Matt Wald has a story in this morning’s New York Times that illustrates what increasingly seems like the core issue associated with the energy transformation now underway. Wald writes about a rapid rise in demand for Amtrak train tickets, which is turning out to be more cost-effective ways to get around. Market forces may have kicked into high gear with remarkable suddenness. But the things we need to do to respond involve a massive shift in the societal infrastructure that is currently based on cheap energy:

Today Amtrak has 632 usable rail cars, and dozens more are worn out or damaged but could be reconditioned and put into service at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each.

And it needs to buy new rail cars soon. Its Amfleet cars, the ones recognizable to riders as the old Metroliners, are more than 30 years old. And the Acela trains, which have been operating about eight years, have about a million miles on them.

Writing specifications for bids, picking a vendor and waiting for delivery takes years, even if the money is in hand.

The Economist, in this week’s edition, has a remarkably optimistic take on the global energy picture:

Wind power is taking on natural gas, which has risen in price in sympathy with oil. Wind is closing in on the price of coal, as well. Solar energy is a few years behind, but the most modern systems already promise wind-like prices. Indeed, both industries are so successful that manufacturers cannot keep up, and supply bottlenecks are forcing prices higher than they otherwise would be. It would help if coal—the cheapest fuel for making electricity—were taxed to pay for the climate-changing effects of the carbon dioxide produced when it burns, but even without such a tax, some ambitious entrepreneurs are already talking of alternatives that are cheaper than coal.

We’ve been trying at the newspaper to measure and explain the changes afoot as the price of energy soars. My colleague Lloyd Jojola had a great piece this morning looking at bus ridership, which has exploded:

One commuter route has seen passenger loads more than double in the past couple months.
ABQ Ride boardings surpassed 909,000 in May, an 8 percent increase compared with the same month last year. But more marked increases have occurred on bus routes that largely serve commuters, causing the transit agency to make changes to accommodate more ridership.
“Our bigger increases have been in the commuter routes, and they have been over the last couple of months vs. the first part of the fiscal year,” said Art Martinez, a Transit Department spokesman. “We were definitely seeing steady growth, but we’re seeing spikes in the last couple of months.”

We’re in uncharted territory here with respect to the elasticity associated with rising gas prices. There’s good evidence (see this CBO study, for example) that behavior changes in both short-term ways (choosing the transit alternative, driving more slowly) and longer term ways (buying a smaller car). In the past, the effects have been tiny. But so have the price increases, really. The price increases today are not tiny. I crave numbers to better measure the resulting effects right now. Every data point I’ve been able to find suggests the results this spring and summer have been much larger.

Check out energy celebrity Al Zelicoff’s latest energy-saving tip. But for the real action, you must watch Al and Troy’s latest energy tips and piano bar video.

I’ve been picking up and putting down Daniel Yergin’s The Prize for the last few months. It’s both a delight and infuriating, for the same reason. Yergin clearly loves what he’s writing about, so he writes about it a lot. I keep wishing he’d get on with things, but his side trips are not without merit.

Given the current global situation, I was fascinated by his discussion of the situation in the 1920s:

A fear of imminent depletion of oil resources – indeed, a virtual obsession – gripped the American oil industry and many in government at the end of World War I and well into the early 1920s.

There was, at the time, much discussion of the promise of oil shales in Colorado (has it ever been thus, right around the corner?) And then there is this:

[T]he British government had given over two acres in Dorset to the cultivation of Jerusalem artichokes in the hope that this plant could produce alcohol in commercial quantities to be used as automobile fuel.

Apparently the Jerusalem artichoke has extremely high carbohydrate content, which makes it a good for making ethanol.