This is a followup to my previous post:

Calculating Commuting Costs on Vancouver Island.

You can read the reasoning behind it, the methods and what not at the last post… this is simply a continuation showing costs of commuting to Victoria. Again, given the rapidity of the rise happening, and going to happen in the future… the only realistic option is to get people out of their cars altogether and onto transit. And that means renewed rail on the E&N.

Please, show your support, and go to OurCorridor.ca … push senior levels of government to invest in the E&N and make it a viable alternative for people, and for industry and business.

Click on the images below to see the movies of rising gas prices. First is the “High Mileage”, 4.2L/100KM (55mpg) scenario. Second is the “Low Mileage” 10.7L/100KM (22mpg, which is also the US national average).

This will be the first post in a series as I work through this data.
First, full disclosure, I work at Malaspina (Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo and live 80KM away in Port Alberni. It’s a 1 hour drive morning and night, so yes, I have a vested interest in this topic. I am also a volunteer with the Corridor Coalition, which is trying to convince government to restore the E&N to a state where it could take a large chunk of the economic and environmental load of off residents, business, and industry on Vancouver Island.

The reason i started this, what I saw this post here at the theoildrum.com doing a similar study of commuting costs from the suburbs of Sydney, Australia.

The general premise being, that those in Australia, and in North America, have very much become used to very cheap gasoline (petrol). And this has created the ever expanding suburbia and exurbia with very little investment into Public Transport (rail, bus, or otherwise) by any of the governments in question.

As fuel prices rise rapidly, this is having a serious affect on the ability of households to cope… especially since wages are not keeping up with inflation over the past 30 years, let alone rising costs of the past 5.

So, I’ve created my own version of the Sydney example. I’ve used StatsCan data on Median Household Income and calculated the annual cost of fuel for transport based on 225 work days (42 weeks) a year, 2 different mileage constraints (“average” 22mpg or 10.7L/100K and 55mpg or 4.2L/100KM) broken down the percentages, and plotted them by distance on a map.

The first case I’ve tried is commuters to Nanaimo. So I’m using Nanaimos Median Household Income of $47,000 to calculate the percentages.

First is the Low Mileage Case. Second is the High Mileage Case. The Slideshow will walk you through $1.20, $1.50, $2.00, $3.00 and $8.00

Click the images and you will be taken to short slideshows showing the effect of rising prices. (Quicktime/iTunes required)

The $1.50 scenario could happen by May long weekend.

The $2 and $3 scenario could easily happen due to a major disruption/attack/hurricane/etc… and the $8 scenario is what they currently have in Europe.

The question we must start to ask, is, if oil prices are going to stay high, or go higher… how will that affect working people. People who *must* live outside the City due to high mortgage/rent will be forced to pay more and more just to get to work. When is the point that we should start investing in alternatives to get people from their home, to their work. Or better yet, start bringing their home and work closer together.

Personally, i don’t think we can wait for markets and economies to force down prices in urban areas in order to shift people back in from the suburbs. The prices are simply rising too fast. Right now, what we need to do is look at our medium range options. And on Vancouver Island, that means the E&N and Island Corridor Foundation. Sign up at OurCorridor.ca to show your support.

Next I will be doing commuters to Victoria.

Hi everyone.

I’ve had lots of discussions lately on www.alberni.ca about TFL44 and all the terrible forest practices going on on lands that have been deleted from the TFL. This is what I’ve found.

What I’m trying to find out is… are the lands granted to Robert Dunsmuir for the E&N the “private” lands and were those incorporated into TFL44?

The answer is yes. And as they were under TFL44… they were then under the management guidelines of all TFLs, which is the crux of the Hupacasath argument on consultation with stakeholders. Whether they were originally public or private lands is irrevelant at that point as all lands under TFLs were treated the same… the lawsuit now brought forward deals with a possible Conflict of Interest when the BC Government deleted the lands from the TFL and they were taken by companies part owned by BC Pension Plan investments.

Here is a current map of the South Island Forest District (PDF, 4MB, locallink, original)

This is a big link/PDF… so I have taken a screenshot of the relevant part, Port Alberni is roughly in the Center, you can see Sproat and Great Central to the East of it, and Cowichan Lake down at bottom.

You can clearly see the white/brown demarcation… that’s where Dunsmuir/Crown lands start and end… what appears to have happened is that all of the private, Dunsmuir land once under TFL44, has now been returned to private control.

For confirmation… this online book, “The Great Land Grab” (PDF, 1MB, locallink, original) has a map of the Dunsmuir lands as of 1884.

Here is a screenshot of the relevant map.

And finally… you can find a map on page 1 of TFL44 as it was in 2001 in this filing by M&B. (PDF, 600K, locallink, original)

If you compare the current and M&B maps, you can clearly see that all of the North and Eastern sectors of both Sproat and Franklin Divisions were on Dunsmuir land… which are precisely the lands in question by Judith Sayers and the Hupacasath FN.

From the EnergyBulletin

After last weeks admission by the CEO of Shell that cheap oil will peak around 2012. Now we have the former CEO of Canadian energy jewel, Talisman Energy.

Dr. Jim Buckee thinks we’ll see $150-$200 oil by Q3 or Q4 2008.. And that will be the point where price rationing begins, as it did in the 70s.

