I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few months. I just wanted to write some of this down to help me form some slightly more concrete ideas. What follows is likely not the most coherent thing ever written – it’s meant to serve as a starting point for me to come back to later…
With the price of oil spiking, and the known reservoirs being depleted, we obviously need to move away from a total dependence on a non-renewable resource. That’s a total no brainer. But, there doesn’t seem to be a solid or effective movement towards that end. There are a few areas where progress is being made – the Prius, the solar/wind power initiatives, for example. But, there isn’t any large-scale movement away from petroleum. If anything, people are looking for subsidies to maintain their dependence on an increasingly scarce (and therefore increasingly expensive) resource. Gasoline prices skyrocket. Natural gas is through the roof. The cost of a barrel of oil is 6 times what it was not too long ago. And the solution? At least in Alberta, the provincial government is just cutting everyone cheques to help defray the cost of petroleum, since the government is literally rolling in cash as a result of petroleum taxes. And, other countries manufacture wars, and entire campaigns, to maintain their ready access to cheap oil. Addicted like a crack baby.
I’ve also been doing some thinking about my own personal reliance on petroleum. I’m a suburban-dwelling, SUV-driving (but I commute using public transit, so that helps), natural-gas-heating-and-cooking ecological disaster. My house likely contains several barrels of oil. The carpet is synthetic – I walk on oil. The TV is encased in oil. Clothes are spun from it. Pillows stuffed with it. Walls painted with it. Food stored in it. House heated with it. Food cooked by burning it. Think nothing of packing up the family and burning half a tank to spend some time in the mountains. Or hopping on a plane and burning off several barrels of oil to go to meetings far away.
As a mental exercise, I try to imagine how much prehistoric biomass went into the stuff that makes up my home. How many tonnes of jurassic algae went into my gas tank. How many dinosaurs per 100km does it get?
It’s one thing to say we need to switch away from a petroleum based economy – it’s quite another to think of what I could do to replace these items. Try walking through a department store – the majority of items there are made from (or with) petroleum. We’d have to revert to methods of manufacturing resurrected from the 1800s and early 1900s. Things would take longer to manufacture. They might be more expensive. They might not last as long. But, they would likely be healthier to be around. I’m positive we’ll be a healthier lot once the oil runs out, without off-gassing carpets, and other petroleum byproducts seeping into our systems every day.
One thing that keeps popping into my head – the real value of petroluem for power is its ability to be used “off grid”. It’s portable, storable, and easy to take with you. The only industry that truly needs a portable, storable power supply is the military. So, why wouldn’t they be funding more research into renewable energy, so they could reserve the remaining petroleum for themselves? Take a fraction of the funding for the military industrial complex, and dedicate that to finding a sustainable and renewable power supply for the rest of the world. Just about everything else could be redesigned to run on some form of rechargeable electrical power. Electric cars. Even planes could be run on some form of electical power.
The other handy thing about switching to electrical power is the abstraction from the source of the energy. Unlike natural gas, which is a pretty concrete thing, an electric grid could be fed by solar, wind, tidal, or geothermal sources.
The C-Train (the commuter train system in Calgary) apparently uses 40% of the total electricity demand of a city of 1 million people. But, a few years ago, they switched the source of electricity for the trains to be fed by a wind farm south of the city. The entire train system switched over to a renewable energy supply, without modifying the grid, or the trains.
Even a switch to nuclear power as an energy source, which has the promise to provide essentially unlimited power with no pollution if executed properly, doesn’t solve the dependency on petroleum for manufacturing goods. We need to find a replacement for plastics and the like before we can really affect change.
I’m just thinking out loud here, but I want to go walk around Heritage Park again to see how they did stuff before the total and utter dependence on petroleum kicked in. I’m walking around with a lot of suburban petroleum-dependant guilt here, and am having trouble seeing a way to get the monkey off my back.
For some very interesting reading about the petroleum dependency, check out Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler. It’s sure got my head spinning about this… His take on Calgary as a microcosm of the North American Tragedy is pretty eye-opening (but he did get at least one fact wrong – there aren’t any Target stores in Calgary 😉 )
Starting to have flashbacks to The Last Chase – time to break the car down into parts and store it beneath the floor in the garage…
Update: slightly corrected (although incompletely) the “how many dinosaurs are in a tank of gas” thing – although I like the ring of that, so I left a bit of it in 🙂 Michelle Lamberson, who was a geologist in a previous life, let me know that petroleum comes mostly from marine biomass (algae…) rather than dinosaurs.
