Path through Vienna Park, by Alex Steffen
This seems to me to misunderstand some key facts about the physical world.
The first is simple physics: the amount of energy used to transport something is based on the mass of the thing and the speed of the movement, as well as how long you move it. Simply put, moving something heavy slowly takes far less energy than moving it at higher speeds. The faster you go, the more energy-intensive the acceleration (which is why lower speed limits for cars save so much gas).
The second misunderstanding here, it seems to me, is about energy substitution. It’s not that substituting other forms of energy for oil is impossible — for instance, people sailed the world thousands of years before the invention of the steam engine — it’s that the energy available in these other forms is often less “dense,” which means it’s harder to gather the energy to move heavy things quickly. You can sail a ship slowly using wind; to drive it forward at a good clip, you need coal or (better yet) oil.
So, in the future, it’ll likely get much more expensive to move big, heavy things at high speeds over long distances. But not everything we ship is heavy, and not everything we move needs to go fast.
Moving more slowly doesn’t mean you never ship anything. Many commodity goods, for instance, can travel quite slowly and still be valuable. Ancient Rome, for instance, maintained a thriving trade in grain with Egypt. Overnight shipping may soon be a thing of the past, but global trade isn’t going anywhere.
Other items don’t weigh much, and so don’t take much more energy to ship more quickly; and of course, much trade is now essentially dematerialized. Software, news, entertainment, design — all are traded in digital form. And the increased cost of energy for these transactions is pretty marginal compared to their value. Even if energy cost 10x as much, the price of downloading a song wouldn’t need to rise much. Even the computer we listen to that song on isn’t nearly as “energy price sensitive” as say, your average lawnmower or home gym. Information will still flow in a world with expensive energy.
What this all means is that what we’re really about to experience is what I call “the death of speed.”
The death of speed will have profound impacts on our cities and suburbs, on whole industries, on a variety of retail models, even on our diets. It will change the landscapes of our lives. But it won’t leave us living in the small towns of the past.
UPDATE: Got an interesting question, asking why the death of speed wouldn’t lead to a more agrarian future of small towns, self-sufficiency? It’s a good question, and one I’ll explore in more detail soon, but the short reply is this: moving food makes up a minuscule portion of most developed nations’ energy footprints.
Particularly in places like North America, Australia and New Zealand, the biggest direct impact will almost certainly be that car-travel (and thus, also, auto-oriented businesses and sprawling suburban lifestyles) will become much more expensive. The best solution to this problem is simply building communities where more things are close by and walkable. Density-done-right saves energy in all sorts of ways I’ve written about in the past and will explore again soon. The death of speed will spur the rise of compact communities.
I believe these predictions are not going to materialize. Most movement is over land (either on it or above it), so demand substitution of some form of electrified rail — whether large trains or maglev PRT in low-pressure environments — will supplant air travel if the cost of portable, combustible fuel ever becomes prohibitive.
There’s also an upper bound on said fuel, as substitutes can come in if petroleum prices are too high for too long.
Distance and speed also don’t have a linear relationship with energy intensity. For example, the major expenditure in terms of intensity is the acceleration. PSAT modeling by Argonne Labs shows a large diesel SUV getting 40 mpg at a steady 55 mph. It’s the stop-and-go of real world driving which eats up all the fuel. Same goes for commercial jets getting to high altitudes for constant velocities at low wind resistance.
Economics-wise, look at real-world numbers. Jet Fuel currently runs $2.69 per gallon and it takes 2,995 btu per passenger-mile for commercial air travel. That means a flight from LA to New York (which is longer than the average flight and certainly more efficient) would use almost 59 gallons of fuel per passenger at a cost of $157. As a share of an unrestricted coach fare (typical business flight ticket), it’s really not that substantial, even if it were to double.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by AlexSteffen, Keid Sammour and linda carroli, Jordy Gold. Jordy Gold said: RT @AlexSteffen: The Death of Speed. Your world's about to get slower, not smaller. http://www.alexsteffen.com/2011/02/the-death-of-speed/ [...]
So what does the death of speed mean for the prospects of high speed rail?
As a long time reader of yours at Worldchanging, I’m glad to follow your writing here. It would be great to have the RSS feed enabled on WordPress so as to not miss anything!
[...] of large, slow, wind powered bulk freighters, among other fun ideas. I was reminded of it by this post from Alex Steffen. Especially for commodities like coal, grains and ore — storable goods that get carried in [...]
