fossil fuels

[nibot]

Supposing that we have already passed the time of peak oil production, my question for you is this: in what year will we see fewer cars on California roads than in the previous year?

At what point will the Interstate Highways be fossil roads, abandoned relics, like the decaying steel towns of Pennsylvania, like the Erie Canal?

When will Phoenix be Detroit?

Or will someone invent the coal-powered car and doom us all? (The plug-in Prius actually burns coal.)

Comments

[janviere.livejournal.com]

The Roman roads are still around.

If we don't have enough energy to drive ourselves around in the future, I'm pretty sure that we're going to have difficulty powering server farms.

My bet is that the first life-altering crisis will happen with food, when the real cost of trucking everything we eat across the country starts to show.

I have no concept of "when", though.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Not just trucking. We get fruits flown in from South America, New Zealand, and South-east Asia. I can buy a bottle of Italian wine at Trader Joes's for less than $4. I do not understand how this is possible.

[surpheon.livejournal.com]

I can blame a lot of my CO2 footprint on server farms - I'm getting flown around to optimize 'em. The cost of running a server farm is high enough that the big guys are seriously looking at optimizing them. You can typically take off 25% of the total (including racks, basically halving the HVAC energy) energy consumption of a server farm if given a cleansheet design, it's easy. (http://hightech.lbl.gov/documents/DATA_CENTERS/06_DataCenters-PGE.pdf) Plus computation is getting more efficient per flop. I'm pretty sure that server farms will be OK (at least 'my' babies will be:)