It's not only a rail passenger issue since AMTRAK runs over freight tracks. this is a must read as well.

AP IMPACT: US freight rail congestion a concern

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Rail-Congestion.html?scp=3&sq=railroads&st=nyt

The world is in crisis. No one has pulled the fire alarm yet.

LET'S CANCEL THE OLYMPICS BECAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING.

The games can represent all the unnecessary travel, consumption, construction and waste that have to be tackled to preserve the biosphere. Their cancellation can serve as a platform to educate and inform an international audience.

Use the international focus of The Cancelled Olympics as a fire alarm.

Or, if that's too sacrilegious for ya, let's seek a ban on NASCAR racing. Tens of thousands of people drive for hours in their cars to watch faster cars go around and around and then they all drive home. It defies all logic - and the outrage from the fan base would help get the message through to the steadfastly ignorant.

It'd be about as popular as pulling the fire alarm during an orgy, but somebody has to throw a bucket of cold water on the western world and say, snap the hell out of it!

I do not see Americans changing their ways easilly. Since most Americans feel that the "American way of life" is the best then why the should settle down for anything "worse" (Forget about the notion that it acctually might be better, Americans know better and everybodey outside USA is either unable on unwiling to realize this, especialy those no-good socialistic atheists in Europe).

When it becomes way to expensive for them to use their cars, THEN and ONLY THEN you can expect a change. You know, you have to get over the notion that public transport is only for loosers and poor people...

Do not expect any politician to mention this, telling the truth is never a popular thing, and it is a pretty sure way to NOT get elected...

Peak oil theory has nothing to do with supply and demand. It is purely about supply. Petroleum is a finite resource which humans have been extracting at increasing levels for about 100 years. At SOME point, according to POT, production will peak, and then begin an inexorable decline. It is really a pretty simple theory.

The exact point is disputable for many reasons, but most estimates indicates that we are within a decade of that peak (we may be a decade past it.)

The real point is that no, the gas pumps won't go dry on January 17, 2117. But, once we have passed the peak, every year after that petroleum will be scarcer. Eventually there won't be any left (that is economically viable to recover).

And the point of all that is that we need to be working on alternatives to petroleum, because although it has powered our modern world, it is getting harder to find and extract, and there is more competition for it every day. (I am ignoring the environmental problems for now. Running out of petroleum MIGHT be good to the planet, if we humans don't burn every stick of wood cooking every living thing on the planet to eat when we run out of oil and corn and cows.)

peace.

Radical conservation can go a long way in making the best possible use of the remaining fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions dramatically. First off; the automobile is obsolete. Pneumatic tires use massive amounts of energy, as do suspension systems. Brakes that convert the energy propelling a car into heat are obsolete, while I'm not an engineer a braking system that stored energy to a flywheel or an electric generator storing energy to a battery seems long overdue. The endless starting and stopping in traffic is an absurd waste of energy. Finally automobiles kill way too many people.

CSX, the rail company, advertises that they can move a ton of freight 423 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel. The main reason for this is that steel wheels on steel rails uses far less energy than pneumatic tires of roads. The second reason is that trains don't stop and start continually.
http://tinyurl.com/3v6aku

The time to announce that the automobile will be prohibited from the roads in five years has come. The time for a new transportation system employing much lighter weight vehicles with steel wheels on a light weight rail system is now here.

Finally the steering wheel, gas pedal and brake need to be removed and a computerized control system that is integrated with all the other vehicles needs to replace it. Technology has developed to the point that with the combination of high speed computing, data transmission GPS, radar, laser distance measurement technology etc. that there are now the tools to control a transportation system much the same as the internet is operated.

An integrated control system would then be able to virtually eliminate crashes, end stop and go traffic and the elimination of having to control the vehicle would give riders the opportunity to read, watch TV, surf the net and a million other actives. Eliminating crashes would allow the weight of vehicles to be reduced by 75% or more and operating with steel wheels on rails with energy storing brakes would also reduce energy consumption dramatically.

Cars would become much like horses, nobody rides one to work, but they still run the Kentucky Derby every year as a holiday for the overly rich and self important.

