Will someone please give me a logical explination

[TROLL-HOLE-E-O]

Here are some key points missing from this thread:

WORLD OIL SUPPLY IS ARTIFICIALLY LIMITED.
OPEC is a cartel... they keep supply low to keep the prices and their profits high. 10 years ago I paid $0.73/gal because OPEC was "overproducing." Today, gas is SEVEN times as expensive.

EUROPE'S HIGH GAS PRICES ARE SELF IMPOSED.
They are due to huge taxes imposed. $8/gallon? Yes but $3+ is tax in many places. This affects demand and has encouraged more efficient cars. The fact that Euro's have skinnier streets also forces smaller vehicles.

THE US IS A LOW POPULATION DENSITY DEVELOPED COUNTRY.
This means Euros can have better transit systems. This means that Euro's can tolerate higher gas prices because they have shorter to drive. This means that 'mericans all have longer drives than Euros. Vespas wouldn't work as well on 20 mile commutes. This is just a fact of geography AND poor planning going back 50+ years. When you look at Phillipe's map, you see the highest per-capita users are developed and low density. There is a push for mass transit, but do we see any trend towards revising suburban planning? Thank heavens telecommute jobs are on the rise...

A BIG CAR CAN BE MORE EFFICIENT THAN A SMALL CAR
A single smug person in a 40mpg car has a larger carbon footprint than 3 people in a 15mpg SUV. It depends on your regular use. There is a reason that airlines compute passengermiles/gallon, not simply mpg.

THE US DOES HAVE HUGE UNTAPPED OIL RESERVES
Congress just voted to continue the ban on extraction from Oil Shale. The US has the worlds largest known Oil Shale reserves. We have enough oil to 100% self-supply for 100 years. It's simply a matter of cost and will.

THE MILEAGE KEEPS GOING DOWN
Trucks keep getting bigger... so do cars... why do hybrids today get 40mpg but a 1980s CRX got 35mpg without a hybrid? Today's Tacoma is as big as a Tundra from a few years ago! Find me any 1/2 ton truck? Hell, you have trouble finding any 4-door vehicle that is <=1/2 ton. If the prices are sustained, the market will respond, but we truly need an alternative renewable fuel supply. This will stabilize prices too!

I drive an Accord. I am about to switch to something that uses more gas because I need the capacity. Yech...

SUMMIT FOR PRESIDENT !!

[hop]

One more cost comparison:

A pint of Raging Main Ale (92 octane beer equivalent) in the Friday Harbor Ale House = $6

A gallon of 87 at the local land-based Shell station = $4.30

There are times when I think nothing about putting away a few pints an evening with nothing to show for it later except an empty wallet and a headache. Every once in a while something magical and memorable happens but still, when I think of how far I could go on the same $$$ spent on gas instead of being mentally impaired for an evening, I sometimes wonder how stupid my priorities are.

I have a limited amount of disposable income that is allotted into various funds for spending. Maybe if I took money out of my beer fund and put it into my fuel fund I'd get farther (ahem) in life?

[tommyvee]

WOW. The only correct thing in that mess is that supply and demand does set the price. The supply is artificially low, so the price is artificially high. Why does it take laws to keep drilling out of ANWAR? If it were a drop in the bucket it wouldn't be worth the investment and no one freely participating in the free market system would want to bother. That is obviously not the case.
AND, population percentage has nothing to do with how much oil a county should get....it's production. We produce the most good and services,so we need the most oil. Better we burn it than the Chineese. They create far more pollution per unit of production than we do.

Why does it take laws to keep drilling out of "ANWAR"? Well, ANWR stands for Artic National Wildlife Refuge (don't know where you got the "A"), so the laws that created it protect wildlife and not SUV owners. Political action can change that situation, but the mean estimate of 7 billion barrels is about 1 year of US consumption and less than 4 months of world oil consumption, so drilling ANWR would have substantially less impact on oil prices than increasing the CAFE standards, which could reduce US annual consumption by 25% or more and not just for one year.
You can believe anything you want, including that Western Colorado has more oil than the Middle East. But when you go to buy gas, you have to deal with reality in the form of the world petroleum markets. If 2 billion Chinese and Indian people want to buy the same oil to carry 60 people in a bus as you want for an 11 mpg truck, supply and demand will determine the price you pay.
The "oil shale" in Western Colorado has about the energy content of mashed potatoes and is difficult to burn, and requires tremendous amounts of energy to convert into a liquid fuel. Plus the processing would require huge amounts of water that Colorado simply does not have (The Colorado river already dies out before it reachs the ocean, so there is no more water available). No company has an economic method for converting "oil shale" to liquid fuel, and as a mechanical engineer with plenty of energy and product development experience, my opinion is that none of the current experimental methods look likely to succeed.

