Carl Etnier's blog

The London rioters and looters have been using social networking to organize, apparently. So have the forces for order, calm, and cleanup. (h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Carl Etnier, Transition Times blogger.

In the 1930s, Katheryn Breer of Horn of the Moon Farm in East Montpelier walked to high school in Montpelier. She did this even though her father had one of the first cars in the area, which he used to deliver eggs and milk from the farm. The 14-mile round trip was too much to do every day, so she boarded with a family in town and walked home after school Saturday to spend the weekend with her family.

Now, the average Vermont car is driven 17,000 miles a year; school buses transport students daily from Horn of the Moon neighborhood to U-32, a more-distant high school; and daily driving commutes from Montpelier to Burlington or further are not uncommon. In a state that has taken advantage of low land prices and low gas prices to spread settlement sparsely throughout the countryside, one of the greatest conundrums in the transition away from oil is how to tackle transportation as oil supplies dwindle and prices soar.

Technophiles point to new fuels: ethanol, biodiesel, natural gas, hydrogen in fuel cells, or electricity in batteries. The problems are that the new fuels that can go into existing cars are themselves quite limited, and that shifting the technology of much of the car fleet over to other fuels takes decades. Electric cars, hybrid or purely electric, are rare and expensive, and even before the Great Recession led people to cut back their spending, it took 17 years to turn over the U.S. car fleet.
Staying put more is one obvious solution. In The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler writes that he expects people in the countryside to stay there most of the time in the future.

Another option is depending on the kindness of strangers. Responding to peak oil and climate change, Marci Young of Morrisville sold her car years ago and doggedly hitchhikes most places she goes. For those less intrepid, organized carpooling represents a more secure way to double, triple, or further multiply the efficiency of existing vehicles.

On Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, the Hardwick Rideshare project of Transition Town Hardwick set up a table in a soggy field devoted to an agriculture and sustainability fair. Around the corner from a Buffalo Mountain Co-op stand featuring hamburgers from local beef, the table was their first significant outreach attempt to build a network of people carpooling with each other.

Marcia Smith, 70, staffed the table. Her house in Walden is six miles from Hardwick. “Some people bike it,” she said, “but I’m not up to that.”

Many existing services support people who want to travel without driving a car. One handout from Hardwick Rideshare lists many of those, including the Vermont Bicycle and Pedestrian Coalition, regional bus services, a “model of effectiveness” for local carpooling (HinesburgRides.org), and the Agency of Transportation web site for carpooling both to work and to one-time events (ConnectingCommuters.org).

With Hardwick at the junction of Routes 14, 15, and 16, there are a lot of directions that people travel to town from. Hardwick Rideshare gathered information about which roads people travel on and how they want to participate in the budding rideshare program.

Smith, along with the other Hardwick Rideshare founders, Emily Laxner and Nancy Notterman, hopes to attract enough members to build a ride-board kiosk, design an on-line ride board, or perhaps organize a ride board on the radio or cable access TV. Smith would also like to see a lot more taxis. “Make it easier to run a taxi service,” she suggests.

Smith has lived without a car for much of the last year, and she has found neighbors willing to give her rides. Still, she looks forward to having a more systematic rideshare system. “If it’s organized, you can fit your travel into a plan. It’s hard to call up people and ask them when they’re going to town.”

Ian Urbina has written a series of three articles published in the NY Times which pull back the curtain to reveal doubts and accusations within the much-hyped shale gas industry.

One article, "S.E.C. Shift Leads to Worries of Overestimation of Reserves," is about how the Securities and Exchange Commission, in the waning days of the Bush Administration, adopted a rule that allows gas companies much more latitude in claiming reserves in areas where they had not drilled. Instead of allowing them only to claim reserves in areas close to their existing wells, the new rules allowed them to use modeling to claim reserves further out.

A lot of assumptions go into models, and there's an old saying about what can happen when you ASS_U_ME. In this case, gas companies can overstate their reserves and bilk investors. So no problem, just have some independent third party audit the models, as one does with accounting--right? 

Well, industry quashed that idea. Why? Urbina writes:

John Nester, an S.E.C. spokesman, said the new rules did not require third-party audits because there was a lack of qualified professionals available to do the work and companies themselves could do a better job checking their own reserve estimates.

The second reason is pure hokum. But the first reason, an alleged lack of qualified professionals, also collapses under very little analysis. You don't have to be a free market fundamentalist to believe that if you increase demand for some sort of labor skill, you'll increase the number of people who have that skill. It may take a little time, and some importing of skills or outsourcing of work may be necessary in the short run, but skilled labor follows the money. Look what happened in the final years of the 20th century, when billions became available for computer programmers who knew FORTRAN and other languages decades past their peak use, to fix Y2K problems. People learned FORTRAN. FORTRAN programmers came out of retirement. The work was done.

Mandate that gas companies have third-party audits of their reserve models, and the skilled professionals will appear. If a current shortage of skilled professionals really is a serious bottleneck, have the rule go into effect a few years in the future.

But apparently the S.E.C. does not believe in the power of the free market.

The other two articles in the Times' fascinating series are here and here.