RichM, the speculative behavior we are observing is a symptom of the Peak Oil phenomenon. Anticipation of supply not meeting demand drives the price up just as much as supply actually not meeting demand. This is one of the reasons why, when big changes happen, they tend to happen much more abruptly than people expect.

Barry

I just watched the documentaries "The End of Suburbia" and "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Oil is a finite resource. Imagination, perseverence and adaptability aren't.

Hedge fund capitalists are like bloated monsters that gorge themselves till full then move on to their next victim, leaving the naive, the innocent hopefuls, and just plain dumb, scrambling to survive off the remains of a ravaged carcass, i.e. techs, housing. Commodities are the latest victims being circled by the beasts of greed.

I lived in China for three years and took more train trips there than I can count. Yet, how many times were trains off-schedule? Once, and that was because of a severe storm that knocked out the catenary used to power the electric locomotive that was pulling my train. Otherwise, trains were on schedule almost to the minute, even long-distance trains crossing from the eastern coastal provinces to the remote northwest.

One reason for this is that China has been plugging massive amounts of money into its railroads, including high-speed rail and double tracking existing rail lines.

Meanwhile, Americans piss and moan about gas prices and our crumbling air transportation system, yet one of the surest ways to lose an election is to tell people to get out of their cars. Getting a license at 16 is a rite of passage, and people in most of the U.S. feel as though a car is their birthright. As we speak, citizens of my hometown of Seattle are bickering over whether the city's future lies in light rail. Whenever someone suggests putting in a new rail line, liberals, conservatives and libertarians collectively denounce it as a "boondoggle" and insist that all the city needs to overcome oil dependency and congestion is more buses sharing the road with traffic.

I don't want the transportation systems in this country to collapse because of what it would mean for a lot of people, but part of me fears that it will take precisely that for selfish, whiny, NIMBY Americans to wake up and realize that we're not on the wrong track, but the wrong road.

Good article. It didn't mention the causes in the forbidden words, overpopulation and extreme money-power concentration, but it was headed in the right direction.

Ezeflyer- the crash caused by peak oil will solve the population problem...

Maplefudge's idea of cancelling the Olympics is fantastic - immediate, hard-hitting, for the age. And not only should NASCAR be ended because of the asinine, American waste that it is, but all professional sports should be curtailed, starting with the spectating - sporting events can be televised-only for probably much less environmental cost.

And yet, imagine the savings if we went further, and stopped having all these teams flying and bussing to far-flung cities around the continent to compete - regional and local sports are the future.

From ExxonMobil: "Peak Oil? Contrary to the theory, oil production shows no signs of a peak... With abundant oil resources still available - and industry, governments and consumers doing their share - peak production is nowhere in sight."

More comforting words from, well, you can guess:

"The basic thesis here is that lots of eco-nuts, and policy wonks think that oil production has peaked and that doom is around the proverbial corner."

"So please don't slander Mother Earth and say she's run out of oil when it's man-made mischief to blame."

"There is no true energy crisis... there's still enough there to provide all the projected needs of the United States for 200 years."

And on and on and on, with the bottom line being this: Global warming, peak oil, dying oceans, mass extinctions - all just one big anti-capitalist hoax perpetrated by the hippies.

What, us worry?

Ezeflyer- the crash caused by peak oil will solve the population problem…

When Cuba was " weaned " off cheap oil from the Soviet Union in 1990 , Cubans suffered their own "Peak Oil" . The average citizen lost fifteen pounds of body weight and I'm sure the "population problem" was temporarily "solved" by fewer pregnancies along with the usual starvation . They learned from their over-reliance on the USSR and produced a documentary entitled " The Power of Community : How Cubans Survived Peak Oil " . The producers of the documentary also made a thinly-disguised appeal to all countries but especially Americans to learn from Cuba's mistakes and plan aggressively for Peak Oil.

Will American Gov't , industry or private citizens heed the appeal.

Is "Tupperware" made of wood ?