This thread has gone a long way and I don't want to harsh on the sledheads too much, because we all consume oil and peak oil will change things for everybody. I love international travel (leaving for France on next Friday), but I expect the air travel industry to be radically restructured in the next decade. Renewable powered land, air, and sea travel is technically possible, and when finite fossil fuels are exhausted, I am confident that humans will figure it out. Until then, don't buy stock in airlines.
But the transition is going to be a bitch, and not just for sledheads, but also for the billion people living on a dollar a day or less, and competing for food grain with biofuel purchasers in developed countries. UN estimates are that hundreds of millions of people will have trouble affording adequate food at current prices, which will only go up as we go down the depletion curve.

[PNW Skier]

I have nothing to add to this thread besides I burn copious amounts of fossile fuel and it's fun.

[f2f]

I have nothing to add to this thread besides I burn copious amounts of fossile fuel and it's fun.

myself, i'm more of a greenhouse gas person. i produce instead of consuming.

[summit]

Your attitude was that sleds are a gross excess. Stop and think about how much more camera gear you can bring in and how much more bomber gear the athletes can bring in, how many more remote places you can go, and how many more laps your skiers can do if you have sleds. Sleds = more pics with better equipment (skis and cameras) in more places.

Why don't you stop and think about how many people actually care about those photos? Most people don't ski because of the pretty pictures, most people ski because they enjoy the sport. You're trying to justify your actions by catering to a very small percentage of the demographic.

OMFG you are stupid and presumptive. I do not even own a sled. I do not make my living as a photographer either.

How many people care about the pictures? Well, people seem to buy a lot of skiing magazines which are full of them. Ski companies buy the pictures for advertisements. Athletes want to get published and so do photographers.

You need to pull your head out of your smug presumptive ass.

[snowful]

And now for something completely different.

[whatcomridaz]

Actually I am keeping the trailer I bought for towing with the blazer, cause 4 people and 4 sleds to one truck is a heck of a lot better than 1 or 2 people / sleds to 1 truck.

Might wanna rethink that one, you'll be so far over the GVWR that you won't be allowed to drive it in Canada.

[Lone Star]

i have learned from this thread that we can justify all of our waste if it's in the name of earning a buck.

[whatcomridaz]

I rip on it because I've made a conscious decision a few years ago to sell my sled and to not use them anymore. The ski industry existed for 100 years before snowmobiles became popular and I guarantee if you took them away tomorrow it would continue to exist. I enjoy skiing more now than I did at any point in the past. Anyway you turn it around snowmobiles are inefficient, noisy and more cause pollution than any vehicle on the road. Older sleds emit up to 30% of their fuel and oil unburned. Talk about wastage.

You're no different than the commuters in Vancouver. Instead of idling through traffic on the highway you rip up to the alpine going 90km/h while spitting out gas, exhaust and noise. Is that your choice? Yes. But it is also my right to be a bastard when people like you whine and complain that they are paying to much to destroy OUR environment.

IMO they should levee massive environmental surcharges on all two stroke engines to make the users pay for their waste. Even better will be the day when they outright ban two stroke engines.

WORD!!!

So you couldn't get the balance eh? Sucks to be you, sledding at the beginner stage for years while trying to do simple hill climbs.

Bummer to be a loser

[BakerBoy]

Might wanna rethink that one, you'll be so far over the GVWR that you won't be allowed to drive it in Canada.

Jeenyus there bought a truck with a bed that won't take a sled deck either. As a result, his math becomes fuzzy, because he's only got a 2 place trailer, and nobody wants to go sledding with him.

[whatcomridaz]

I'm not exactly sure why you're quoting me and talking as if I'm trying to be a downer. Although, I think you and powslut are at almost the same place, you agree that it's your lifestyle choices that lead you to your consumption level and you've both justified to yourselves that level.

That said- I would contend that while certainly a biggish PITA to deal with, a trailer built with an eye toward wheeling will go some pretty fucking crazy places. Perhaps you've never seen a trailer built for off road but I can assure you that if you can drive a chevy pickup with two sleds on the deck there you could drive a properly set up trailer with two sleds behind a 4wd transit/sprinter (or an SUV).

Not a bloody chance

2 sleds on a sled deck=increased traction

2 sleds on a trailer behind a car=increased drag and minimal tongue weight while going up hill

[philippeR]

This thread is awesome!

