Another example of our vastly changed energy landscape is the fact that we a have passed “peak gasoline.” We did this way back in 2007 and it looks like we will never again burn as much gasoline as we did in that year. So, we are producing more oil and gas and using less gasoline. Who would have predicted that ten or twenty years ago. Our CO2 emissions are also dropping quickly. This is good news for almost everyone, but it creates a problem for highway maintenance. Highways are maintained by gasoline taxes. Less gasoline burned means less money.
A simple solution would be to raise the gasoline tax, although this is a dynamic equation. As you raise the tax, you get less use and in the medium and long run less revenue. But raising gas taxes is politically very difficult, especially in a political season and in the last few years the political season never ends.
These developments continue to amaze me. Coming of age in the 1970s, we were told that we would run out of oil and gas soon, that there was no way people would burn less gasoline w/o draconian measures, maybe rationing and that the energy future would be a bleak succession of shortages and decline.
Today we have achieved success beyond that wildest dreams of the experts of the 1970s. If we could go back in time and tell them what happened, the experts would think we were crazy or worse. The “worse” would be that you would be an energy crisis denier. Everybody hated them. but they were right.
It goes to show how unpredictable things really are and why the only real way to plan is to let lots of options be tried. No central solution works for very long and usually creates trouble. Imagine if we had been able to implement those “expert” solutions of the 1970s.
We used to talk about peak oil back in the old days. That is a meaningless concept. Turns out, however, peak gasoline makes a lot of sense.