I was banging the same drum 10 years ago TJ, not much has changed since then. Since i started working in the oil industy, i see a different side to the “oil is running out” picture. Without going in to much detail, i have to hand various facts which indicate that we have quite away to go before we run out of oil. Its expensive to get at for sure, but there’s plenty left. Cars gone in 25 years? Maybe, but not because of a shortage of oil.

Its a going to take a couple of generations before we are weened off from cars and i suspect in some goverment think tank thats the plan. Can you imagine the ramifications if you were to drive people off the road over the course of ten years? For instance, at £5 a litre of fuel, im looking at £300-400 to go visiting my parents. I simply couldnt afford that and i rather doubt that public transport would be in place within anything like 10 years. Where would that leave me and anyone else in that position? Now, you could in hindsight say that shouldn’t have moved so far away, but you know what they say about hindsight. What about when people start moving from the rural areas to be closer to work? At £5 a litre thats going to be a typical knee jerk reaction for some, you’ll have a lot of wealth being transffered in and around urban areas and i think it would create a big rich/poor divide.

I did raise a point the other day that oil is running out, fast. While motor vehicles emit roughly 8-10% of the total CO2 emissions, they use 40% of the oil on the market.

This is probably why the private car is bearing a disproportionate amount of taxation when compared against other emitters of CO2, after all, no government wants to mention the term “Peak Oil” and feed a frenzy of public disquiet and economic turmoil.

In my opinion, a larger proportion of fuel tax revenue should be directed towards sustainable public transport subsidies. And yes, I’d willingly see some other public spending cut to allow this to happen.

On a larger scale, the idea that renewable, nuclear or even fusion power is going to simply step in and render fossil fuels redundant is bunk. You’re going to need energy to build all this stuff before it starts producing energy so even if fusion power really is 30-50 years off, you’re still going to need to ensure that you have 50-70 years of economically viable fossil fuel resources left (assuming an extremely ambitious 20 year takeup completion for non-fossil fuelled energy and transport).

As much as I miss my old 2.5 V6, I’m not sure that reducing petrol prices at the pumps is the right way forward, as I’ve already said, I’d rather see more tax revenue being put into public transport.

I did raise a point the other day that oil is running out, fast.

but it just isn’t.

(not ‘fast’ anyway…)

we’ve got enough ‘pumpable’ stuff to last about 100 years – at the current rate of consumption.

but we’ve got much more than that lying around in enormous shale/sand deposits.

(see: Alberta)

limited processing capacity for this tricky stuff will cause prices to rise slowly, slowly forcing us to use less.

extracting oil from the shale/sand is environmentally catastrophic (locally), but nobody cares.

(I care, because i have a beard, and read the guardian – so obviously i cannot possibly be part of the problem. but most people really don’t giveashit.)

Okay, easily accessible oil is running out fast. The stuff that wasn’t viable for oil companies to extract and sell for less than $80 a barrel mostly what’s left as you have to either extract it from hard to reach environments or you need to process the crude correctly to remove the impurities. Neither option is cheap.

You can’t just see a price spike on a Monday, design and build a specialized extraction process and refinery on a Tuesday and start selling petrol from these sources on a Wednesday. The lead in times are measurable in tens of years.

Demand in the far east is ramping up at a rapid rate, the level of demand in China and India will very soon be the same as the US. When demand increases, the market price will inevitably rise.

Even oil from tar sands/shale is profitable at the current trading price of around $115/barrel.

and the world is stuffed full to bursting with the stuff.

why do we think we’re about to run out?

How much do you think oil will cost when all we have left is tar sands, the arctic, and deep sea wells?

I say again. We’re not short of oil. We are short of cheap oil.

Public transport is much cheaper per person per mile than a car

How’d you get that figure? If you look at the cost of laying on existing facilities then that could be correct, because we have a privately run transport industry that won’t run economically non-viable services.

If you were to replace car usage with PT then you would have to service areas where population density is too low to make it economically viable.

As for changing living patterns – do we all have to move to the big city? That’s going to be crap for quality of live and result in even more urbanisation. The industrial revolution was bad enough for the countryside, this wouldn’t help.

. Can you imagine the ramifications if you were to drive people off the road over the course of ten years?

Which is why I am advocating a 25 year timespan.

awhiles – we do not have plenty of oil. We do not have plenty of uranium, we do not have plenty of gas. we have a couple of decades left at current cosumption and consumption is rising then we are into very difficult and expensive to get oil

Molgrips = public transport is cheaper – much cheaper – every time you look at it from any direction.

