The university profs and the tech sector worker bees are still absolutely confident that some hypothetical "they" will "come up with" magical rescue remedies for running the Happy Motoring system without gasoline.  My main message to lecture audiences these days is "...quit putting all your mental energy into propping up car dependency and turn your attention to other tasks such as walkable communities and reviving passenger rail...."  Inevitably, someone will then get up and propose that the transition to all-electric cars is nearly upon us, and we should stop worrying.

It never ceases to amaze me how informative and helpful Romm is concerning the science of global warming, and how incurious he seems to be about solutions.  In particular, he obviously is not very interested in trains or walkable communities, and I don't just mean the occasional reference.  

He obviously is not doing much reading on oil.  $5/gallon by 2015 is also pretty funny, if it wasn't tragic, because it will likely be much higher by then.  But the point [odograph] is not exactly what the price of oil will be when, the point is that we should be seriously considering alternatives to classic suburbia, which fortunately many contributors to gristmill do.

The more expensive oil becomes, the more expensive the materials. People may well be able to bear the increased cost of fuel by using increasingly more fuel efficient vehicles, however what happens when all of the basic building materials double, triple, quadruple in cost?  

You can't run a 3000 horsepower iron ore haul truck on batteries. Oil is the only way you can power the heavy industries that supply the volumes of materials required for urban sprawl. Without plentiful, cheap, oil human settlement will need to contract.

One of the ironies of peak oil is that you need huge amounts of diesel (from oil) to run coal mining equipment (trucks, shovels etc). Hopefully peak oil also makes coal more expensive forcing a paradigm shift.

Suburbia is first and foremost a space problem.

Humans without cars can very happily live together in relatively confined spaces. We visit those communities all the time in Europe and marvel at the charm and intimacy of their small villages and cities.

And then we come back here and conclude that we can't have this here, because what would we do with the cars?

It is by now an unwritten assumption that humans are born with the space for an automobile attached to their navel. According to today's zoning rules, our cities are planned primarily for cars, and secondarily for humans; and that makes them huge, empty and phenomenally inefficient.

The idea of suburbia is simply not attainable for all people on the planet. And it is only attainable for the US by depriving the rest of the world of their resources so that we can waste them on our carland over here.

Coming back to the original article, we are not only running out of oil; we are also rapidly running out of space, out of breathable air, out of water, out of time we spend stuck in traffic.... etc., and much of that has to do, directly or indirectly, with suburbia.

Suburbia may be very nice for a subgroup of people in a particular phase in life. But to make it the predominant organizing principle for everybody's form of habitation is simply insane.

Cars are wonderful machines for particular purposes and pleasures, and ideally suited for individual mobility when that is needed. But to organize a transportation system around nothing but that is even more insane.

And to fight wars to keep both of the above possible.... oh well!

Gerhard W. Mayer The Conceptual Motion Company an urban repair enterprise

"Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015."

I think that's actually pretty mild, almost business (change) as usual.  Then again, that may be all we get, and nothing more extreme.

I think I'm more rankled by the Kunstler "worker bee" quote.  There are certainly worker bees, folks with low creativity, in every field ... but it's dangerous to dismiss a whole aspect of ourselves (we are all builders, creators) with that slur.

The scientists and engineers are going to try, and we have since the days of the pyramids, we'll part of what they dream (after trial and error).

I keep a little list with me of ethical questions to consider when trying to determine whether to do something; the first question is "What if everyone did what I'm proposing to do?"  Your comment nicely points up how the enjoyment of car ownership requires that others not have cars -- hell would be a world that used cars at the same rate as Americans.

The 5% Project

1) In your hypothetical example gas rises to $8/gallon and the consumer switches to a hybrid car in response. So far so good. What happens next? Does the price of gas stay flat at $8/gallon? No, it continues to skyrocket because worldwide oil production continues to decline. What vehicle will the hypothetical consumer switch to? You see, it's relatively easy to double fuel economy from 25 mpg to 50 mpg, but the next doubling from 50 mpg to 100 mpg is very difficult and expensive with standard passenger vehicles.