There's no American Embassy in Habana , Helms-Burton is still in effect and the most Americans know or care to know about Cuba is that it is still ruled by a dottering ol'nut-bar named Fidel Castro ( some might know that it's correctly , Fidel Castro Ruz 'cause that's how he signs his name at least if he's still alive )

Clinging tenaciously to their two-hundred + year-old national hubris and arrogance , most Americans will learn the hard way , the same way Cubans learned the hard way .

As Napoleon said: "Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake".

Even our vassal states are just pretending to do our bidding while secretly plotting for their OWN security.

We (US) Americans never bother about the rest of the world, and wouldn't give a doodoo about them anyway. What's Britney doing today?

Sad thing is, I can't help noticing that we're using 1/3rd of our GDP paying for our military to grab the last oil deposits whilst Europeans are investing in energy that will last. Sweden is on its way to being fossil-fuel independent by 2020. But those Europeans are just so GAY! Sir, yes Sir!

Bet there'll be a few of us sailing on the Mayflower 2 in the opposite direction in a few years. Don't know what kind of reception there'll be, though..

America sucks! Our selfish self-righteous way of life sucks! I'm looking forward to moving somewhere else! anywhere!

I have no direct knowledge that what I'm writing is true, but we have a friend who works on the barges that go up and down the Mississippi River. According to this friend, there are barges of coal that go down the river (high sulfur that we are not allowed to burn and is therefore sold to other countries) and barges of coal that go up the river (low sulfur coal that is allowed by the EPA). The coal, apparently, is transported across the ocean to locales with the proper regulations. Like we're not all on the same planet. And so it goes.

I don't think it was intended, but this article sort of makes it sound like the future will not be better than the present. I don't agree. At age 57, I will have to be lucky to live long enough to see it, but I think we will have a better country to live in when there are fast trains, like the French TGV, in place of the Interstate Highway system.

I will prefer to ride on steel on steel electrically powered local transit. And pedestrian and bicycle friendly, high density cities will be greatly preferable to what we have now. And all that can be powered by renewables.

I think Maplefudge's idea to cancel the Olympics is ridiculous.

The Olympics are a much-needed metaphor for international collaboration and understanding. The world needs to see people coming together from every corner of the planet and doing something positive.

We aren't going to create a good future if we destroy positive things like the ideal of the Olympics to make negative points.

I agree with Mr. Kunsler's overall viewpoint, as presented in this column. I am going to read his novel. I am interested in reading ideas about possible human futures that are not dystopian. We urgently need to have people visioning a different way of life.

Every now and again, I see one of the cute all-electric cars. I live near Stanford, after all, in hip, cool Northern California. I used to live in Seattle and often saw cute electric cars at the U. of WA, tooling around. Before that, I lived in Ann Arbor, close to Motor City and there were actually parking spaces in downtown Ann Arbor that had electrical outlets for electric cars. Gosh, I want one of those cars and then I fantasize that the world will be different if everyone drove electric cars but Mr. Kunsler's point, I think, is that our car culture has to change. Electric cars will not solve the problems we face. The real problem is that we allow dominators to tell us that making money is more important than people.

I don't own a car. I haven't owned one for 4+ years. I have learned a lot, living carless. It is possible, of course, but I have had to adjust. People are fascinated when they learn I don't have a car, like they are surprised because when they first knew me, I came across as normal but once they learn I don't own a car, they seem to wonder if I am a freak weirdo. Maybe I am.

I walk. I walk a lot. I live in a suburb. The public transit is not so good. There are, like, no buses on weekends. If I can't get where I want to go on a bus, a train, a light rail or by walking, I'll try to get a ride with a friend. And then, if I can't come up with a ride, I am prepared to conclude that maybe I wasn't supposed to go. So far, I have always been able to get rides. In these 4+ years, I took a cab once. And, I gotta tell you, the money I spent on that cab still stings.

Almost everyone grills me, when they hear I don't own a car. They also tend to grow defensive, rushing to assure me that they could never live without a car. How do you do it?!! everyone asks me. People always say they don't have the time.