As for changing living patterns – do we all have to move to the big city?

No – it might be move work – certainly what we need to stop doing is travelling long distances to work and especially the two way commute where rural workers on low pay have to live in towns when they can no longer afford houses in the country and country dwellers all work in cities and towns.

We are going to have to change – its inevitable as the cost of energy rises

… we have a couple of decades left at current cosumption and consumption is rising then we are into very difficult and expensive to get oil…

it may be difficult, and expensive, but we’re already using ‘difficult’ and ‘expensive’ oil.

£100/barrel was enough to justify drilling in the deep ocean in the gulf of mexico.

£100/barrel was enough to justify strip-mining really rubbish stuff. you can’t pump it out of the ground, you have to dig it out.
(and then process the hell out of it)

£100/barrel was enough to get oil-men sniffing around in the arctic.

and if that’s the price we’re prepared to pay, and the trouble we’ll go to, then there’s a LOT of oil.

it’s almost as if some people want us to run out of oil – and the sooner the better…

as far as anyone can tell (good guesses mostly), if we’re not at peak oil nowish, we’re not far off. But i don’t believe that production will fall off a cliff the moment we reach ‘peak oil’.

production will reduce slowly, the oil price will rise slowly, we’ll change our ways slowly accordingly. We really will be fine.

but right now, petrol prices are high because of tax.

There is some interesting stuff on WIKI which depending on its accuracy, makes interesting reading re anticipated supply/demand.

the problem that seems to be being ignored is food, there is a huge petro-chemical input into modern food production, the UK is not self sufficient. Increasing oil prices mean increasing food prices.

Make of that what you will.

Molgrips = public transport is cheaper – much cheaper – every time you look at it from any direction.

So, if someone puts on a bus from some small village into town, and there are two people on it – how is that cheaper than having two cars drive in? The bus gets what, 5mpg? And you have to pay the driver and everything. Each passenger pays £1.20. And the next bus is empty.

Do you see what I mean? If you want to increase coverage much more than we currently have, you need to start subsidising – and that subsidy could get massively expensive. Otherwise how do you decide which routes to run?

The problem with tax on fuel is that it doesn’t take into account a persons income.Generally the more you earn the more tax you pay.
Fuel duty is a blanket which covers everybody,regardless of income.
This is not a fair way to collect tax as wealthy people wouldn’t notice £2 a litre petrol.Camerons “we’re all in it together ” is untrue.

well its not like fuel tax is a particularly tory policy, and labour doubled the fuel price escalator during their time in power. it could probably be proven fairly simply that richer folk pay more on fuel than poor folk (they travel further and drive more thirsty cars) therefore they do pay more.

Additionally, if someone’s in the highest earning tax bracket, they have to earn £2.80 to pay for a litre of fuel, whereas someone in the normal tax bracket only needs to earn £1.68. if you add onto that the fact a bimmer 7 series will only do 25mpg, but a typical focus will do 50, a ‘fat cat’ is paying 3.3x as much as someone poor for the same distance travelled.

Sounds like a progressive tax to me

TBH burning oil seems a bit nuts, when it’s such a finite resource and so useful for other things.

That’s some right dodgy reasoning right there. They have to earn more to pay for EVERYTHING. Plus you’ve worked it out as if they pay %50 on everything, haven’t you? When they don’t. And they don’t all drive BMWs.

Unless you were consciously being silly.. your post is just about daft enough to be deliberate, but it doesn’t have the necessary joviality..

they have to earn that much extra in order to travel the extra distance.. It was taking things to extremes, but I don’t understand why people think its necessary to have 2 progressive taxes on top of one another. if you take the tax earned by the government on a 40% tay payer’s liter of fuel (£1.77 of £2.33 or 76% of the money earned) I’d argue that its probably already penal enough

It’s not a progressive tax.

Person #1 is.. a mechanic, on modest income lives in a small village. The local garage goes out of business, so he needs a new job. The only one available is 30 miles away, but he has to feed his family so off he goes, 60 miles a day.

Person #2 is a rich city banker. He gets pushed out of his job because he crossed the boss one time too many, so he gets another job. It’s in the financial district, same as usual, so his commute is the same. 60 miles a day for him is nothing.

So how is that fair? Each pays the same amount of tax ON THEIR FUEL PURCHASES although not on their income.

You still double counted the tax on your original post btw.

sounds like a good argument for person#1 to settle his family nearer a centre of population so that if he does loose his job in the future, the likelyhood is that he can get something reasonably nearby, and use public transport to get there, if he can’t walk or ride a bike, therefore saving himself a few quid running the car…

The problem with tax on fuel is that it doesn’t take into account a persons income.Generally the more you earn the more tax you pay.

