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Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society
The [socially progressive] Canadian/ Agora Cosmopolitan, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada ^ | 12 January 2008 | James Howard Kunstler

Posted on 01/16/2008 3:45:36 PM PST by dufekin

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To: RockinRight

“A problem with no real easy solution.”

Daunting but not that difficult in my view. From the microperspective, it’s a problem that’s easily resolved: get married, have as many children as possible, and raise them responsibly.

From the macro perspective, I think it’s primarily a problem with tax policy; families with children are taxed at an unconscionable rate (especially in the U.S.) and are effectively punished for having children. In the long run, the problem is going to correct itself. We just might not like the solution. Ultimately, those who breed in spite of the tax ramifications of doing so will prevail.

The future belongs to the fertile.


101 posted on 01/17/2008 7:31:13 AM PST by RKBA Democrat (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!)
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To: RKBA Democrat
Personally my wife and I will do our part.

From the macro perspective, I think it’s primarily a problem with tax policy; families with children are taxed at an unconscionable rate (especially in the U.S.) and are effectively punished for having children. In the long run, the problem is going to correct itself. We just might not like the solution. Ultimately, those who breed in spite of the tax ramifications of doing so will prevail.

Perhaps I'm wrong because I have no kids yet, but don't you pay less tax the more kids you have?

102 posted on 01/17/2008 7:36:28 AM PST by RockinRight (Huck(abee, not the Freeper Huck) Sucks.)
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To: discostu; RockinRight
No amount of rezoning now will make Tucson or Phoenix or LA not sprawling cities.

I could live like that when I was young and single...but my wife and I wouldn’t want to raise our (future) kids there. We’re more traditional, we want a real yard for kids to play in, swingsets, parks, that kind of stuff...not some high density urban concrete jungle.

A lot of people are like that, and I don't think my re-zoning answer is likely to happen. However, this exercise was to imagine a post oil society, with the author only offering a 19th century alternative. If we really ran out of oil, it would become cost effecetive to rebuild our cities.

Beijing is a city where only 4% of the population of 15 million own cars. Yes, it is polluted, but from factors that would not translate over here.

As for not having a pace to plug in a plug-in, we'll be surprised how fast people will make changes to their houses/apartment buildings to adopt to them. Having a house without a convenient way to plug in a car will be like a house without a place for a washer and dryer.

103 posted on 01/17/2008 8:41:50 AM PST by Vince Ferrer
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To: dufekin

This is moonbattery from someone who considers the destruction of modern civilization to be an end in itself — scaring people with “insoluble” energy supply problems (which can in fact be solved in any or a number of ways, such as nuclear to provide the base electric load and energy input for synthetic fuel production) is simply a means to that end.


104 posted on 01/17/2008 8:49:13 AM PST by steve-b (Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. --RAH)
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To: piytar
In short, in 5 years oil will be a thing of the past except for mfg. and legacy (i.e., your current car) uses. Gasoline powered cars won’t vanish overnight, but their numbers will go down significantly over time, and then the law of supply and demand will crush oil prices.

I think it'll take longer than 5 years, but I definitely expect to see the day when we can tell the barbarians to use their oil as camel lube.

105 posted on 01/17/2008 8:50:38 AM PST by steve-b (Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. --RAH)
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To: facedown
"Kunstler, who majored in Theater at college and has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates, made similar predictions for Y2K as he makes for peak oil.[5][6] Kunstler responds to this criticism by saying that a Y2K catastrophe was averted by the hundreds of billions of dollars that were spent fixing the problem, a lot of it "in secret," he claims.[7]"
It would appear that he's still majoring in theater.

"Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future!"

106 posted on 01/17/2008 8:54:10 AM PST by steve-b (Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. --RAH)
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To: Old Professer
The reason we saw this, in my opinion, was that inertia combined with sheer luck to keep the finance sector decoupled from reality....

OMGWTFBBQ -- this guy calling somebody else "decoupled from reality" is like Michael Moore calling somebody else "fatso".

107 posted on 01/17/2008 8:58:33 AM PST by steve-b (Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. --RAH)
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To: RKBA Democrat

Nonsense. In fact, there is a social-engineering subsidy (child tax deduction) for it.


108 posted on 01/17/2008 9:02:32 AM PST by steve-b (Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. --RAH)
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To: DLfromthedesert

A healthy person can walk that in two hours. I appreciate the personal evaluation BTW, but it is useless at this point.


109 posted on 01/17/2008 9:02:37 AM PST by RightWhale (Dean Koonz is good, but my favorite authors are Dun and Bradstreet)
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To: Vince Ferrer

I don’t think it could ever become cost effective to rebuild our cities. To make Tucson not sprawling means getting rid of the homes and workplaces of over a million people, trying to get the city and a half dozen surrounding incorporated areas to agree to a remerge structure, and rebuilding something “efficient”. And that’s just a fairly small southwestern city, trying to de-car LA or Phoenix of Dallas would be job 10 times as large.

Beijing is an old style city, it has absolutely no functional relationship to how a Tucson or Phoenix exists. Might as well compare us to NYC, they’re just different places. The big “problem” for southwestern cities is we didn’t grow up we grew out, where northeastern US cities followed the European model of building multistory buildings pretty much from the first settlement, the southwest didn’t. When I first got to Tucson during the Ford administration you could count on your fingers the number of multi-story homes in town, you could count on one hand the number of semi-skyscrapers (there were 4). By the time US settlers got to the southwest they had grown accustomed to a concept of seemingly infinite space, and because wider is always easier to build than taller that’s how the towns out here were built. The ranch style house is the classic symbol of SW building, you take what would be a two story house in NYC or Chicago, lop off the 2nd floor, put it behind the 1st floor so the make an L and walla you now have the same amount of living space taking up twice as much real estate.