As a marine biologist working for the USFS (huh?), I burn an average of 10 gals of unleaded a day in my 17' Boston Whaler. Looking back through our log books had our daily fuel costs at about $22 in 1999. Now we are spending $50 a day. Luckily these costs are coming from all of our collective pockets and not just my own, so my personal expenditure is actually quite low ($50 per day / ~300,000,000 people = $1.67e-7 per person per day). Of course I know that not everyone in the US is actually paying taxes so it is probably a bit higher than that, but I figure if I find a penny on the ground each day I'm more than covered.

Plus, I'm doing my part to save the world while I'm burning this gas, so that's gotta count for something. Hell, today we even picked up a plastic bucket that was floating around while we were surveying! We're the greenest Federales out there!

Edit: I did have reservations about picking up that bucket, as it was providing habitat for a bunch of algae and a few crustaceans that are now dying a slow miserable death in my backyard. Oh well. Maybe we're not so green after all.

[whatcomridaz]

Jeenyus there bought a truck with a bed that won't take a sled deck either. As a result, his math becomes fuzzy, because he's only got a 2 place trailer, and nobody wants to go sledding with him.

Ouch that's some serious poor planning, Although I told him last weekend that toytec would fab one up for him for under 2K. It's not perfect but it'll fit. Sure doesn't help his weight problem but it'll get him up Glacier Creek.

[hemas]

Finn's certainly use less gas than Americans, but do they use less energy? According to Statistics Finland, total energy use in 2006 (the last year for which data was available) total usage was 1,492 petajoules (<=> 1.492 exajoules). See (http://www.stat.fi/til/ekul/index_en.html).

The energy usage in the US as a whole in 2005 was 105,000 terajoules (<=> 105 exajoules). See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_..._United_States).


With a US population of 300 million and a Finland population of around 5 million this translates into 350 petajoules per million for the US, and 298 petajoules per million for Finland. As such a 'typical' American uses roughly 17% more energy than a 'typical' Finn.

The closest comparable in the US to a state having a European style transportation infrastructure and population distribution to something like Finland would be New York. (Densely populated costal area with large sparsely populated hinterland, well developed mass transit in the urban areas). Admittedly the climate in New York isn't as bad as Finland's, but much of the state’s climate is no better (and in many cases worse) than Finland’s costal regions where the majority of the population lives.

Total energy use per capita in New York state is roughly 60% of the median among US states and about 70% of the average for Finland. See
(http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/states/s...e_per_cap.html) . This is in spite of the fact that energy prices in the US (and in particular, New York) both historically and currently were and are much lower than in Europe.

Why yes, we do consume a lot of energy... Then again, I don't see a lot of paper mills in New York, or any other heavy industry...

In 2002, Finland produced 12.8 Million tons of paper. where as in 2001, the US produced 80.66 million metric tons. Only 7 times as much...
http://www.unece.org/trade/timber/mi...61/finland.doc
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/resear...2003/print.htm

And then there's this small flaw:

Finland’s costal regions where the majority of the population lives.

Again, that simply isn't true, as quite a few people and reasonably big cities (in Finlands scale) are in the middle of the country (eg. Tampere, Finlands 3rd largest city). I won't even go to the climate or weather...

So add up the fact that in Finland and Sweden you have a high degree of effective urbanization and in non-urbanized parts of Norway you can't drive out of the fjord, then take the gasoline usage numbers and multiply by 2 and pretty quickly you are at fuel usage numbers comparable to similar parts of the US and total energy usage numbers that are in many cases worse.

Again, not complitely true. Yes, there has been some degree of effective urbanization near the bigger cities. Yet at least 1/3 if not more lives in the sparcely populated countryside (both in Finland and Sweden). And Norway, well they do have good roads and then they have these nifty tunnels and ferries that take people accross the fjords or through the mountains.



So why not look at Germany... Population density is 596/sq mi, area is 137,847 sq mi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany). Their gas consumption per capita is a bit under 110 gallons... And they don't have that big population centers (like southern Finland). Plus their public transport nextwork was pretty much blow to pieces in 1940's..

As for total energy consumption... well Germany used a whopping 14.2 exajoules. So around 170 petajoules per million inhabitants... And Germany also has a lot of heavy industry (which included paper mills, and as we all know heavy industry consumes a lot of energy).
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/ency...ri-con-ger.htm

[Gripen]

So why not look at Germany... Population density is 596/sq mi, area is 137,847 sq mi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany). Their gas consumption per capita is a bit under 110 gallons... And they don't have that big population centers (like southern Finland). Plus their public transport nextwork was pretty much blow to pieces in 1940's..
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/ency...ri-con-ger.htm

Ironically enough.... guess who rebuilt that public transport system?

Oh the irony!

[GoNads]

Jeenyus there bought a truck with a bed that won't take a sled deck either. As a result, his math becomes fuzzy, because he's only got a 2 place trailer, and nobody wants to go sledding with him.