No. Income tax and NI are linked to income. Taxes like VAT, alcohol duty, tobacco duty, inheritance tax and council tax are not.

The more fuel you use, the more duty you pay. Just like if you eat more biscuits, you pay more VAT.

which tax did i double count? from your raw earnings on a liter of petrol you get taxed

fuel tax
vat on the fuel cost and on the fuel tax
income tax/national insurance on : the fuel tax, the vat on the fuel tax, and the cost on the fuel.

the nature of income tax being progressive effects, by its very nature, everything you purchase. Why would you need another progressive tax on top of that? aside from being impossible to implement, if the first tax isn’t progressive enough, the better thing to do is just make that tax more progressive, but if you go down that road too far you end up without enough incentive for people to earn money as too much of the additional earning is burned away..

The more fuel you use, the more duty you pay. Just like if you eat more biscuits, you pay more VAT.

yes, but in order to pay for the fuel duty, you need to earn more (as a high rate tay payer) than a low rate tax payer would. the effective tax is higher, as your earnings are taxed more

yes, but in order to pay for the fuel duty, you need to earn more (as a high rate tay payer) than a low rate tax payer would. the effective tax is higher, as your earnings are taxed more

The total tax take is highest for the poorest quintile. Higher-rate tax payers are better off overall.

Edited, ignore me.

The problem with person no.1 is that it’s currently viable to work within a large radius of your home, so all the mechanics in that huge area compete for the same work and some end up doing serious miles. Cut the viable area and everyone travels less.

TBH burning oil seems a bit nuts, when it’s such a finite resource and so useful for other things.

A few hundred years from now, they are gonna be sooo jealous of what we took for granted.

Probably not- by then we’ll most likely have fusion so electricity will be cheap, non-polluting and reliable. And we’ll have electric cars with batteries that will do hundreds of miles between charges.

So the idea of burning oil with all the pollution that goes with it will look archaic and ridiculous.

TJ said so.

The total tax take is highest for the poorest quintile. Higher-rate tax payers are better off overall.

Arithmetic means aren’t a good measure of the tax take in the highest quartile as it has an unbounded upper limit. It’s a crude but reasonably effective measure for the lowest three quartiles but not for the fourth. I compared my actual income tax (as a % of income) with the mean and it was significantly higher.

During the bad weather last winter in Edinburgh people managed to get to work, shop etc.
It just was a lot more inconvenient but people had no alternative other than to walk, car share and catch the bus.
This just goes to show that people will find a way to get about without constantly relying on the car if they are forced to.

Driving in the UK 9/10 is easier and cheaper than the alternative.
This must change now.
When there is not enough natural resources in the world to go round and our economy is too poor to buy them we need to be in a position to cope.

Soon one of the bad boys will be in every car and home.

Free energy

Honest.

The total tax take is highest for the poorest quintile. Higher-rate tax payers are better off overall.

It’s surprising how many intelligent people still think higher rate tax applies to all their earnings. Personal finance is a bit of a gap in education.

Molgrips – I think you’re being a bit soft on Beeching (though obviously he only carries the can for a Government decision). Most of the rest of Europe seems to have managed to retain subsidised transport, and I’m assuming they didn’t do it suddenly in the last 50 years or so. Looking outside the island might have offered an alternative long term perspective.
I still find it odd and slightly melancholy that there are multiple branch lines locally to me that my Dad can remember using to go to college, work etc.

Arithmetic means aren’t a good measure of the tax take in the highest quartile as it has an unbounded upper limit. It’s a crude but reasonably effective measure for the lowest three quartiles but not for the fourth.

The unbounded upper limit is only relevant to the fifth quintile.

I compared my actual income tax (as a % of income) with the mean and it was significantly higher.

Your income tax may be a higher percentage, but other taxes will be lower. That’s the whole point of calculating total tax take – it refutes the notion that higher-rate tax payers pay more overall. They don’t.

Probably not- by then we’ll most likely have fusion so electricity will be cheap, non-polluting and reliable

By then, fusion electricity will only be twenty years away from commercial use. 😉

During the bad weather last winter in Edinburgh people managed to get to work, shop etc.
It just was a lot more inconvenient but people had no alternative other than to walk, car share and catch the bus.
This just goes to show that people will find a way to get about without constantly relying on the car if they are forced to.