After a certain point, the marginal cost of efficiency improvements becomes greater than the marginal value of fuel saved, even at extremely high oil prices. What is that point? Is a rough estimate possible?

2) Your example only addresses the cost of vehicle fuel, but suburbia is a vast, interconnected system overwhelmingly dependent on cheap oil products at all levels. Many localities already are finding they cannot afford to maintain the extensive networks of roads and infrastructure that are necessary for suburbs to function.

Gasoline use for cars and light trucks is about 43% of total oil consumption (about 9 million barrels/day, out of roughly 21 million barrels/day). Most of the rest is consumed by heavy trucks and industrial processes. Many big box suburban retailing operations are organized upon long distance shipping and just-in-time, warehouse-on-wheels logistics that depend on cheap fuel.

3) Suburban houses are bigger and use more construction materials per person, and those materials require major energy inputs, particularly bricks, windows, drywalls and structural concrete.

4) I don't think all suburbs will be abandoned. Many people like the lifestyle and will do what's needed to make households and transportation efficient enough to survive peak oil. To get there will take a lot of work and retrofitting, but it is well within our means technologically. However, getting there is not about technology. It is about policy, leadership, initiative, foresight, and vision. Kunstler argues that the suburbs will crash because he sees no evidence that we are getting on with the job on the scale and with the speed that is necessary. I hope he turns out to be wrong, but he could just as well be right.

5) The name is spelled "Kunstler."

Ped Shed Blog

Of course not, but I think it's a good bet that this will unfold over decades rather than (say) between now and Christmas.

That makes it really hard to guess how creative we'll all get over time.  Most of us haven't started.

I imagine it is slightly more complicated, with an optimum car density (high enough to share costs on infrastructure but not so high as to generate congestion(*)).

* - pun intended

In any case, this was a post about why I don't worry about peak oil (as opposed to climate change), not what I think the solution to the transportation problem should be.

As for the claim: "$5/gallon by 2015 is also pretty funny, if it wasn't tragic, because it will likely be much higher by then."

I seriously doubt it will be "much higher" than $5/gallon in 2015 in constant 2007 dollars -- in large part because demand destruction will kick in before then.  If you are so confident it will be then 1) you should be able to make a killing in the oil futures market and 2) you should be willing to construct a bet around what you think the price will be.

I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't think oil will hit $280 a barrel in 2025 in inflation-adjusted dollars (you'll get way too much demand destruction and alternatives being economical before then) -- I was just saying that in such a worst-case scenario, suburbia can live on.

I do expect to see oil prices rising relatively slowly over the next two decades (with spikes), giving people a bit more time to plan on which cars to build and which cars to buy.

Whenever gasoline gets above $4 a gallon for an extended period of time, so that people know it's not going back down, that will begin the conversion towards much more efficient vehicles.

But more to the point for me, well before 2025 we will be so desperate to cut greenhouse gas emissions, that even the U.S. government will be ramping up fuel economy standards and establishing mandates for plug ins and cellulosic ethanol. Indeed, if the next president doen't take very strong domestic and international action to cut GHGs, then either we get really desperate by, say 2015 (and by desperate I mean a World War II scale effort), or it is game over, climate-wise.

Even if peak oil was not happening, I don't see the suburbs existing in their current form, as comments above have argued.  Even if global warming were not happening, the lack of as energy-dense a fuel as oil would doom the internal combustion engine.  Even without both peak oil and global warming, the destruction of the Earth's ecosystems, as you well document, would be leading to a desert planet.  Sorry if I get a little frustrated at times, but we obviously need to go back to the path we were on before 1920, of trains and walkable communities, and cook up a WWII type program to make electricity a carbon-free resource.

The world is reinvented every minute, and anyone who doubts that should look back at the Gapminder video David linked in a little while back.

And so I say "false dichotomy" to this idea of a static present, versus one great leap we all must make (led by the appropriate prophets and elites of course).

(When I talk to people about 'walkable communities' hidden in the suburbs, they start to think about it, and name a few they already know.  This is something ripe for evolution.)

It is kind of ridiculous how we have gotten used to travelling huge distances every day dragging with us tons of steel, inefficiently!  