Update: I’ve just created a wiki page to share resources on sustainable energy, including a link to the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy at the University of Calgary.
Update: And, perhaps, we should reserve plastics for medical applications? I can’t imagine a modern hospital functioning without plastic. Maybe the catch is we’re all hung up on “modern” – lose that requirement, and it’s easy to shake the dependence on petro-crack.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few months. I just wanted to write some of this down to help me form some slightly more concrete ideas. What follows is likely not the most coherent thing ever written – it’s meant to serve as a starting point for me to come back to later…
With the price of oil spiking, and the known reservoirs being depleted, we obviously need to move away from a total dependence on a non-renewable resource. That’s a total no brainer. But, there doesn’t seem to be a solid or effective movement towards that end. There are a few areas where progress is being made – the Prius, the solar/wind power initiatives, for example. But, there isn’t any large-scale movement away from petroleum. If anything, people are looking for subsidies to maintain their dependence on an increasingly scarce (and therefore increasingly expensive) resource. Gasoline prices skyrocket. Natural gas is through the roof. The cost of a barrel of oil is 6 times what it was not too long ago. And the solution? At least in Alberta, the provincial government is just cutting everyone cheques to help defray the cost of petroleum, since the government is literally rolling in cash as a result of petroleum taxes. And, other countries manufacture wars, and entire campaigns, to maintain their ready access to cheap oil. Addicted like a crack baby.
I’ve also been doing some thinking about my own personal reliance on petroleum. I’m a suburban-dwelling, SUV-driving (but I commute using public transit, so that helps), natural-gas-heating-and-cooking ecological disaster. My house likely contains several barrels of oil. The carpet is synthetic – I walk on oil. The TV is encased in oil. Clothes are spun from it. Pillows stuffed with it. Walls painted with it. Food stored in it. House heated with it. Food cooked by burning it. Think nothing of packing up the family and burning half a tank to spend some time in the mountains. Or hopping on a plane and burning off several barrels of oil to go to meetings far away.
As a mental exercise, I try to imagine how much prehistoric biomass went into the stuff that makes up my home. How many tonnes of jurassic algae went into my gas tank. How many dinosaurs per 100km does it get?
It’s one thing to say we need to switch away from a petroleum based economy – it’s quite another to think of what I could do to replace these items. Try walking through a department store – the majority of items there are made from (or with) petroleum. We’d have to revert to methods of manufacturing resurrected from the 1800s and early 1900s. Things would take longer to manufacture. They might be more expensive. They might not last as long. But, they would likely be healthier to be around. I’m positive we’ll be a healthier lot once the oil runs out, without off-gassing carpets, and other petroleum byproducts seeping into our systems every day.
One thing that keeps popping into my head – the real value of petroluem for power is its ability to be used “off grid”. It’s portable, storable, and easy to take with you. The only industry that truly needs a portable, storable power supply is the military. So, why wouldn’t they be funding more research into renewable energy, so they could reserve the remaining petroleum for themselves? Take a fraction of the funding for the military industrial complex, and dedicate that to finding a sustainable and renewable power supply for the rest of the world. Just about everything else could be redesigned to run on some form of rechargeable electrical power. Electric cars. Even planes could be run on some form of electical power.
The other handy thing about switching to electrical power is the abstraction from the source of the energy. Unlike natural gas, which is a pretty concrete thing, an electric grid could be fed by solar, wind, tidal, or geothermal sources.
The C-Train (the commuter train system in Calgary) apparently uses 40% of the total electricity demand of a city of 1 million people. But, a few years ago, they switched the source of electricity for the trains to be fed by a wind farm south of the city. The entire train system switched over to a renewable energy supply, without modifying the grid, or the trains.
Even a switch to nuclear power as an energy source, which has the promise to provide essentially unlimited power with no pollution if executed properly, doesn’t solve the dependency on petroleum for manufacturing goods. We need to find a replacement for plastics and the like before we can really affect change.
I’m just thinking out loud here, but I want to go walk around Heritage Park again to see how they did stuff before the total and utter dependence on petroleum kicked in. I’m walking around with a lot of suburban petroleum-dependant guilt here, and am having trouble seeing a way to get the monkey off my back.
For some very interesting reading about the petroleum dependency, check out Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler. It’s sure got my head spinning about this… His take on Calgary as a microcosm of the North American Tragedy is pretty eye-opening (but he did get at least one fact wrong – there aren’t any Target stores in Calgary 😉 )
Starting to have flashbacks to The Last Chase – time to break the car down into parts and store it beneath the floor in the garage…
Update: slightly corrected (although incompletely) the “how many dinosaurs are in a tank of gas” thing – although I like the ring of that, so I left a bit of it in 🙂 Michelle Lamberson, who was a geologist in a previous life, let me know that petroleum comes mostly from marine biomass (algae…) rather than dinosaurs.