There speaketh an urban dweller.

what about those who, by the nature of their work (and bearing in mind that somebody has to do those jobs) has to work in a rural area?

I speak as someone who worked for the Forestry Commission, living in a village with a community of less than 200, eight miles from the nearest other village, 25 miles from a supermarket, 35 miles from a train station, post bus and school bus only. butcher and grocer van visited the village once a week.

school bus travels 17 miles to nearest “second school” – to get to the bus stop in the morning, a number of the outlier kids had to travel three miles each way miles to the bus route – they lived on sheep farms.

So, should they have moved closer to urban area’s?

I worked for the commission, they were the ONLY employer in the village, other than the pub (largely reliant on tourist trade), the village shop/post office and the cafe (reliant on tourist trade).

Petrol at £5 per litre? Where’s your alternative transport options?

A number of the farms don’t have mains electricity – they are reliant on wind and back up generators – electric cars simply not an option.

Come on TJ – its nice sitting in the ivory tower living in the centre of Edinburgh, with your Billion quid tram system.

where’s the options for other people at 5 quid per litre for petrol? somebody has to look after the sheep, somebody has to work in the forests, planting the trees and shooting the deer.

People living in truly rural area’s have NO option but personal transport.

or would rural sheep farmers children be taken into care to ensure they can get an education in your socialist utopia?

The unbounded upper limit is only relevant to the fifth quintile.

Apologies I misread your first post, however the point still stands regarding the efectiveness of the mean when you have an unbounded upper limit.

Your income tax may be a higher percentage, but other taxes will be lower. That’s the whole point of calculating total tax take – it refutes the notion that higher-rate tax payers pay more overall. They don’t.

I didn’t compare income tax rates, I compared my effective income tax rate to the mean value of the total tax rate of the lowest quartile and my income tax rate was higher. I’m not trying to argue that there isn’t a high tax burden on the lowere paid just that using an arithmetic mean isn’t a good measure when you have one group that has an unbounded upper limit.

Apologies I misread your first post, however the point still stands regarding the efectiveness of the mean when you have an unbounded upper limit.

Which applies to some people in 1 out of 5 quintiles.

I’m not trying to argue that there isn’t a high tax burden on the lowere paid just that using an arithmetic mean isn’t a good measure when you have one group that has an unbounded upper limit.

Which applies to some people in 1 out of 5 quintiles.

Given that most people in that quintile will be at the lower end of the range (less than 1% of the population earn > £150k), we’re talking about a pretty trivial point here – it’s unlikely there are enough outliers to significantly skew the sample. Remember that a small number of people in the 5th quintile will be paying the 50p tax rate, balancing out the smaller % of income they pay in non-income related taxes.

Z11, they having been farming sheep for millenia, cars have been around for a hundred or so years and in the mass market for a few decades.

Remove cars people will adapt. end of. You may not like the adapation but you will cope.

Mrmo – yep, no problem, if we really want people to go back to victorian standards of living, education and health, then thats great.

Do you recall Hannah Hauxwell?

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/around-yorkshire/local-stories/my_heart_and_soul_are_still_up_in_the_dales_1_2436328

Do you really want to impose that sort of lifestyle on people in the UK in the 21st century?

You may not like it but if we don’t sort out personal transport then that is where we are going.

I dont think anyone here is under any illusion that we have to reduce energy consumption, we take that as a given. Whats under disussion is the time scales i guess. TJ, forgive me but you did say ramp up the cost of petrol/diesel to £5 a litre over 10 years. I dont believe 10 years is enough to implement an alternative. Look at the proposed high speed train service, HS2. As a concept began around 2009, if it gets the go ahead, its proposed to open around 2018.

You mentioned about cars that are capable of 100mpg, with rising fuel costs i suspect manufacture would be quick to respond, maybe a car capable of 200mpg? or 300mpg? Rasing the fuel cost wouldn’t have stopped people from using their car less, just made them ditch there un-economical car for new car. You’d be back to generating the same tax from fuel as before, but then have to deal with the scrapping of the un-economical vehicles.

Trains – rail network is at capacity – trains are pretty much rammed at commuter times so you need more trains which means more track and routes.

Actually the way to increase train capacity isn’t by building new tracks its by adding more cars to each train. There’s a surprising amount of infrastructure upgrade going on at the moment in London at least as its becoming quite obvious that 10 and 12 car trains are coming soon on commuter lines as the platform lengthening works are currently underway. Together with upgraded signalling then capacity increases – its not like building roads you know…

HS2 by 2018?? hahaha! 2025 realistically.