[ExI] Oil will never run out

[Damien Sullivan]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 10:23:27PM -0700, spike wrote:

> Thanks for pointing this out Keith.  The next few years will surely give the
> masses a hard education in physics and engineering.  We will come to
> understand comments such as a politician's recent assertion that we could
> have cars that get 100 mpg, had we invested sufficient billions of dollars
> in research.  The fact remains that we don't need research, we can already

Even more important than high mpg cars may be getting low mpg cars off
the road.  What you really care about is gallons per mile

MPG   GP 10,000 miles
10     1000
20     500
30     333
40     250
50     200
100    100
1000   10

Note the savings are much bigger early on.

Same is true of power plants.  Going from 25% to 50% is much more urgent
(and likely easier and cheaper) than going from 50% to 75% efficiency.
Or in real numbers, going from using 4 units of fuel to make 1 unit of
power to using 2 units, vs. going from 2 units to 1.333 units.

As for the problem of "needing" a big vehicle for self-protection: if
the government can mandate that cars drive on the right or left side,
surely it can mandate the maximum size or weight of vehicles driven on
public roads, even without invoking concepts of externality risk.  Ban
the suburban tanks.  Or mandate that they be unable to go very fast, to
trade off size vs. speed.

-xx- Damien X-)