Update: I’ve just created a wiki page to share resources on sustainable energy, including a link to the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy at the University of Calgary.
Update: And, perhaps, we should reserve plastics for medical applications? I can’t imagine a modern hospital functioning without plastic. Maybe the catch is we’re all hung up on “modern” – lose that requirement, and it’s easy to shake the dependence on petro-crack.
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Wow. Best blog discussion ever! 🙂
Cory: Contrary views are not only welcome, they are absolutely necessary. Thanks for playing devil’s advocate.
Brian: Thanks for the great rebuttal! Much better than I could have done 🙂
As for the “sailing to New Zealand” comment – I didn’t feel it was cheap – it brings up a very important point. Maybe that’s exactly how we should be doing long-haul travel. There is nothing carved in stone that transportation will continue to be cheap and easy. It’s that kind of “we’re owed convenience” thinking that led to SUV Nation in the first place.
And, this morning’s post from Jim Kunstler[1] is rather eye-opening about the direction things appear to be heading. I’ve got no reason to doubt his reasoning there, and am a bit concerned about what it implies…
As for the developing countries – I sincerely hope that we work our collective asses off so they can leapfrog the problem. I’m really not concerned about an energy crisis as I am an agricultural crisis. I’m not going to loose sleep if SUVs are parked with empty tanks, but millions of people are being set up to starve once the petro-fertilizers are gone[2]. We’ve artificially inflated/ignored the carrying capacity of the planet. THAT’s the real pending crisis, not the price of gasoline.
[1] http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2005/11/true_blue.html
[2] http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002945.html
Corrie –
“Last I checked, the US had not taken over the oil fields of Kuwait OR Iraq, not to mention Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or that large oil-rich country across our northern border…”
Your definition of “taken over the oil fields” — is unnecessarily tight… whoever is in nominal control is of secondary importance, what matters most is a willingness to provide American markets with oil at a favorable cost. It’s obvious that Saudi Arabia is an American client state, as the close ties between House of Fahd and Bush family make all too obvious. Incidentally, Osama Bin Laden explicitly linked the presence of tens of thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia (who never quite got around to leaving after the first Gulf War) as primary motivation for the 9/11 attacks. And what about those permanent army bases they are building in Iraq?
As far as Venezuela goes, history makes it obvious that the preferred mode of Latin American intervention is not invasion (Bay of Pigs, and Grenada excepted), but supporting a coup. Which is exactly what the Bush administration did with Venezuela back in 2002. In such a clumsy manner that even the American press criticised them for it, back when Bush could do no wrong.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,688071,00.html
And there is no need for the United States to “take over” the Canadian oil fields, as they are already mostly owned by American interests (though the Chinese are making inroads). There is also NAFTA and other trade agreements that will compel us to sell energy to the American market even in the face of shortages at home.
At this point, if you still cling to the notion that oil has nothing to do with America’s military adventures then there is nothing I or anyone else can say to convince you otherwise. The fact that the President, Vice-President and Secretary of State are all former oil executives is not worthy of mention, and any connection between their policies and the soaring profits of oil companies worldwide is obviously just a wild coincidence.
I assume your line about “backbone” and caribou is a reference to the ANWR drilling that was reversed by the US Congress — maybe it’s a lack of machismo, or maybe it’s a realization that the amount of oil up there is a pittance when weighed against the environmental damage that drilling will inflict.
One reason that gas prices have dropped is that Europe has been releasing significant oil and refined products from its own strategic reserves after Katrina (they just ended that, after all, they need it too). But in any event, short-term fluctuations are of minor interest when the long-term trends are so obvious.
D’Arcy makes it very clear that his own lifestyle is dependent on oil, that’s what the whole posting is about — your shot about him sailing to New Zealand is out of context, and is cheap.
And the rise of oil consumption in China, India and elsewhere is not something that is lost on anyone. It a major reason why analysts suggest the effects of peak oil will be so severe. That developing countries aspire to the benefits of our lifestyle is no revelation. It’s all the more reason we need to get our own act together.
I’ve been busy, so it took a while to catch up to this post.
Allow me to play the contrarian.