He got a Tundra right? If its this years it'll take a bulldog deck for sure. Chris Browner has that setup, I grabbed my deck 2nd hand from him after they threw a newer shinier one his way. But a bulldog deck will run you 3200$ new, minimum. They're based out of Chilliwack though.

And whatcomriderz is right, you get a lot better traction with weight over the rear wheels than weight being towed behind. I doubt you could get a trailer to the snow line here in whistler right now, especially with all the creek cuts. Decommissioned logging roads are near impossible with a trailer.

[Sparky]

Truck owners - 0
Sledneckers - 0
Euros - 0
Americans - -1
Big Oil - +4

Can we have a score update please?

What with the Americans no longer being sabotaged by home goals (ranting trolls) and the Euros/Scandis off to an early start today, things must have moved on?

[Viva]

In 2002, Finland produced 12.8 Million tons of paper.

Let's keep this relevant. Just how much of that paper went into the making of porn magazines?

[philippeR]

They still print porn magazines ?
I thought the only paper used by the porn industry were tissues.

[DougW]

Then again, I don't see a lot of paper mills in New York, or any other heavy industry...

In 2002, Finland produced 12.8 Million tons of paper. where as in 2001, the US produced 80.66 million metric tons. Only 7 times as much...

Might not want to use that unless the papermill is accounting for the wood produced energy. A modern kraft mill is almost energy neutral and can export electrical power without burning extra wood waste brought in. Lots of mills bring in hog fuel, waste from sawmills , and burn in in their boilers so can produce more power and sell.

Its all about habits. I remember cat skiing with a bunch of Norwegians. One was saying that lot of them had cabins in the mountains which they skied up to. Sleds were not allowed so people skied. They way he referred to sleds was like they were something dirty. Norway there's a country which per person has more net worth than anybody. But taxes the consumption of oil.

[Gunder]

Ouch that's some serious poor planning, Although I told him last weekend that toytec would fab one up for him for under 2K. It's not perfect but it'll fit. Sure doesn't help his weight problem but it'll get him up Glacier Creek.

Jesses fuck guys. Two sleds on trailer, and two on a deck would still be well with in the GVW.

Did the research, I can get a alu sled deck and with two sleds i am still easily under the bed weight for the truck. I will need to get air bags but thats not that big of a deal..... jsut got to sell some more porn to pay for it all.

[Toadman]

Seems like gas should cost more than milk.

Depending on where you're at in the country, it does. If you buy diesel, most likely you're paying more than you would for a gallon of 2&#37;. I would expect mags to start whining when gas is more than a six pack of beer. It's been along time since I bought a 6 pack of PBR, anoyone know the price on a sixer of PBR?

Damn, two page tops on this thread - FKNA!

[WWCD]

With everything spread out, what do you do when you get off the train?

PS I wish we had high speed trains. I'd definitely ride them... but I'd be limited in where I would because of the need to go places once off. It would work better on the coasts than in the heartland.

I don't think a country-wide mass transit system similar to Europe is too far fetched.

I know it's not a perfect interpretation, but you can assume more lights = more people. It is also very easy to pick out most of the main interstates, and only becomes easier as to follow them as you get into more rural areas. This makes it very easy to assume most of the population already lives very near to the interstate system. Seems to me a large percentage of the population would be serviced by just using the plans laid out by the interstates.



And Europe just for comparison.

[PNW Skier]

He got a Tundra right? If its this years it'll take a bulldog deck for sure. Chris Browner has that setup, I grabbed my deck 2nd hand from him after they threw a newer shinier one his way. But a bulldog deck will run you 3200$ new, minimum. They're based out of Chilliwack though.

And whatcomriderz is right, you get a lot better traction with weight over the rear wheels than weight being towed behind. I doubt you could get a trailer to the snow line here in whistler right now, especially with all the creek cuts. Decommissioned logging roads are near impossible with a trailer.

Tundra? Their website shows them having a capacity of 1580 pounds.

Alluminum sled decks - typicaly around 320 pounds plus the ramp which we'll conservatively say they're 40 pounds so you've got 360 pounds of deck.

a 2006 skidoo 800 weighs 565 pounds wet X2 is - 1130pounds


already we're at 1490 pounds.

Add two people at 150 pounds a piece and you're overweight. Plus the weight of your skis and gear and recovery equipment and extra gas....

I'm sure the Tundra will handle it but if a cop really feels like being an ass you're gettin' a ticket.

This, Nads, is why you and I own 2500hds. My truck will carry 3194 pounds and yours 3217. That's enough capacity to (legally) load up four people, all the gear they can carry, two sleds and hell tow a four place enclosed if you really need to.