If you really want to stop drilling in the gulf, stop drilling in the gulf. Ban it. Take the supply right off the market. Prices will rise, and oil consumers worldwide will cut back out of necessity.

You can still give them the gift of lower prices after the rigs have been shut down. It’s a nice gift. You’ll be lowering your standard of living so someone in a developing nation can maintain or improve theirs. But giving them that gift without shutting down the rigs first won’t shut them down.

The us could do wonders just by mandating better economy standards and implementing more cash for clunkers schemes.

It’s amusing to see how angry people are about being told to drive less. That’s the sort of random fury common when someone knows they’re wrong, but won’t admit it.

Still, “drive less” doesn’t scale. Personal virtue doesn’t scale. Infrastructures and incentives need to be biased to favour not-driving over driving.

You are really talking about a cultural re-boot.

Sadly the conservation and “green” movements are so full of bad science (and wildly expensive, they don’t call it Whole Paycheck for nothing) that the desperately needed credibility to change American minds has pretty much been shredded.

Perhaps this is wildly pessimistic, but my guess is that we will continue to secure oil resources around the world (or cement our relationships with oil producing countries) until, as Howard Bloom would have us believe, the Huns come down from the hills and eat us alive.

Not if, but when.

The justified indignation from people like “lolbrandon” is just the tip of the iceberg. Some people are doing all they can just to survive in these United States, much less worry about some abstract number they read on a left leaning opinion blog.

Anyway, I consume much less than your sketchy 9% conclusion, so I guess I get a hall pass! I don’t have to worry about it! I can watch the game tonight guilt free!

Kick ass! Go Celtics!

Just gotta keep that thumb off the scale to gain that vantage point.

You nailed it.

Oil disappears after you use it — you simply cannot reverse the process and get it back.

Secondly, oil is limited. Once we’ve used it up, it’s gone forever.

And third, when we need more oil, we have to drill. That requires an investment which is extremely costly, time-consuming, and not really guaranteed to produce results.

Um, no. As your second paragraph points out, oil is fungible. So I think what you meant was that by reducing demand a tad,

“With a 9% reduction in national daily gasoline consumption, we could slightly depress the per-barrel wholesale price of crude, but probably not enough to make drilling in the Gulf unprofitable.”

Reducing consumption is a fine idea for many reasons. This is not one of them.

That shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone with a conscience.

Reducing our oil consumption is simply not on the table. It’s not going to happen. We need to accept that and move on to develop solutions that take that into account.

Isn’t there a more reasonable course of action? Couldn’t they instead retreat inside and board up the windows, for example?

Why do I keep seeing this argument in full or partial defense of the oil industry’s action or the government’s inaction? Yes, we created a demand for oil by our actions. But that doesn’t outright prevent the use of increased safety measures when conducting high risk drilling operations. Shouldn’t we expect and demand the government and oil industry to do better than blindly react to our demands, or at the very least accelerate efforts to reduce our demands?

there are two things we’re thinking about here:
a) our industrial footprint and
b) how much we pay for oil.

#a causes horrible damage to important plants, fish, & friendly neighbors.

#b is expensive.

but arguments about oil being a global fungible commodity actually have nothing to do with #a or #b; they’re FUD.

reducing oil use in the USA would shrink this country’s industrial footprint. the resulting technologies would then help
other people reduce *their* footprints. there’s nothing lost there, by trying.

reducing oil use would also shrink the trade deficit, meaning less domestic money would be sent overseas (to be borrowed back, w/ intere$t). this would be good no matter whether other people increased their oil use.

we’d also be getting on w/ replacing oil (through both fuel-switching & demand management) — very important to do this in a way that works — and this substitution project also is completely independent of (though helpful to) other people’s oil plans.

Big enough to encourage the folks who still commute alone in giant pickups and Hummers to get a fucking clue.

* * *

My daily commute is almost exactly 7.0 miles. Almost all of my shopping can be done on the way home, going at most a mile out of the way.

I fill up the tank on my Civic once a month.

But while I’m probably way below the curve usage wise, I’m considering bicycling now and then.

I came at the equation the other way around – from the personal angle.
I bike to work every day. I’m lucky enough to have a short 5m commute.

My car gets about 25mpg city driving so each week I’d be burning through one gallon of gas just on commuting.