This narrative is much more reasonable than Kunstler’s collapsitarianism, but I think it still might overstate the impact of higher fuel prices. as far as I can tell, the only economic activities most people would really find a 10x increase in oil prices starkly obvious is air travel, air freight, and motorized personal vehicles. At current fuel prices, getting a shipping container from just about anywhere to just about anywhere else is several thousand dollars. Unless this already represents a significant fraction of the final cost of your goods, your customers are not going to freak out. Even the much ridiculed trans-continental salad, only roughly doubles in price if long-haul trucking goes from $2/mile to $20/mile.
It would be really interesting to see the distribution of the values of the contents of shipping containers, and what kind of cargo makes up the low value density end of the curve — those are the things that will be replaced with more valuable, durable, repairable, or locally manufactured products first. It looks like the OECD keeps track of this to some degree. Typical freight costs are on the order of 1% of the cargo retail value for most things. Large appliances and assembled furniture is more like 10%.
The cost of short and medium distance air travel on the other hand is something like half fuel. Long flights are worse. Gas makes up about a third of car ownership costs in the US… so you’re right that a 10x increase in fuel prices will wreak personal mobility havoc.
We can move cargo using sail – augmented by biomethane (derviced from food waste)driven engines – faster than a comparably sized ship, esp now they are forced to ‘slow steam’ to conserve fuel to save operational cost.
Love your work.
I guess that the author of this post did not take basic physics. How long something is moving does not affect the amount of energy it takes to move it, because an object in motion remains in motion indefinitely. What’s more, the kinetic energy can be recovered at the other end. This is the way regenerative braking systems work.
Yes, there are energy losses throughout the system, and some of these increase with the speed of motion. But far and away the most important reason that energy is lost is that no effort is made to recover it. Why? Because it is not deemed to be worth the expense! Ordinary brakes, for example, turn kinetic energy into waste heat rather than recovering it, but are far less expensive than regenerative brakes.
In short, slowing things down is far less important than not throwing away the energy used to move an object when the trip is done.
I’m not sure I’m following your point in this post, Alex.
You begin by asserting that people “misunderstand” the idea behind a shrinking world at the end of cheap oil.
It seems to me that the “density,” as you put it, of non-petroleum energy is beside the point, or at least needlessly obtuse.
You end by conceding that the exigencies of peak (unaffordable) oil will indeed force us to retreat “into smaller and smaller geographies,” which is the simple point many analysts are making.
I recently reviewedJeff Rubin’s book Why Your World Is About To Get a Whole Lot Smaller which details the reasons for the looming contractions in our lifestyles, not to mention consuming habits.
Of course, global trade will not suddenly stop. But it will, indeed make many industries impractical as they are now run–with cheap oil greasing the wheels, so to speak. Rubin tries to keep the focus on the positives: many jobs exported by globalization will come home, for instance. But he also lets the air out of a lot of overly-optimistic scenarios for alternate fuels, such as electricity for cars.
Global transportation and trade is the macro issue, while the way we do business locally will also require major adjustments. We are simply going to have to re-think some methods of transportation and technologies altogether, with the idea of the personal automobile–transporting millions of suburban commuters daily–at the top of the list.
Good points! We need to break down what goes fast, what goes slow.
Also we need to figure what’s worth the energy required for the effort to get them. Many so-called “Life-style choices” are only choices because the energy costs are paid externally.
Moving food may make up a small, but not insignificant proportion of our energy budgets, but turning oil into food is what most modern agriculture is based on. No matter where the food comes from it will require more effort. This can either be toil, done by marginalized people for the benefit of others, or it can be localized meaningful effort expended to feed those we know and care about. This has to do with questioning the wider appropriateness of commodification, beyond the scope of energy budgets alone.
The death of speed will be a factor in bringing our focus into community, the death of commodification will strengthen communities and bring their inter-relationships out of the “let’s exploit x to feed y” model.
The opportunities to leverage justice and equity by the ways in which we deal with crises arising from fuel depletion and other commodity shocks are the real promise of our age.
Thanks everyone for interesting comments. A couple thoughts/reactions below…
“It would be really interesting to see the distribution of the values of the contents of shipping containers, and what kind of cargo makes up the low value density end of the curve — those are the things that will be replaced with more valuable, durable, repairable, or locally manufactured products first. It looks like the OECD keeps track of this to some degree. Typical freight costs are on the order of 1% of the cargo retail value for most things. Large appliances and assembled furniture is more like 10%.”