First, your aside about “oil wars” needs some sourcing. Last I checked, the US had not taken over the oil fields of Kuwait OR Iraq, not to mention Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or that large oil-rich country across our northern border. Indeed, the US Congress currently lacks the backbone to invade a caribou herd, much less an oil-producing country.
Here on the southern Erie shore, gas is just above $2/gal US; it’s come down quite a bit in recent weeks.
The military is NOT the only industry that relies on portable power supplies. There’s this little line of business called Transportation – moving people and goods from Point A to Point B. Were you going to sail to New Zealand?
By the way, do you have any links to eco-warriors in China and India? Those exploding economies are going to rapidly surpass the West’s oil consumption.
There has been some research into using corn to make plastic, but I believe in the end, researchers realized that the amount of oil used to drive the harvester and whatnot was greater than the amount needed to create the same amount of plastic directly. Maybe this could be changed though if they used an electric harvester, etc., but for now, it won’t work.
Yeah – and most agriculture is dependent on petroleum-based fertilizers as well as fuel for tractors/combines/threshers, etc…
How many dinosaurs…
Um… I’d say zero… unless they had a very bad day…
For the most part petroleum is sourced from marine-derived organisms…
You’ll find your Jurassic jungle in your coals….
Cheers..
-Michelle
Whoops.. followup..
By marine organisms, btw … I mean algae and such…
Heh. That’s why I love having Geologists in my network of friends 🙂
Good point. So, mostly algae, and the occasional T. Rex that got washed off a beach or something…
Just watched: http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ on DVD the other day. Besides scaring the bejeezus out of me, it does propose a few things.
I’ve been keeping a few links on sustainability D’Arcy. The one on biodeisel inspires me. http://del.icio.us/leighblackall/sustainability
You describe the prices of oil spiking (imagining that they might come down). People I talk to describe it in terms of our capacity to extract what is left has peaked, while our demand for it keeps increasing. So, unless new technologies are developed that will boost capacities to extract what is left (and filter it) at rates pared with our increasing demand, I’d say the prices will just keep going up, up, up.
Sell your petrol car while there is still a market for it, buy a diesel if you still need a car, start hanging out at fish and chip shops, enjoy the zen of filtering used cooking oil.
Move to a community where they are preparing for blackouts, food shortages, and high unemployment.
This is one direction of the possible switch to renewable fuel resources…
http://www.ford.com/en/vehicles/specialtyVehicles/environmental/ethanol.htm
Ford. Go figure.
Leigh: Thanks for the links. I’ll definitely be checking them out.
As for the spike in oil prices, they should just keep on going up, but will be artificially reduced by government action. It’s already happening now, where oil is being diverted from the EU to the states to prevent the $4 Gallon. Because that would be the end of the world.
Sadly, it’s just not feasible to completely dump the car. Like it or not, I live in a city addicted to cars, and it would be impossible to do anything beside commute to/from work without one.
I do like the idea of rush hour traffic smelling like french fries though 🙂
Josh: Ethanol blended fuels (or straight bio fuels) are great, but growing all of those crops relies on petroleum-based fertilizers to keep yields consistent…
I’ve created a wiki page to share resources on sustainable energy.
http://wiki.ucalgary.ca/page/Sustainable_Energy
You make a strong point about how subsidies let consumers ignore the problem. In fact, the case for the opposite, taxes on gasoline, seems prudent if it allows consumers to gradually move to substitutes. But regardless, consumers are now making substitute choices: witness the year-over-year sales of GM/Ford (SUV-heavy) to Honda/Toyota (leading hybrid providers). I saw a great picture yesterday of an industrial lot converted to holding Hummers that weren’t selling. The U.S. gov’t did release oil and refined gas from its strategic reserves to prevent Gulf-caused shortages, but I’m not aware of subsidies in the states (maybe with winter heating oil?)…. care to shoot a pointer to something about oil being diverted from EU to the states?
Sam – I saw a reference to the EU oil diversion on Clusterfuck Nation
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2005/10/no_direction_ho.html
James Kunstler mentions a 2 million barrels per day diversion, but doesn’t cite a source.
And, switching cars from gas to hybrid won’t solve the problem. It’s a step in the right direction, but is only a fraction of our dependence on petroleum. Plastics are a huge part of it, and there is no replacement in sight for that yet…
I guess my first reaction about the problem of plastics is that it will be similar to automobile choice. People stop driving SUVs when it becomes a bad economic choice (i.e., moves from 5% to 20% of free monthly cash). My guess (these are all guesses; I have no authority on these issues) is that the abundance of plastics in our lives are due to how cheap plastics are to produce. As oil prices go up, plastic prices go up, and then substitutes and alternatives will be used. People will start reusing cloth shopping bags when grocery stores start charging for using plastic bags (I have seen this in parts of europe).
