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.
I agree with your sentiment; however, I foresee drastically increasing fuel costs, especially under a Democratic administration, Kyoto-style immutable international treaties stifling the economy, and a Democratic Congress. Very few people personally benefit from their economy-killing policies while many suffer greatly, especially the paupers whom they purport to rescue. But look at the incomprehensibly increasing intransigence of the Congress on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling issue. If only capitalists dominated the Congress...
Plug ins will use the power grid, of course, but for the most part during off peak hours. I don’t have any numbers handy, but I have read we can charge a lot of them by simply running our generators during off peak hours, which makes the switch largely invisible to NIMBYs who don’t want any new power stations. By the time we need new power stations, it will be an irreversible trend. Plug ins require the least amount of infrastructure changes early on amoung any of our transportation alternatives.
Ah, good find. I worked in Y2K remediation and most of the threat was bogus. We corrected for many things that would never happen. Simply put, the fear of malfunction caused by rollover in a chip's date function assumed that the date was relevant to the process being performed and also that the date was synchronized with the current date (Remember the computers that reset themselves to Jan 1, 1980 or something similar? A door opening chip that was regularly powered off without saving a date to non-volatile storage would like spend its whole life in the 1980s, never seeing Y2K. There are bunches of similar examples.) Y2K agitation can be compared to the movie Reefer Madness.
Ok. The handicapped, elderly, asthmatics, arthritic, etc., all can't work.
If the snow plows aren't running then a ten mile walk (bicycles are not good in 2 ft of snow) in Minnesota takes 5 or so hours each way. Texas heat and humidity?
Some people live where they live because they can afford it. A house within walking distance from downtown Houston is beyond most people's grasp. Your's too I expect.
How many sheets of plywood can one carry on a bicycle?
Your solution is no solution. In fact it is stupid.
Plug-in hybrids? For at least 10 more years, the length of time it takes to build a nuclear power plant, anything that plugs in will get 52% of its energy by burning coal. Plug-in hybrids = Coal-fired hybrids.
We have the ability to solve all of America’s energy problems with nuke FISSION, if the greenies (probably funded by OPEC) would just get out of the way. A car could have battery power for short hops, plus a small gas engine for longer trips
????
Production values have increased since 2004. Also, selecting 2004 as your comparison year is deceptive as it was the largest production increase in decades. Total petroleum production rarely makes great increases following a very large increase.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/RecentTotalOilSupplyBarrelsperDay.xls
Pessemistic pablum from a typical leftist who doesn’t understand economics. Lunatic ‘solutions’ to a problem that doesn’t exist.
At the risk of preaching to the choir (since FReepers do tend to understand economics): as oil prices rise, sources of oil (like oil shale, fields with difficult-to-extract residual reserves, and the like) that were previously unprofitable to exploit become profitable and will be used. So too, at higher oil prices, competing sources of energy become profitable to use (coal, nuclear, wind, and even solar) and will gradually replace oil usage.
There will be a bit of bother while we sort out what medium we use for portable energy. There are too many problems with using hydrogen as a portable energy storage medium, so I’m guessing at some point plug-in hybrid flex-fuel cars will become the most common means of transport, but not because the government forces them down our throat, just because they will become the cheapest thing to run. Still, unless some of us have encouraged our grade-school kids to get screen names at FR, I don’t think any of us posting here will live to see the day when most portable energy is not derived from petroleum.
Most of this sounds pretty much like:
-you WILL be assimilated
-you will depend on government to get around in your daily lives
-you will live a live of bare sustinence
-we are telling you this because we will force you to do so
Just what I always wanted. To live in an arcology or a 2000 foot high building crammed in with a bunch of other smelly people.
I like my car and will continue to use it as long as I can, because:
1. My wife and I have family all over. We fly when we can, and drive at other times.
2. There’s no mass transit convenient to us unless we DRIVE to it first, or take a bus (in my wife’s case.)
3. I want to go where I want, when I want, and not have to depend on someone else to get me there.
“pos-oil society”??
Liberals are such luddites.
Eventually sure...and it’s a good thing that we aren’t running out of oil (or useable oil) tomorrow.
Or in many cases, people work in neighborhoods that aren't safe and/or friendly to family.
A problem with no real easy solution.
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.
Not exactly...Paul Allen lost BILLIONS in the cable T.V. company..called Charter Comm....and RCN an internet provider. Not to mention the Portland Trailblazers....
Between the years 2000 and 2005 BusinessWeek calculated that Mr. Allen lost over $12 BILLION in bad investments.
That all said....he can afford these huge losses..and the final chapter isn't written for sure.
But to say Allen isn't known for wasting money...isn't factual to people who have followed his past investments.
Plug in hybrids might work up north where people already have to plug in their cars a lot, but down south (where the population of the US is moving) it’s a non-starter. I’ve never parked my car a safe extension cord distance from an outlet under my control, most of the south is like that.
The southern (especially the south west) part of the country is also a problem for your rezoning idea, rezoning can change the future but it can’t change the past. No amount of rezoning now will make Tucson or Phoenix or LA not sprawling cities. Because of how far and wide these cities populations are there is simply no method of public transportation that would be useful to the citizens that would be a gigantic waste of time and fuel. When you have a population density 1/10 of NYC the bus (train, whatever) to passenger ratio just doesn’t work you need too many vehicles to cover the area and they’ll get too few passengers to make it worthwhile. And there’s no fix for that short of razing the cities and starting over from scratch, and that plan might face a lot of resistance.
First off, there won’t be a “post-oil” society, ever. We’re not going to ween the people off of oil, and it won’t be (IF it were to happen) IN OUR LIFE TIME.
Second off, it CAN’T happen unless and until we go completely nuclear, or find some other, renewable source of energy and it is cheap enough or free for anyone to use. Solar comes to mind, but is isn’t CHEAP (yet). And some areas of the country simply can not use it efficiently (or the world for that matter).
Thirdly, this is a PIPE dream of some idiot ecoterrorist who’d rather be out blowing up pipelines and sinking ships containing nuclear material.
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