Posted on 01/16/2008 3:45:36 PM PST by dufekin
Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being “Mister Gloom’n’doom,” or for “not offering any solutions” to our looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here are my suggestions:
1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed “greens” and political “progressives” are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.
2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller and finer scale, and will require more human labour.
The value-added activities associated with farming — e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils — will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America’s young people (if they can unplug their iPods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform, not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We’ll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be re-inhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications.
The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature — as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components — at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken.
The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.
4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire U.S. trucking system). Get used to it. Don’t waste your society’s remaining resources trying to prop up car and truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit.
Let’s start with railroads, and let’s make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbours, and also for our inland river and canal systems — including the towns associated with them.
The great harbour towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind — yes, sailing ships. It’s for real. Lots to do here. Put down your iPod and get busy.
5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies of scale (and kill local economies) — they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the “warehouses on wheels” of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil.
The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public’s acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick by brick and inventory by inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned “middlemen”).
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead.
Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don’t want to work for a big predatory corporation? There’s lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.
6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear.
As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America’s heyday of manufacturing (1900–1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We’re going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don’t know yet how we’re going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.
7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to an end. It was fun for a while. We liked “Citizen Kane” and the Beatles. But we’re going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We’re going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We’re going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery makers, and singers. We’ll need theatre managers and stage-hands.
The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).
8. We’ll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less affluent society, we probably won’t be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away.
Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it.
But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage — and, in any case, will probably out-perform today’s average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line of work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called “doctoring.” Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let’s hope that we don’t slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.
10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail — everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you.
An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.
So, that’s the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.
“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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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!"
OMGWTFBBQ -- this guy calling somebody else "decoupled from reality" is like Michael Moore calling somebody else "fatso".
Nonsense. In fact, there is a social-engineering subsidy (child tax deduction) for it.
A healthy person can walk that in two hours. I appreciate the personal evaluation BTW, but it is useless at this point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LOL, but Criswell had the hair for it.
Some excellent designs have been developed in the former Soviet Union. What color of gray concrete do you prefer?
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.
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.
We need electric cars and nuke power.
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.
“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.
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