One thing I always look at in post-apocalyptic literature is how they treat transportation: notably, are people still driving cars and how long can they do so and under what conditions?

Entering our current oil crunch, I think it’s obvious how fragile the ecosystem around cars are, but just letting the car sit unused and untreated for as little as a month can start to introduce\ problems. The idea that you can just pop into a car that’s been abandoned for 3 years, pull the keys out from behind the visor, and start driving is unrealistic.

  • Best: The Postman. We’re back to walking and riding horses.

  • Good: The Last of Us, Season 1. People walk or ride horses, when our heroes DO find a working truck, it is treated as the jackpot it is–and I think it even had a spare gas tank in the back to maximize distance traveled to harvest gasoline. Realistically, gas as a fuel for fires would be a valuable enough commodity that it would have been scavenged, but they need to do some traveling and high speed dragons are not available in this genre (Reign of Fire aside).

  • Worst: Jericho. Nuclear explosions in the US pretty much wreck everything and despite the town of Jericho being completely isolated, people just drive their pickup trucks around all seasons long without comment. Horses and bicycles are maddeningly present but rarely used. I think the show thought American audiences could accept a premise where the federal government collapses after multiple nuclear strikes, but not where people in Kansas got off oil dependency–that would be too out there.

  • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksOP
    5·
    3 days ago

    Obtain good-quality oil. The easiest oils to use for biodiesel are neutral vegetable oils like canola, corn, and sunflower oil

    I think this where the crunch would come in. Biodiesels are economically feasible because of factory farming, which have massive carbon inputs. Could a small community farm enough biodiesel to make the investment in that bushy tech tree worthwhile? I tend to doubt it.

    • gloktawasright@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 days ago

      Yeah I’m inclined to agree with you. More likely to me would be sourcing and preserving some of those oils so you have a more stable mid term fuel source, but eventually when that runs out you’d need to pivot to other options.

      Something like use cars and motorbikes for 1-2 years, then convert to other fuels based on availability and knowhow for the next however many years, then back to horses.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      3 days ago

      In terms of quantity, it depends on competition from food production, basically.

      Modern fertilizer and pesticides allow you to get a much higher yield on the same land, and modern farming vehicles allow you to plant and harvest whatever oil crops without an army of labourers. If you had a ton of idle land, because all the urban people are dead, it reduces to the second problem.

      Pressing/steeping the oil out of it is another challenge. Probably surmountable, although it’s still going to cost a lot more than it does now.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 days ago

      of factory farming, which have massive carbon inputs

      The fuel used to run the tractors can itself also be biodiesel.

      • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksOP
        1·
        2 days ago

        Absolutely! The question are is you want to have an agricultural system with such a fragile link in the chain. And modern factory farming isn’t just “a tractor”, which can certainly help small scale operations. I can see a tractor being an adjunct, but probably supporting a large group of farmers, who, at any rate, probably need to keep busy anyway.

          • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksOP
            1·
            2 days ago

            Because there are a lot of parts on the tractor that might need to be repaired and replaced. Even if you had access to everything you need, how many people are going to know how to do it?

            And timing is critical in faring, so you’d have to get the tractor repaired quickly if anything goes wrong.

            So if you lose one person or can’t fix one part quickly enough, your entire agriculture system falls apart if its based around a tractor.

            A system built around human labor or even animal labor is much more resilient.

            • grue@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 days ago

              We were talking about carbon inputs and biodiesel, not reliability. Growing biodiesel has no carbon inputs if the farm itself runs on biodiesel.