Also, check out this cool map of petroleum flow. It’s not perfect but someone has obviously read a bit of Tufte: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/oil_market_basics/petflow.htm
Sam, that flow map is great! Thanks for the link!
I agree that the economics of cheap plastic is what keeps it so readily available, but something’s wrong if we have to wait for something to run out before it becomes expensive enough to make us switch to something else. Once the oil’s gone, it’s gone.
Couldn’t agree more…. And that seems to make a pretty good case for gas taxes. Very cheap gas has led us in a direction that clearly isn’t long-term sustainable. We will confront the issue now, but we should have been confronting the problem over the past two decades.
The ironic thing is – in Canada, gas taxes make up 40% or more of the price of gas. In parts of Canada, people are already paying the equivalent of $4US/Gal – but even that isn’t slowing down consumption much. Especially when the governments then turn around and write cheques with the excess revenues (several billion dollars surplus) to help us pay for it.
I’m more scared that we won’t confront the problem now. More oil wars and rigged elections to maintain cheap gas. And the Alberta tar sands have about 1 trillion (with a T) barrels of oil locked in the ground – with plans under way to extract every last drop. That will last for a while, and then what?
Future generations will talk about us, and shake their heads about the fact that the best thing we could do with all of the oil reserves was to burn it rather than using it all for more productive things. Once it’s burned, it’s gone. Forever. Once it’s turned into plastic, at least it can be recycled.
D’Arcy, thanks so much for posting this. I’ve been carrying around a similar obsession in my head for some time as well (been reading Clusterfuck Nation too), and have no idea what to do with it all. Talking (and blogging) is a start, though we gotta back it up with some pretty serious change as well.
I should say more, but my heads more cloudy than normal today.
And besides all the points you make here, let’s not forget to add climate change into the doom-monger mix.
Yeah. There are so many things tied into our petro addiction…
The scary thing is that even though I (rationally) know the issue, and know there are ways to mitigate it, I don’t see an effective way to switch to sustainable living. It seems like the only people to successfully switch are the millionaires from Hollywood who are using their cash to make them feel better. Then they buy a pimped-out Hummer…
I added a couple links to your wiki that attempt to provide hints on sustainable living.
It would be nice, at the very least, if some sort of political consensus could emerge for ongoing development that took sustainability into account. I can’t believe, knowing what we do, that development of suburbs perpetuates urban sprawl the way it does. And free (and enhanced) public transit should be a no-brainer. I read that public transit brings in about two billion dollars a year in Canada from fares. That’s a fair chunk of change, but we spend money like that on all sorts of stuff — why not increase fuel taxes, tolls, and other car-related costs to make it happen?
Thanks for adding the links, Brian.
Suburbs, on their own, aren’t necessarily evil. With a proper and effective mass transportation system they could be a good thing. Sort of the best of both worlds. Well, ok, that’s probably a stretch, but they don’t have to be nearly as evil as they are now. With a slightly higher population density they could be sustainable.
But, at least in Calgary, the public transit system is almost exclusively designed around commuters. Easy to get to/from downtown, and if you’re lucky to other places too. But, you would be hard-pressed to use public transit as your only form of transportation…
One thing that might help would be decentralization of the downtown core – what if there were multiple smaller suburban downtowns spread throughout the city?
I also keep coming back to this: right now, I can’t see how I (or any other Mere Mortal) could afford sustainable living in any real sense. There needs to be a LOT of work done there…
Liking this networked learning in action!
I dunno about your country D’Arcy, but the millionares over here are the last ones to attempt to live sustainably, or with minimal ecological footprint. Over here its been the hippies and alternatives that have made the biggest difference to their lives, footprints and influence on the broader communities. They started a political party called The Greens, and countless organic food coops that organise awareness film nights, hold permaculture workshops, promote local community trade, opened alternative energy stores selling alternitive devices for domestic use etc etc.
Perhaps this wonderfully designed PDF from Changethis manifestos will inspire you to buy a diesel engine and start organising biodiesel and vege oil reuse cooperatives at the stations. Its not the ultimate sollution we need, but its a start to reducing our footprints.
The PDF is an exciting read! A proposal on how to effectively change things using algea grown in salty deserts… http://www.changethis.com/9.Biodiesel
Now, to add these links to your wiki….
Thanks, Leigh.