-Yes, more investigation into this (and into which products need rapid delivery [e.g, cut flowers, fresh fish] and thus need faster transportation) would be really helpful in parsing what some of the effects of the death of speed might be. Would love to hear more…
“Gas makes up about a third of car ownership costs in the US… so you’re right that a 10x increase in fuel prices will wreak personal mobility havoc.”
-my major point, precisely: our communities are likely to change more than our trade networks or cultural ties…
“the only economic activities most people would really find a 10x increase in oil prices starkly obvious is air travel, air freight, and motorized personal vehicles.”
-generally agree, but also think it’s important to remember how huge a deal the last is, and how much behind-the-scenes energy it takes to maintain auto-oriented development and retail patterns. I think the biggest impact is going to be on land use.
“It’s the stop-and-go of real world driving which eats up all the fuel.”"How long something is moving does not affect the amount of energy it takes to move it, because an object in motion remains in motion indefinitely. What’s more, the kinetic energy can be recovered at the other end.”
These seem to me to be making versions of the same point: in theory, in a world with no friction/ wind/ water resistance, no traffic and some breakthrough kinetic energy recovery, moving things fast over long distances would not be a problem. My point is that, in actual reality, it is.
“You end by conceding that the exigencies of peak (unaffordable) oil will indeed force us to retreat “into smaller and smaller geographies,” which is the simple point many analysts are making.”
-I think you completely misunderstand me. My point is that while our land use will almost certain grow more compact (because auto-based transportation is so energy intensive, and for other reasons), and certain practices (like overnight delivery) will grow more expensive, the geographies of our lives — our connections to distant people and markets — is not likely to shrink much any time in the foreseeable future. People in New York and San Francisco and Copenhagen and Singapore live in very dense communities; they do not live in isolated enclaves. I’m suggesting they’re a more accurate model for the future than, say, a 19th century small town.
“We can move cargo using sail – augmented by biomethane (derviced from food waste)driven engines – faster than a comparably sized ship, esp now they are forced to ‘slow steam’ to conserve fuel to save operational cost.”
-interesting data point!
Thanks again
Alex
As for the speed/energy issue, per unit of distance, it takes 11% less energy to move an airplane passenger than a light vehicle passenger, even though they’re traveling at around 10x the velocity. Even if you were to stick to light vehicles themselves, highway mileage (higher speeds) in non-hybrid vehicles always exceeds city mileage (lower speeds).
Plus, the fuel cost differentials are only becoming more favorable for air travel over time. In 1980 (the prior fuel price peak), air travel fuel per unit of distance cost 16% less than light vehicles. In 2008 (the latest price peak), it was 26% less. This is despite the fact that commercial air fuel went up in real prices by 29% in that period while motor gasoline prices were flat. As a percentage of per capita GDP, fuel costs for flying in 2008 were less than half what they were in 1980 – and that’s at over $3 per gallon.
While it’s true that basic physics describes objects in motion as having kinetic energy that is potentially and profitably retrievable (via such technologies as regenerative braking), the practical fact is that energy losses over the distances covered by normal journeys will be orders of magnitude greater than the initial investment. See how far a car will roll.
The aircraft figures provided by Joe are interesting but are a little misleading when a mass transit system is compared to personal transport*. A more realistic comparison would be between trains/buses.
I am also intrigued by the possibilities of dirigible transport for medium/long haul. Could they replace trucks?
*Mr. Moller, come on down!!
Hi, Tony. Good point about comparability.
Transit buses use 4,348 BTU per passenger-mile, compared to 2,995 for commercial air. The average speed of a transit bus is 12.6 mph.
Rail comes in at 2,541. Commuter rail is the fastest of the rail transit modes at 31 mph average.
A typical route like the Capitol Limited on Amtrak goes at a scheduled 44 mph average with an on-time performance of 66%. The Empire Builder comes in at under 44%. By contrast, airlines average around 80%.
A problem with comparing air to rail (like Amtrak) is that the distances are not comparable. Amtrak may come in at 2,398 compared to 2,995 for air, but take the DC to Chicago route and the rail distance is 780 miles and air only 597. So the BTUs per passenger for those respective trips are 1.79 million for air and 1.87 million for rail.
Plus, Amtrak is basically two systems. One, electrified and highly-utilized Northeast. The other – everything else. The first one pulls down the system-wide energy intensity numbers considerably.
Compared to the 44 mph upper bound average speed of Amtrak for that route, the average round-trip speed of a non-stop flight is 333 mph, or 7.6 times as fast. For less energy.