I do expect to see oil prices rising relatively slowly over the next two decades (with spikes), giving people a bit more time to plan on which cars to build and which cars to buy.

Depends what you mean by "relatively slowly". Let's see. Oil has gone from $12/barrel in 1998 to $90+ in 2007. It has risen over 50% this year so far. Up $10 in a week or so. Now there is no end in sight, as enough investors have realized that the cat is out of the bag, and that oil production has reached is geological limits. At this rate, we'll be over $125 by Christmas.

Well, there is an end in sight to escalating oil prices and that is an inevitable global recession that is the only sort of demand reduction we're likely to see in the global North. After that, if we get rationing and an Energy Depletion Protocol we may be able to plan for an orderly transition to a fossil-fuel-free future. That's the only scenario where I can see stable oil prices, and avoid Kunstler's Long Emergency.

By the way, glad we agree:

(When I talk to people about 'walkable communities' hidden in the suburbs, they start to think about it, and name a few they already know.  This is something ripe for evolution.)

Again, those who are so sure that oil is about to skyrocket should go into the futures markets and make a killing. Put your money where your mouth is.

I'm betting on much lower prices, which is why I'm betting on growth in emerging markets and Asia.

J.S.

Economic Illiteracy Harms The Planet! www.voicesofreason.info.

The press is being irresponsible in not throwing into the refinery, instability, etc mix the problem of peaking oil.  The thing that really bothers me is this: there were always problems like these in the past, and there was always someone to turn on the spigot.  It was the U.S. until the U.S. peaked in 1970, then it was Saudi Arabia, and now...everyone is pumping pretty much full blast.  There haven't been enough significant discoveries in the past two decades to lead to increased supply -- even the National Petroleum Council and other establishment bodies are worried, ferchrissakes.

I can't believe you guys are pulling the ol' "if you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" argument.  If I had a pile of money, and 10 years to sit on it, I probably would, but I don't (I know people who do).  The question is not how I can get rich, the question is avoiding a calamity -- sort of like global warming.

As for refinery capacity, the argument has been made that oil companies aren't going to make significant investments in expanding capacity precisely because they understand we are at or near the peak of global oil production. My understanding is that refineries are extremely expensive to build in the U.S., so the oil companies might have good reason to be leery of investing in new U.S. refinery capacity that may well soon become superfluous.

"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith

I propose a bet with any of the Peak Oilers- you name your scenario and let's put down some wagers on it. I'll start:
I think in real terms the price of oil (measured by average price over the year) will not be greater than $65 a barrel during any year over the next 5 years (unless there is another major war in the Middle East).

I see your optimism and faith in the system are hardly dented. I wish I could say the same.

Then you write above:"I'm betting on much lower prices, which is why I'm betting on growth in emerging markets and Asia." But isn't growth in Asia driving oil prices up?

You know, I think we're all in various stages of denial of the extent to which our current ways of living are depleting and destroying the Earth. I know it's something I struggle with. As the Pachamama Alliance puts it, we have to help "awaken the dreamer", that is, us.

And I should have explained it was about waking from the dream:

It is as if we are living inside of a dream, sleepwalking toward oblivion, while self-serving, shortsighted interests encourage our slumber with managed news, celebrity culture and other weapons of mass distraction.

It is, temporarily. Supply has to catch up with demand. If you and others had been doing your jobs by investing in oil futures, supply would have already caught up with demand.

You may save gas by driving one, but the batteries take a s**tload of coal or whatever to manufacture. With increasing opposition to coal... go figure.

Hybrids are more trouble than they're worth, in short.

Whiskerfish

re: Whiskerfish
Romm seems to conveniently forget that many hybrids take more energy to make than they could ever save, relative to a regular gasoline-powered vehicle.

Says who?

I sure hope you aren't quoting that CNW Marketing study at face value.

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/10/05/oh-so-a-hummer-is ...
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/12/115426/732

-David Ahlport

From what I had read, they (the industry) had studied the question and they found that the electrical production industry does have enough nighttime capacity to handle the increased demand of charging cars for daytime use.  The charging has to be done during the night.  

The inevitable increase in the price of crude oil in the future should give us some thought into how to handle it smartly.