I was meaning the Ed Begley Jr., Woody Harrelson crowd of Born Again Eco Warriors.
The average Joe couldn’t give two shits about sustainable living (at least here, in the middle of Oil Country).
My guess is that a more centralized downtown with more vertical building would be more efficient than decentralized downtowns. Wouldn’t a 60-story building be more heat efficient than 60 one-story buildings?
Born again eco warriors… maybe they have their role… not sure if we have any of them here…
BTW, before the oil drives airfares through the roof… you coming to Oz next year? I’ll show you some cool sustainability stuff here to make up for the plain fuel 😉
Maybe in a pure efficiency frame of analysis – but it also has to be livable. Who’s going to raise a family on the 59th floor? I know people do that, but there has to be a balance…
What I was imagining was a series of smaller “cores” with surrounding residential and support neighborhoods. Just enough to get the overall population density up over a certain threshold while reducing average commute times. It would also be relatively easy to build high-efficiency mass transit systems between these hubs to make the entire system relatively commutable, while still retaining some form of open-space living.
Leigh, that sounds cool! How about a “Sustainable eLearning Tour” 😉 But, yeah – no current plans to head to Oz, no matter how much I’d like to do so.
Oiled up and ready to offend
As a follow-up to my other politically-themed post, thank you D’Arcy for stepping forward with some thoughtful and necessary discussion on the implications of the petroleum economy. (Some good comments there too.) To be honest, most of my periodic blo…
[…] After my thinking out loud about Peak Oil, I’ve been doing some more thinking about it (as have others). The changes required to prevent The End Of Oil are so drastic and large-scale that I really don’t see that happening. The oil is going to run out (or become so expensive that only Bill Gates can drive his 2033 Prius) and there’s just nothing that can be done to prevent that. Cue an image of what the “haves” were doing in Mad Max – they weren’t filmed, but SOMEONE had access to the oil. […]
Great post — we might as well be thinking about these issues before we’re forced to.
I must say, I don’t share your optimism about suburbs. Even with excellent mass transit, it doesn’t make any sense to have masses of people living in enormous houses nowhere near their work, recreation, services or anything resembling a neighbourhood or integrated communities. Yes, you could take the train to your work every day, but having to get in your car to get your milk, or pick up your kids, or do just about anything else out of the house may be a “luxury” we won’t have forever.
Jeremy – it’s not so much optimism for suburbs, but realization that they aren’t going away. Millions of people live in suburbs. What are we going to do? Tear down the suburbs and relocate people? That’s just not going to happen, so we need to figure out a way to make the suburbs sustainable.
I can stay in the suburb that I live in to get milk, etc. without driving. I often wuss out and drive it anyway (that will be changing), but the choice is there.
We just need to add more services in a decentralized manner, and it would be much more sustainable.
I wouldn’t be so sure that the suburbs are there to stay D. I mean they are really just a design of post 20C war and depression America, with the rest of us dumbly following the model. Easy come, easy go.
In Canberra (Capital of Australia), and depressing example of oil economies corrupting a development design originally based on public transport hubs, the council there is rezoning the suburbs to allow for higher density developments. They hope this will stimulate more inner city development AND the satellites you describe.
So, lets say your house is within a potential satellite… reinforce your footings and up you go.. 2, 3 maybe even 4 stories and bring in the tenants. Build a green house (if it gets cold) over your yard and start up a community garden, with chooks, and a couple of goats!
Outside the satellites, the lots go vacant. The lawns die back and the buildings become the play war zones and grafitti canvases for the local kids, with stray dogs scratching on the floor of master bedrooms. Bit like inner city living was 50 years ago when the oil-burbs where getting built.
You better prepare for some social rot out there too D. High unemployment, service blackouts, few police… don’t worry, you’re prepared, you’ve seen MadMax1 😉
Yeah – I’m thinking that moving to Fiji and stocking up on ammo might be a good idea 🙂
Fiji!! But the rising waters and higher humidity will cause more coos! Fiji has a huge army with too many guns… I’m heading for the NewZealand mountains myself.
I was being tongue-in-cheek when I suggested Fiji, but you know that might not be so far off the mark… Sure, Fiji itself may be a bad choice, but the idea of a permanent retreat may not be so bad.
No worries D. Its all tongue in cheak really. With a fare bit of interesting conversation thrown in there to boot. Good on you for sustaining the chat.
Perhaps Sweden is where you need to be – is it in your 43 places? According to this website, Sweden Plans on Being the First Country in the World to Be Free From Oil in 2020!