Well, as long as the price of oil and gasoline remain low, it is going to be very hard to get people to make the adjustments to deal with the social/environmental costs. See the discussion on this list of suburbs and automobiles (All right, you people, now get out of those sport utes!).
BTW, I should have said "readily available" (cheap) oil in my missive. There is a lot of oil in tar sands. Now, Mark Jones has noted that there is a high energy cost of getting that oil out (and a much higher one to get shale oil out). But it should be kept in mind that the energy is of a different type. One should not fall into an Oswaldian "energeticist" position, sort of an equivalent of the labor theory of value but focused on energy. Energy comes in various forms and there are demands for specific forms.
Thus, there is a demand for petroleum, not all of which is used for energy, btw (synthetic fertilizers, plastics, etc.) and the energy demand is very specific for petroleum products. This is a major reason why we need a new automobile technology. We need to get off oil, and, Dan, you are right that it is the social/environmental reasons that are the most important. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 20 May 1998 20:58:27 EDT Dhlazare <Dhlazare at aol.com> wrote:
> In a message dated 98-05-20 13:25:04 EDT, Barkley Rosser writes:
>
> << Even if it is off by ten years or so due to
> as yet undiscovered major reserves or major tech
> breakthroughs in terms of recovery methods out of old
> fields (these have been happening to some extent), at some
> point we are going to have to get off oil, one way or
> another, period.
>
> Dan Lazare replies:
>
> Yes, I quite agree, although for the forseeable future I think that the
> pressure will be from the environmental/social side, not the supply side. To
> reiterate: energy markets are glutted, have been so since the early 80s, and
> prices are kept artificially through subsidization of infrastructure and
> environmental costs, etc. The chief danger is not that oil will run out, but
> that the cost of those externalities will prove ruinous. Hell, they're
> already proving ruinous. The question is what happens when ruin is piled on
> top of ruin ad infinitum.>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu