Quote:
Originally Posted by GRU
I don't believe that
The prices wouldn't go down so far that the poorer people that arn't buying much fuel now would end up buying too much fuel if the prices dropped.
|
In the short term, fuel consumption would indeed be reduced. While fuel prices may not plummet by half, they certainly would decrease substantially. The fuel that is not consumed now is merely shifted to future consumption.
I'm not saying conservation and efficiency is unimportant (I am on an efficiency forum after all), I'm just pointing out the fact that even widespread fuel conservation will do little good for the environment. This has been proven historically time and time again. Efficiency has been improved substantially over the years for most consumer goods. Think about how inefficient water heaters, refrigerators, TVs and vehicles used to be. We have much more efficient appliances nowadays, but are we consuming less energy?
Don't take my word for it though, lets see a practical example:
A Pentium 100 MHz processor from 1995 consumed 10 watts of power. Transistors continued to shrink at an astonishing rate, which had the effect of making each calculation take just fractions of the power the Pentium 100 required. Eventually the Pentium 4 3800 MHz processor was released, which consumed 115 watts.
100MHz \ 10W = 10Mhz per W
3800MHz \ 115W = 33MHz per W
While efficiency increased 300%, consumption increased 1100%!
Source:
Wikipedia
You see this human behavior everywhere. A similar example can be made of cars (they just get more powerful over time). Efficiency will never result in less consumption, just expanded ways to use it.
As long as oil is relatively easy to produce, it will be consumed regardless of efficiency. Relatively cheap alternatives are the only way oil consumption will be permanently reduced. This will occur through a combination of increasing oil prices (scarcity), and decreasing cost of alternatives (technology advancement).