems here in Utah.

Man, what an awful injustice that was done to our society.

Where has all the science gone?

Oh, that's right, most people have never understood the hard facts behind the energy we use. I was really tempted to call in Doug Wright's show yesterday when he and Francine Giani were talking about the high gas prices here in Utah.

Doug made the comment that with all of the oil shale in Utah, we shouldn't have to pay so much for gasoline. He also said that sometimes he feels like a six-year old when he tries to understand why gas prices are so high.

Well Doug, if you want to understand why we don't produce oil from shale and tar sands, I have one acronym for you: ERoEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's not very profitable when it takes a company two barrels' worth of energy to produce three barrels of oil. Maybe a six year old can't understand that, but a sixth grader probably could.

And as for the price of oil (or gasoline) in general, it also doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand. The world has been endowed with a finite amount of oil. Its production follows a rough bell curve, and it appears that we could be near the very top, or in the "bumpy plateau" region at the top of the curve. If demand for oil-based products keeps going up, and the worldwide supply goes into terminal decline, then the price skyrockets. It's basic economics - supply curve shifts to the left, demand curve shifts to the right, and the equilibrium price goes up.

Wouldn't it be interesting to know how many of Utah's leaders - whether they be local, state, etc. - are aware about worldwide peak oil production?

If they're not, they should be.

Overextended

It seems that pretty much everything in our society is overextended.

Human population, whether it be worldwide or here on the Wasatch Front, is overextended.

People have overextended families with too many kids, and some of those families can't afford to support all those kids.

Our connectivity to the rest of the world is overextended, which in turn helps viruses, both computer and biological, travel from one part of the globe to another with amazing speed.

Financially too many people are overextended with excessive credit card and other debt.

The amount of food we eat is overextended. Never have there been as many morbidly obese people as there are today.

Our communities are overextended. They sprawl out to the point that they're not livable and self-sufficient anymore.

Yes, it seems that overextension is one of America's biggest problems. If only there was a painless, easy way out.

Reducing traffic congestion?

I'm no economist, but it seems to me that the government often levies taxes in order to influence people's behavior. For instance, we put a high tax on cigarettes as to discourage people from smoking.

Would it be possible to give people some sort of tax credit for living within a mile's distance of their place of employment? There was a story in the Salt Lake Tribune back in February about people who actually commute from Salt Lake County into Davis County each day for work. According to the story, about 9,200 workers commuted daily from SLCo to Davis Co. in 2004.

Whenever I talk to people about how good it is to live close to work, they always say "But we can't all live in downtown SLC." And they have a point. But if you work in Layton, or Bountiful, or Farmington, wouldn't it be nice to live there too?

Think about how many fewer traffic jams there would be each year, and how much less money would be spent on fuel if everybody made a serious effort to either live close to work or to work close to home. I've been in a situation where I've worked within a mile of my house, and it was so beautiful. I saved so much money on gas, and got some exercise by walking to work.

Of course, if people had a serious tax advantage to live in areas close to employment, it might hurt the real estate values in cities like South Weber, Fruit Heights, West Point, Herriman, etc., while helping the real estate values in Ogden, Clearfield, etc.