Transportation Woes
The other day, Emily started shopping for plane tickets for our yearly Christmas trip home. We were both shocked to find out just how limited our options were going to be this year. It seems that neither of the only two carriers that make direct runs between Kansas City and anywhere in Florida will be available: ExpressJet appears to be going under, and Midwest Airlines is trimming its routes into Florida to seasonal travel, and only out of its Milwaukee hub. For the remaining carriers, we're looking at paying somewhere around twice as much per ticket as last year (when we had a direct flight...not to mention warm cookies en route). We've even looked into Amtrak for the trip, since we'd had such a great experience traveling between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore earlier this summer. However, the train offered no relief with its 36-hour trip duration and stops in Washington and Chicago along the way. Six days spent on a train (for the round trip) is just too much to cut out of our already limited vacation time. Not to mention that these tickets are no cheaper than what airlines are offering.
At the same time, I can't help thinking about the flights we've booked this summer headed to Washington for two of Emily's research trips. In both cases, the flights were literally half empty as late as ten days before the trip! I've heard that airlines are doing this - flying half-empty runs, and wasting I-don't-know-how-much operating cash - just to maintain their territories at the airport terminals. Recently, I even heard that airline pilots have been landing in serious trouble with their employers for requesting a 15-minute buffer in their fuel load. The more fuel they carry, the heavier the aircraft, and the less fuel-efficient it is...so the airlines are trimming fuel loads as much as they can. Going way back to March or so, I read a blurb on Gristmill projecting something like a $6 billion dollar loss for the airline industry if oil stays at or above $135 a barrel for the year (recently, I've seen figures that it's been around $146 or more). In light of that estimate, I guess it's no surprise that some of the smaller airlines are starting to go tits up.
All this is starting to sound like a nightmare come true. I've been digging deeper and deeper into the mountain of information available on climate change, the economics and future of petroleum, and our dysfunctional American lifestyles. It seems like the best information going estimates that we'd reach a worldwide peak in oil production between 2008 and 20015 or so. I'm not sure whether that plays a part here or not. However, with China and India ratcheting up their demand for oil daily - in China, this is more like a sustained explosion - it seems clear that our days of having a measure of control in the oil market are over. We can't increase supply enough to make a significant, sustained impact in the price of oil, even if it wouldn't take years to tap our remaining oil fields. The best option for our economy seems to be decoupling it from the price of oil. And, as Al Gore said last week, the best way to do that is to get on track with renewables.
When I first started to imagine what might happen if the price of oil made cheap transportation impossible, I felt very isolated. Since we live 1000 miles from home right now, we depend heavily on cheap transportation twice a year (okay, once this year) to see our families. With gasoline at $4.15 a gallon, it's not hard to imagine a day when going home to visit family will be the financial equivalent of a holiday in Rome. I'm starting to think of this as an enforced return to life at a human scale. On a human scale, the United States is truly an enormous place. California, Chile, Mexico, Honduras, and all the other places where most vegetables come from these days are very far away indeed. Hell, even making a trip across Gainesville these days makes me realize how far it really is; I couldn't walk it in any practical way, and with soaring fuel prices, our bus service has actually been reduced in the past two weeks.
Critics of Al Gore's speech last week said that in the current climate of economic hardship and high prices, it was no time to talk about investments in renewable energy. I think these high prices can serve to heighten our appreciation of the incredible wastes of energy that are involved in our modern, globalized-because-we-can lifestyle. Maybe once we realize how unnecessary avocados from Honduras are (just to take one example from our local grocery store), then we can start to dig in and restore the old, local, common-sense way of life we've shunned for so long.