What should humans be doing with their days, the hours, minutes, weeks, months given to them by the goddess? I think people spend a lot of time doing crap like shopping. People seem to think, some of them, that shopping is living. People seem to think that budgeting, planning how they will buy the next things they will buy, and how they will pay for all the things our commercial culture has taught them to want. . . they think this is life. This is not life.

I think humans should all spend time each day with themselves, thinking. And time interacting with people they care about. Being. BEING.

Usually when someone talks to me for more than a surprised moment about my carless reality, I offer to help them look at their time budget and help them find more time. Nobody ever takes me up on it.

I spend most of my time on public transit and walking thinking. I spend time with myself. But I can spend that time talking to friends on a cell phone and I can spend that time on the internet with my laptop. I can listen to music on my iPod.

Mostly, I spent my transit time alone with myself.

I begin to think nobody does that anymore, spend time with themselves.

It seems to me -- I am an idiot freak, what do I know, I don't even own a car -- that people are more and more dissociated from simply being. Seems to me like almost everyone thinks that if they aren't actively participating in the commercial culture, they aren't living.

The politicians, the rich, economists, and reporters are in denial. Thirty years of class warfare at the Congressional level against an unarmed citizenry has resulted in a structural anomaly. The Middle Class is taped out financially. They view citizens as consumers and squeeze us like an orange. When the orange stops yielding juice they squeeze even harder to get the last drop. That is where we are today, the last drop. Add to that a steep cost of living rise brought on by oil scarcity and the generalized high prices resulting from it and we have the specter of families not making it in ever increasing numbers. We already see this in one out of five Americans not having health insurance and the foreclosure crisis. All gas pumps are now prepay to end massive theft of gasoline. So what happens when men and women cannot feed their families, buy gas to get to work, afford their medications, of have their utilities turned off. The Government's answer was to bail out the rich. Theft, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, mental breakdown and suicide will all increase proportionately. Even then the propagandists will suggest that we are either not in a recession or in a very mild one. In an environment such as this it only takes a spark to ignite a revolution. That seems to be where we are heading.

orwellWasOptimist (May 30th, 2008 2:08 pm) wrote, "Peak oil theory has nothing to do with supply and demand. It is purely about supply."

This is part true, but how long we have to use the rest of the world's oil supply has a great deal to do wtih demand.

If we have reached "peak" and have used half of the world's supply, it has only lasted as long as it did because the world was relatively slow to accept oil and gas powered engines. Folks didn't give up the horse and buggy (or walking, or biking) overnight.

We will not have the same number of years for the other half of the world's supply of oil because the demand has been increasing exponentially.

Not only will we have less time because of the supply and demand issue, but we will have less time because of the damage done by burning petroleum and coal products. China is building a new coal plant at a rate of one a day. The oceans are no longer soaking up much of the carbon from the atmosphere, and are becoming more acidic. The polar ice caps are melting at rates that are even surprising the scientists tracking the progression of the melt.

If we are going to adapt for a very different future, we have to do it soon. Time is running out.

