Ugo Bardi reports a summary of a September press release from the Italian “Unione Petrolifera” in “Italy implodes” on his Cassandra’s Legacy blog
Automotive fuels have shown the following trends: gasoline has seen a reduction of 18.2% in consumption while diesel fuel has seen a 15.6% reduction, both compared with September 2011. Summed together, the consumption of the two fuels was 16.3% lower than in Sept 2011. In this month, the sales of new cars have shown a contraction of 25.5% compared with Sept 2011. The first nine months of 2012 have seen a contraction of 20.4% in the sales of new cars.
Those falls in the space of a year are breathtaking. Fuel and auto sales are falling in the UK too, but nowhere near so far or so fast.
The difference is due more to Quantitative Easing than to fundamental economic differences. Outside the euro, and with some of its own oil remaining the UK can delay the day of reckoning but it cannot avoid its appointment with destiny (in the form of declining ERoEI) for ever.
Italy is the UK writ larger and sooner, and Spain and France are not far behind. Three of Europe’s ‘big five’ auto economies are undergoing unprecedented contraction.
This collapse will expose how deeply the ‘real’ (i.e manufacturing and trading) economies of these countries, as well as the UK and Germany, rely on auto making, trading and servicing.
Some of the commenters on Bardi’s blog entry view what’s happening as simply a cyclical economic downturn. One even speculates that the ‘savings’ Italians are making from eschewing cars and gasoline will flow into other domestically-made goods and services.
Energy slaves
Savings? There are no meaningful savings when the average European person requires the daily services of 200 ‘energy slaves’ – 95% of which come from fossil fuels.
What’s happening in Italy (and Spain and France) is deadly serious. It is the weakening and incipient collapse of a main pillar of the real economy.
Moreover, it is a positive feed back loop. If the economy does not burn oil, it doesn’t generate the real purchasing power to buy and drive autos. Without auto activity, the country burns less oil.
The simple answer would be to pump cheaper oil into Italy and Europe’s other struggling economies. But the end of ‘easy’ oil and declining net exports have blocked that escape route.
For once, Senna the Soothsayer from the old BBC sitcom Up Pompeii would be on the money with her catchphrase “Woe, woe and thrice woe.”
All the same, I’ll give the last word to a 21st century Cassandra. No, not Bardi but Massimo de Carlo of the “Mondo Elettrico” blog:
I have no words. An abyss, an abyss, an abyss. No movement because there is no work. No consumption because there is no money. Oil is not used because it is not there. Stop.
QuadRanting 