I’ve read different figures on the gallons per barrel number (from the 42 number you use on the low end all the way up into the 70s). I used 55g/brl so the proportions may be slightly off, but a gallon is a gallon is a gallon.
At 18.6 gallons of gas per barrel of oil, I figure I’m displacing the consumption of 3 barrels of oil each year.

Its not the case that everyone can up and bike to work (but I’m not convinced that #26 lolbrandon’s snarky remarks put him in this category).

What I don’t get are the poorly reasoned arguments that a simple 9% reduction in consumption are impossible from commenters like foobar. Plenty of people made the very same arguments about past technologies and technological paradigms that have long since disappeared. Path dependency is not the be all and end all. Thomas Kuhn, anyone?

Nutbastard: Please read what I wrote. There’s more than one way to reduce your fuel consumption.

One thing the article left out was actual driving behaviour (perhaps not to the extent of hypermiling). Simple factors like keeping your car serviced, accelerating sensibly, and travelling at efficient speeds can make quite a difference.

The NRMA (National Roads and Motoring Association of Australia) published several tips on how to reduce consumption when driving.

http://plantaforest.mynrma.com.au/cps/rde/xchg/mynrma/hs.xsl/11064.htm

Every time I see a driver insist on speeding off at the lights I simultaneously wince and chuckle at the waste of resources and money respectively.

Self-flagellation may make one feel better about having consumed, however.

It’s to make up for their small dicks. 4WDs: chariot of the moron. I’ve often fantasised about going on a stencil mission late one night… I think “big dumb trucks for big dumb fucks” has a nice ring to it… Imagine a fleet of neighbourhood 4WDs rolling around with that painted on the side.

Also, Maggie: I completely agree with the concept, but I think refusing to fill up at BP is a better response to this particular spill. It happened because BP did not follow safeguards and propper procedure, so let’s just sink the assholes by not buying their products.

Hey America: want to reduce your oil comsumption? Then tax the shit out of personal vehicles that have an engine volume greater than 3 litres.

Even if I could, grassroots tactics like this can only catch a small portion of the population. If a stupendous 10% of us agreed to it, we’d have to eliminate all our oil usage. That’s infeasible.

Like other people have said, legal action is the only way to enact any sort of change.

I mean, it’s not like a huge drop in demand along with a shift to a new technology would cause horse breeders to reduce production, horse prices will just drop until they become competitive with cars.

Raise the tax on gasoline, but allow buyers’ co-ops to buy gasoline in bulk, and at a a much lower tax rate.

You join something like Sam’s club, where you fill out a form where you give details like your car’s mpg, your home address and your work address, how many days you work, whether you just commute or have to travel for work, that sort of thing.

You get an allotment of so many gallons, plus a margin, at price X. You get another allotment for pleasure driving, at price Y, and everything above that you pay full boat. There will probably be a standard for mpg, so if you drive a gas guzzler, you’ll just have to cut back on your driving. And, like balance #86 said, if you’re still within the low-tax margin at the end of the month, you can sell that margin to someone else or apply it to the following month, when you take that road trip.

In general, personal virtue is nice, but its value in the grand scheme of things is largely symbolic, and its bigger benefit is that it keeps the real price (and risk) of oil foremost in voters’ minds, who should vote accordingly. And let China worry about China.

Finally, may the system of carbon tax, carbon credits, etc. die a quick death. All it really does is let polluters buy their way out of their responsibility to waste and pollute less. More fundamentally, it’s an artificial structure that reduces clean air and a stable global climate, both essential to human survival, to the status of real estate, another market that profits some sellers and all brokers. The inevitable bubble will follow, and then the bust, and the brokers, who also played the market (hi Goldman Sachs!) will come looking for a taxpayer bailout. After all, the fate of the planet depends on it!

but

even if everyone curbed their personal consumption, wouldn’t the government simply keep drilling to obtain oil/energy for the military, if nothing else?

in other words, would a drop in personal energy use really stop the drilling?

The problem is still the oil giants; they just control what we can and can’t do.

Sure the likes of me and you might want to change things for the better, but the sad thing is most people don;t care. Really, most people.

The only way to get them on board is to not give them a choice. They don’t deserve that choice anyway.

@nutbastard

How about getting a car that does a half-decent mileage? Seriously, anything that does under 50mpg and is a personal vehicle should be illegal.