This is how it will play out.
There will be increasingly drastic fluctuations in the price of oil as demand meets and starts to exceed production capacity. Industrialized countries will go to war to secure their access to oil, but production will start to fall off, either due to disruptions in the supply stream due to war, and/or the decreasing productivity of the oil fields exacerbated by rising demand. This will not follow a bell-shaped curve; all of the "easy" oil, readily accessible and relatively close to the surface, is long gone; extracting the remainder will rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns that will require more energy to extract than it will produce. This will result in a "crash and burn" global economic depression that will make October 28th 1929 look like a minor market correction. Industries will shut down, there will be increasingly frequent blackouts and shortages of heating oil and food as an ever-increasing share of increasingly scarce resources are diverted to the war machine, desperately trying to squeeze out just one more quarter's profits for the military industrial complex.
The newly impoverished populace; hungry, cold, permanently unemployed and completely lacking the survival skills necessitated by this new reality, will start to rebel, but will be repressed by the increasingly draconian "emergency measures" of an increasingly Fascist government. Besides the nullification of the Bill of Rights by the PATRIOT Act, George Bush's (who stole the last two elections, and once referred to the Constitution of the United States as "just a goddamned piece of paper") unchallenged use of "signing statements" allowing him to ignore laws he doesn't like and his unchallenged claim that as commander-in-chief of his fictitious "Global War on Terror" he's entitled to eternal "unitary" (and extraconstitutional) executive powers independent of any neutered congressional or judiciary oversight or challenge, they've vacated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, revised the Insurrection Act so as to empower the president to take direct control of the National Guard, encouraged the creation of private mercenary armies like Blackwater (which operates wholly independent of the military command structure and are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice), and awarded Halliburton subsidiary KBR a no-bid, open-ended $385 million contract to build corporate-controlled concentration camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people. All that's now required for martial law in the United States is the stroke of an imperial president's pen.
As people become more desperate, the social fabric will fray and then quickly unravel as a society awash with firearms that prides itself on "rugged individualism" (actually a synonym for selfishness, self-centeredness, and narcissistic egocentrism) and has always assumed that their privileged position (just 5% of the world's population but consuming more than 25% of it's resources) is the manifest will of God become increasingly pissed off that the teat's gone dry, abandon any pretense of polite society and start preying upon one another (think "Road Warrior" without gas for the cars, or Baghdad, or Mogadishu). The chaos and violence escalates as Government's span of control contracts and finally disappears altogether as the lights finally go out for the last time.
Game over; thanks for playing.

The time for metaphors is over. Now we need meaningful action. International collaboration can be expressed and accomplished in so many more useful ways than by the luxury of the massive GG bomb that is the Olympics. The world doesn't need made-up competition over trivial boasts - who can throw a certain-shaped stick the farthest, whose team can manipulate a certain type of ball through space to score the most "points" - and which is all nationalism practiced by another means. Sports, whether national pastimes or international, is a distraction, a sedative.

Inter-city rail works better if you don't need a car at your destination.
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http://freepublictransit.org
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com
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YOHOCOMA: As I see it the "military team" is extracting the least cost-effective fuel footprint with its 700-plus bases and made-for-TV wars. Or as VET FROM KOREA put it, "Sad thing is, I can't help noticing that we're using 1/3rd of our GDP paying for our military to grab the last oil deposits whilst Europeans are investing in energy that will last."

yeah ok but when somebody- i forgot who- said "the american wy of life is not negotiable" what he meant was not just that we will continue to consume like lunatics, but we will also continue being the world's big bad capitalist boss.
Which in truth cannot happen.

look- global capitalism must show what they call growth every year- a bigger gnp, meaning always more and more production for always more consumption. And that means global capital is going to bite off always bigger chunks of Planet Earth, and a bigger chunk next year. as long as this is the economic system the world maintains, the planet is inevitably doomed. because no matter how much business wishes it were otherwise, our planet is finite, and if they keep doing this it will get used up.
so we really need to work on finding a different economic system entirely, one that can work sustainably for the whole earth. I do believe Vandana Shiva and Terra Madre have offered a rough sketch of what that might look like. the view is rather nice so far, as the wto, the world bank, the imf, u.s. farm subsidies, big agribusiness, and monsanto will be nowhere in sight.

fear and greed

Good article. Unfortunately Mr. Kunstler has just followed it on his blog with an atrocious article justifying the Iraq war in order to discredit Scott Mclellan and those who say that the American public was lied to. He calls them whiners which is always a sign of a lack of substance. The reasoning is ugly , juvenile( big strategic notions riddled with racism and xenophobia) and pugnacious to the point of justifying mass violence( all the Iraqi's fault) in the service of national self respect. Kunstler is an accomplished writer and a major voice on peak oil and the current financial meltdown and offers us a truly independent look at the world, but he loves to think of himself as smarter than everyone else and too easily indulges himself in spitefulness. These things often lead him into foolishness, like his predictions of worldwide disaster from the Y2K computer glitch, or this morally bankrupt ( if Arabs attacked us then many Arabs, guilty or not, must die) justification of the Iraq war. I was kind of a fan, though occasionally annoyed by his spite, but I think it wise at this point to take him with a grain of salt.