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Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 10:47:19 :
In Reply to: Truck Restorations in the Future posted by Paul (in NY) on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 22:44:13 :
20 years from now, I could see any of the predictions here being right, especially regarding what today's kids are into and cars being disposable. But in 60 years, I think there's a reasonable outside chance that the US will be a "failed state", or maybe the whole world will be.
There are quite a few not-impossible ways that could happen. The old bogeymen of nuclear war and plague are still around. Until 100 years ago with oil-fired transportation, famine, plague, and pestilence were a regular part of life. Economic collapse could spread and become permanent. Right now the US is leading the world in trying to push economic stimulus in the manner of Robert Mugabe -- printing money out of nothing and hoping people believe it's real. Other rich countries are doing the same thing. What if it doesn't work? But even if people do all the right things, God's still not making any more oil, and by reasonable estimates, we've burned up about half of it. The most conservative estimates (USGS) say that within 20 years, we'll have burned up half. Others say we're there right now. You can repeal every environmental law on the books, and it won't change the geological facts. Nothing comes close to being as good (cheap) of a transport fuel as petroleum. If we ignore the environment, we can get by a while longer on expensive synthetic oil from coal, but God's not making any more coal either. All the alternative energy sources always sound great, but they simply don't pencil out to being anywhere near as cheap as oil, especially when you realize you won't have petroleum-powered machinery to mine the ore, transport the raw materials and parts, drive the workers to work, and ship the finished goods half way around the world. Take away fossil fuels and you take away affordable transportation.
Take away transportation and you've destroyed modern civilization. Only small, light, high-value things like drugs and computer chips are worth transporting any distance by muscle or wind power. Where people still have some source of liquid fuel, they'll try to keep the old rigs going as long as possible. In that scenario, with a mixture of odd-ball home-brew fuels, the oldest, simplest engines will be the ones that people want, and they'll want them for practical use, not for restoration. There will be places where people still have an oil well or two and some primitive means of fractionating it to extract some "natural" gasoline and kerosene mix, similar to what they used to run Model Ts on. Some farmers may find it economical to make alcohol, which can burn in some old engines with a bit of adjustment. Some people will probably make wood-burning trucks like German farmers used during WWII. Some really good crude oil will burn in a diesel engine without any refining. There's currently a farmer's co-op in central America somewhere that has a small pocket of high-grade crude and is running it in their tractors straight out of the well. It's even possible to distill a gasoline substitute from turpentine, so maybe the loggers, who really really don't want to return to misery whips and junk their chain saws, will make enough fuel out of pine sap to keep their old Stihl's running.
60 years is far enough out that what we've come to expect to be the steady "march of progress" might reverse. If that happens, restoring trucks will mean doing whatever is necessary to make them run on whatever fuel can be gotten. At that point, roads will be bad and distances short, so simple old 4x4s will be the best rigs to use.