Would you re-new contracts with a vendor who:

• Tripled costs in the last 7 years?

• Has a 62.8% medium or worse risk of delivery failure?

• Has an 84.9% medium or worse risk to investments that are required to make future deliveries?

• Can stop 97% of your shipments for political, weather, policy and a number of other reasons beyond your control?

These are the risks outlined in GAO (Government Account Office) Report 07-283.

Firing a vendor can be hard and uncertain.  But the future on oil is not uncertain.

IEA (International Energy Agency) August 2007 report provides an indication of the critical problem between supply and demand

Crude & Condensates (C&C), commonly thought of as crude oil, is the best measure of liquid fuels usable by transportation.  Peak Oil of Crude and Condensates occurred in 2005.

All liquid fuels are are 1.8 million barrels a day below their Peak in June of 2006.  It is highly unlikely new capacity can makeup for this shortfall and the continued declines.

Peak Oil

The largest, safest and closest nations supplying oil have failing capacity; North Sea, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.  The slight increase in domestic production is a minor blimp in a long decline since US Peak Oil began in 1972.

Gains and Losses

With the current rate of decline, it is doubtful that any new capacity will do more than slow the overall rate of decline.

Are you ready for the consequences of the 1973 Oil Embargo, compounded year, after year, after year....

Decreasing supply is not from lack of effort. Saudi Arabia's efforts are indicated by the number of drilling rigs.

Working Hard Yet Declining

Oil-exporting nations will not risk damaging their remaining reserves making extraordinary efforts to increase extraction rates.  Here is a quote from Sadad Al-Husseini, former Saudi Aramco Exploration Minster,

‘‘There has been a paradigm shift in the energy world whereby oil producers are no longer inclined to rapidly exhaust their resource for the sake of accelerating the misuse of a precious and finite commodity. This sentiment prevails inside and outside of OPEC countries but has yet to be appreciated among the major energy consuming countries of the world.’’

Peak Oil and increasing demand creates unsustainable price pressure.  Market response to such pressure is demand destruction through inflation, recession, depression, unemployment.... 

Demand/Supply/Price

The 1973 Oil Embargo was minor and temporary relative to looming consequences.

Replace oil?  How can something so monumental be accomplished?  Preempt waste, start small, provide better service at lower cost and think better.

Preempt waste.  Instead of moving a ton to move a person, moving only the person saves time, energy and money; better than 90%. 

Solar Powered Mobility

Start small allow many mobility solutions and let markets develop.  Widen bike lanes, required children to bike instead of bus to school, allow golf carts on public streets. 

As with the Internet, end monopolies and allow ingenuity to access the public rights-of-way.

Allow new modes such as Personal Automated Mobility (PAM or PRT); Morgatown has logged 110 million injury-free passenger miles.  Reducing vehicles to the of a car or pallet, supports streaming resource to need powered by sunshine.

There is a synergy between transportation's distributed need for power and the distributed ability of sunshine to provide that power.

Leverage advice from those who already changed the world, Thomas Edison, 1910:

“Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the same, Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.”

“Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property."

“There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen....”

Imagine what the world might look like today if Edison had known and acted on Einstein's 1905 proof of Quantum Mechanics based on the photoelectric effect.  Sunshine and electricity might cost about the same.  And that, is the answer to firing oil as the monopoly mobility vendor.

Transportation currently requires 26.7 Quads (Quadrillion BTU's, 10^15), of which 80% is wasted by current transport modes (not counting waste from Parasitic Mass)

Allowing ingenuity, solar powered mobility networks can trim our energy needs to 5.8 Quads while generating a surplus of  6.2 Quads. 

Sunshine and electricity are the same.