Interamnia

I have to say (and I have said it elsewhere) that I quite like this store. Apart from the fun of working out the contents of things from the endless euro-names, LIDLs has big central bins of "stuff" that change on a frequent basis. It's where my laser-level (£8.99) and thread-cutting tools (£4.99) came from, for example.

But this week is classy, in the extreme.

Just beyond the ridiculously cheap imported canned carrots (which are way too salty) were a heaped stack of ...

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Oil is ~$120 per barrel, and possibly rising to $200 by the end of the year. So it's just about doubled in price in one year, and likely to do the same the next...

We can assume - with a finite resource, and one sold into a clearly rapidly growing market - that there has to be a peak oil moment, though it's difficult to place this instant until it's a few years behind us. Estimates from the Hirsch Report put this peak around about 2010 - though it might have already occurred. No matter whether it's a few years one way or another, this decade is the defining turning point of the Oil Age.

The likely outcome from finite resources and a growing market? The price will continue to rise.

Now that obviously affects car-owners directly. My daily commute is 20 kilometres, each way. My car burns 7.5 litres of petrol (currently at £1.08 per litre) every 100 km. With parking charges, my daily cost for the "privilege" of commuting to work is just about £5.00.

I can currently commute by train for a lesser amount - it's £4.70 - but that entails a total of five miles of walking in any and all weathers.

At what point do I ditch the car and take the train? I suspect it's going to be once the car trip costs around two to three times the rail trip - and that could be in just a couple of years' time...

The impact of the end of oil could be a lot closer to the ordinary Joe than people have perhaps considered, notwithstanding rising food, heating and manufacturing costs...

Having borrowed it from the library, I've just finished Robert Zubrin's 1996 book: The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.

It's an interesting read.

Zubrin, rightly appalled by the likely 450G$ pricetag of any Mars' mission which followed NASA's 1989 90-day study, realised that there had to be a cheaper way to get footprints on the regolith. He came up with some neat ideas for this way, called it Mars Direct, estimates a mere 20-40G$ cost, and this book is the easily-digested manual of how to do it.

The problem (and I'm writing this as a pro-Mars fanatic who, I suspect, would have lapped up this sort of talk thirty years' ago) is in the title - he makes no Case for Mars.

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Quote from today's Guardian, on the back of Paris and London's anti-Chinese demonstrations:

"May the Olympic flame never expire." Adolf Hitler

(The procession of the torch was introduced during the Berlin Olympics of '36.)