Sorry but such a thing just won’t happen. The plug-in cars just won’t cut it down here. There’s no room to plug in and the retro-fit would be too expensive, most people will find ways to avoid it. Add to that the fact that most of the current plug-ins just plain do not have even half the range they’d need for your average person down here to use them for their daily commutes and the whole issue is a non-starter.

The reality is the original author failed on his first supposition, any post oil American society still does need to handle the car, in a real way. Which means no plug-ins, nothing less than 200 miles on a refill (recharge, whatever), and no redesign of existing cities already filled with millions of people. Basically what you and he are outlining requires a complete collapse of society, a la bad 70s sci-fi, which is no more likely than us completely running out of oil.


110 posted on 01/17/2008 9:02:56 AM PST by discostu (a mountain is something you don't want to %^&* with)
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To: piytar
Yeah, and we will have a man on Mars by the year 2000.

It never happened, and will not happen for some time to come.

Oil and gas will be the predominant energy source for at least another 50 years. It's still being made naturally and is still abundant, although harder to extract and find.

Natural gas is very abundant.

Technology will eventually change this but not until hydrocarbons are nearly depleted. This won't happen for many decades.

The age of oil is far from over. It's always going to be a matter of convenience and cost. Nuclear is good, but disposal of the byproducts remain a serious problem. This is going to be solved one day, by storage on the moon, but we are at least 20 years or more from that. Until then, nuclear will not thrive to replace hydrocarbons.

In the interim, clean coal would be our best bet.

111 posted on 01/17/2008 9:03:34 AM PST by Cold Heat (Mitt....2008)
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To: RightWhale

10 miles is closer to a 3 hour walk, I used to do a lot of walking in my poor days, but really who wants to. Every part of the country when that kind of walk is at least seriously unpleasant if not outright dangerous. I mean you live in Alaska, do you really want to spend 3 hours walking to work right now? I did it in Tucson in a few Julys and Augusts and I can tell you it really sucked and I did run into dehydration problems sometimes. Then there’s the knee problems I developed, that kind of traveling really blows, especially when you remember that it’s a 20 minute drive.

That’s why we developed a car culture in America, we have the wealth to chose the best method of transportation and cars are the best. Walking sucks and is dangerous and damaging over the long haul, horses aren’t much faster than walking and are extremely high maintenance, bikes have the same weather problems as walking, public transportation is horribly inefficient in spread out cities (which is why I became a walker, I could actually walk most places faster than the bus) and still has the weather problems (gotta get to the bus stop somehow). Cars are fast, climate controlled, and leave and arrive when and where you chose.


112 posted on 01/17/2008 9:11:50 AM PST by discostu (a mountain is something you don't want to %^&* with)
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To: RockinRight

I hear you.

1. I didn’t read the posted article.
2. Just gave my thoughts on conservation.
3. Did not recommend that people give up their cars.
4. Stated that, where I live, people could reduce car use as public transit is plentiful and they could use the exercise.
5. That is all.

P.S. I would much rather take a train than fly.


113 posted on 01/17/2008 9:15:43 AM PST by La Enchiladita (Psalm 27)
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To: steve-b

LOL, but Criswell had the hair for it.


114 posted on 01/17/2008 9:18:16 AM PST by facedown (Armed in the Heartland)
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To: RockinRight

Some excellent designs have been developed in the former Soviet Union. What color of gray concrete do you prefer?


115 posted on 01/17/2008 9:21:32 AM PST by RightWhale (Dean Koonz is good, but my favorite authors are Dun and Bradstreet)
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To: discostu

Which came first, the modern gasoline car or the city planners who put everything you need so far from where you live you have to have wheels and there are no sidewalks? All hail Edison for freeing us from oil dependency and all hail Ford for making us even more oil dependent.


116 posted on 01/17/2008 9:25:59 AM PST by RightWhale (Dean Koonz is good, but my favorite authors are Dun and Bradstreet)
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To: RightWhale

Define “everything you need”, the reality is cars shrunk the world. Where I live and where I work used to be a day trip apart, I’ve seen the diaries of a kid that grew up in my neighborhood in the 1800s, going shopping near where I work was the whole day, an hour or so to prep the horses, a couple hours ride, lunch, shopping, 2 hours back and then another hour to clean up the horse. Of course they were considered two different towns then, but clearly “everything you need” was fairly far apart long before cars or city planners.


117 posted on 01/17/2008 9:31:05 AM PST by discostu (a mountain is something you don't want to %^&* with)
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To: RightWhale

We need electric cars and nuke power.


118 posted on 01/17/2008 9:32:10 AM PST by RockinRight (Huck(abee, not the Freeper Huck) Sucks.)
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To: Cold Heat

The disposal of nuclear by-products is a purely political problem, not a technical one. If the choice is building more nuclear plants or suffering any significant decay in middle-class standards of living, the nuclear plants will get built and the moonbats like this author will be able to do nothing but wail and gnash their teeth.


119 posted on 01/17/2008 9:44:24 AM PST by steve-b (Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. --RAH)
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To: RockinRight

“Perhaps I’m wrong because I have no kids yet, but don’t you pay less tax the more kids you have?”

The reduction in your Federal income tax is laughable. For 2007, the deduction for each dependent is $3,400. So assuming you’re in the 25% bracket, you’re talking an actual reduction in your income taxes of $850 per child. And that pittance is likely to be offset by the higher property taxes you’ll pay for a larger house.

Our tax policies are distinctly anti-child and anti-family.

I hope you’ll have plenty of kids, but don’t do it in the expectation of receiving a break on your taxes.


120 posted on 01/17/2008 5:17:30 PM PST by RKBA Democrat (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!)
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