Here’s his interview with Mark Colvin from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

MARK COLVIN: Meanwhile, ‘peak oil’ - the idea that the world’s supplies of oil have either peaked or will soon start declining, has suddenly gained new respectability.

It’s been derided by the big oil companies for years, but at the end of last week came a turnabout.

The Chief Executive of the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, Jeroen van der Veer put out a paper on Friday forecasting the end of easy oil.

Mr Van der Veer said the result could be a worldwide scramble to mitigate climate change.

Dr Jim Buckee has just retired as President and CEO of Talisman Energy, a major independent Canadian oil company with a market capitalisation of $25-billion.

On the phone from Perth, Dr Buckee told me that ‘peak oil’ was now either here, or very close.

JIM BUCKEE: It is the underlying decline of the world’s major fields that is the dominant driving factor here.

If you think that at the moment the world is consuming 30-plus billion barrels a year of oil and is finding seven or eight billion barrels a year. And this state of affairs has been going on now for 20 or more years. It’s obviously unsustainable and the world is increasingly drawing on the bigger older fields.

You couple that notion with the irreversibility of decline and you’ve got a very alarming picture.

MARK COLVIN: Now this was a very unfashionable notion among the oil companies until pretty recently. But just last week the Chief Executive of Shell came out and said that easy oil was coming to an end. Did that surprise you?

JIM BUCKEE: I think it was only a matter of time before one of them had to say that and the pronouncements of the majors are inscrutable at best and I believe they often have a very political overturn.

MARK COLVIN: What are the politics there?

JIM BUCKEE: I think it’s pretty alarmist if one or more of the worlds largest oil companies say, listen guys, supplies of oil are gonna get tight. The ramifications are immense.

Always the line of the major oil companies, Exxon, Shell, BP has been, ‘there’s plenty of oil, you know technology will overcome shortages; we’ll find it’.

They changed a little bit to, ‘there’s plenty of oil, but access is difficult’ and then this is a change again saying, ‘well actually, it looks like it’s finite and you know we’re looking over the hill’.

MARK COLVIN: Global warming has brought a worldwide debate as to what to do about it, centring around, whether there should be a carbon tax or cap in trade. Is this peak oil going to just force everybody’s hand anyway because the oil will run out?

JIM BUCKEE: Oil running out is sort of wrong terminology. It will continue to produce in large quantities, but increasingly less quantities at higher prices. So we’ll still be using a lot of oil in 20 or 30 years time, but it’ll be rationed by price to the most essential uses of oil and that’s generally transportation.

MARK COLVIN: So we won’t be able to make plastic bottles out of it to put water in?

JIM BUCKEE: Well…quite right.

And in passing of course we pay more for water than we do for petrol at the moment, which is insane. But that sort of thing will rectify.

So another point here is that the amount of carbon generated by hydrocarbons will be nowhere near that envisaged in e.g. the Stern report.

MARK COLVIN: How high can oil go now?

JIM BUCKEE: I don’t think that really we’ve seen any rationing of consumption by price. We did see it in ‘79, ‘80 and that was largely because of the sudden quadrupling of the price of oil. Now we’ve seen a relatively gentle approach and people have accommodated it.

So I would say you need to see oil in the $150, $200 a barrel range before it would have any particular impact on demand.

MARK COLVIN: When do you think we’ll reach that?

JIM BUCKEE: The situation is always very tight in the fourth quarter because Northern Hemisphere demand increases; it’s the sort of highest quarter for demands. So I’d say we’ll see stress again in the third and fourth quarter of ‘08.

MARK COLVIN: Do you think it’ll get to $150, 200 by then?

JIM BUCKEE: I think that’s the number that’s required to ration demand and I’d say so yes.

MARK COLVIN: That’s really racing up on us.

JIM BUCKEE: Well I think the whole situation it’s here. It’s snuck up on us without any people really paying attention to it. And it’s very important. I mean things like layouts of cities and future plans all have to take this sort of thing into account.

I mean if you look at a city like Los Angeles, if the supply of gasoline became tight, it’d be a big problem; how to run Los Angeles and the same problem, smaller in lots of other places. Where you have work at point A, residence at point B, shops at point C and they’re all miles apart.

MARK COLVIN: You’d have to include most of Australia’s big cities in that wouldn’t you?

JIM BUCKEE: Yes I think so. But I mean Perth isn’t quite there yet I don’t think but yes in general it ignores the distances, yes.

MARK COLVIN: Dr Jim Buckee, former president and CEO of the Big Canadian independent oil company Talisman Energy, on the phone from Perth.

It is a day that should go down into history, but likely won’t at least not with any fanfare.

On January 1, 2008, Erich Kastner, the last remaining soldier who fought for the German Imperial Army during the First World War died. (CBC)

Unlike the “winning” side… Germans don’t celebrate or even commemorate their war veterans… for obvious social issues.

However, at this point almost 100 years later… I think it’s safe to say what happened during WWI was simply the worlds greatest tragedy. And those veterans, on all sides, deserve our respect for having fought in such terrible, horrifying conditions.

And so, goodnight, Mr. Kastner. You are the end of a generation. We hope never again to repeat the bloodshed that you were a part of.