There are replacements for oil for use in cars, such as biofuels, or electricity generated by solar, wind, or nuclear power. However, these alternatives are currently more expensive. It seems to me that the only one which is likely to become cheaper is solar power, but the average home can’t collect enough solar power to drive a car a significant distance. Oil is millions of years of solar power compressed into a fluid. Nothing we know of today can equal that in terms of massive energy output for low energy input, because nothing we know of today has that initial energy investment already built in.
U.S. suburbs and exurbs were designed for cheap personal transportation. What is going to happen to them, assuming I’m right that transportation will become inexorably more expensive? Few people are going to want to move a place where transportation becomes a big part of their budget. Inevitably housing prices in the suburbs will fall. People will move to the cities, or at least to places with high-efficiency rail connections to the cities. In other words, the U.S. will start to look more like Europe.
Housing prices are falling right now in the U.S., just as gasoline prices are rising. It is possible that housing prices in the suburbs will never recover. We’ve seen that before in some cities, like Detroit. I expect that we’ll start to see blighted suburban neighborhoods–blighted in the sense of houses being abandoned as the owners can not find a buyer. It’s not all bad–at least it should increase forest cover over time, which will help somewhat with our carbon dioxide problem.
This is long-term. In the short term people will move to more fuel-efficient cars. In the long term, though, gasoline prices are going steadily upward, and while I see replacements on the horizon I don’t see them at the same price.
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