What we should do is increase the taxes on all crude oil (and other energy) consumed in United States so that oil will cost 150 dollars a barrel, but then reduce other taxes by the same amount.  Maybe that will increase the cost of gas by 2 dollars a gallon, but if we decrease other taxes on ourselves, like the sales taxes on the car, decrease our property, income and social security taxes, we, in our country will be better off.   We should reduce the taxes on the things we own and put them on the things we buy.
The United States is such a major consumer in energy; significant reductions in our use will decrease worldwide demand significantly, thus lowering the world price.

To the question of won't the increased costs of diesel affect the cost of everything we make?  Sure, but by how much.  Energy costs of products are a cost, but not the major cost. The major cost is labor.  Double the energy costs and the product price may increase by 10%.   Making a redesign on the product may be enough to save 10% of the material used to make the product.  Or certainly redesign how it's made.   Or it'll just make reuse and maintenance of the product to increase the life of the product more common and economical.

If we increase crude oil to 150 dollars, we will use less of it, and the tax money, from what is 90 dollars a barrel now to 150 dollars, would be 60 dollars a barrel that would go to us, paying off our government services so we could reduce other taxes on ourselves.  If we just leave things as they are now, we will use more crude oil, the world price of crude will go up to 150 dollars a barrel anyway, but the 60 dollars a barrel more will go to foreign oil producers and governments, not to our own government.

We should tax what we buy to pay for our government, not what we own.  We should reduce our property taxes because largely, that is what we own.  We should tax crude oil because that is largely what we buy from someone else.

There is going to be a long lag time before hybrids start having much impact on oil consumption. And even greater lag if future hybrids do not get better mileage than many of them are getting now.  

Conversion is the answer.  Mass conversion on assembley lines.  Infernal combustion engines and systems replaced with plugin hybrid systems.

A factory would do a run of one model, converting over economically to 100+ mpg, then on to another model.

Nice new carbon fiber body/frame hypercars for the big spenders that drive new cars.  And converted used cars for us used car owners.

I think we ought to start calling it a WW 3 stopping effort, rather than a WW 2 like effort.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

With broadband wireless internet on the trains, the workday can even start during the commute.  Saving all that misery time when people are stuck in traffic.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

If you and others had been doing your jobs by investing in oil futures, supply would have already caught up with demand.

Also, even though Prius taxis are passing the quarter million mile mark they still assumed they will be driven about as far as a Pinto because they have a small four cylinder engine (neglecting the fact that it is shut off much of the time and gets half its power from an electric motor). If these cars end up with much more mileage than a Pinto thanks to the hybrid assist, they will be one of the most dust to dust efficient cars made.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

On the cost of the Prius -- according to my research, the energy cost of making cars is minimal, following the links GreyFlcn gave, 15% of the cost of a car as the construction cost sounds about right.  There is virtually no oil used in industry to make things (outside of feedstocks), it's virtually all electrical, but the construction of metallic objects (outside of making the steel) is not particularly energy intensive -- and recycled steel is much less energy intensive than new steel.

The "worker bees" might come up with some other things that work, and if they do I won't refuse them.  I won't turn down an electric supercar just because it's still a car.

Other than that ... a lot of tooth-gnashing about an undetermined "something" happening in slow-motion.  I just read a couple poor guys commenting at another Peak Oil website.  One was worried how trucks with food were going to get through after Peak Oil.  The other was talking about roving armed bands (a full Mad Max scenario).

The weirdest thing of course is the degree to which those fears are accepted.  Peak Oilers are loathe to draw a line, and say "that's crazy talk."

It reflects an early 20th century bias of intellectuals against middle class America.   The idea of these retrogrades (viz., the masthead of Grist) reflects the disconnect between The People and The Writers.

Sprawl is the most efficient way to distribute goods and services.   Large warehouses and malls, coupled with Internet delivery are efficient and reduce energy consumption.   Using cars to take people point to point increase the efficiency of the economy by a factor of 100 -- something no train, lite rail or monorail could hope to accomplish.

Fuel: Hydrogen fuel cell powered Chevy Equinoxes are roaming the highways in advanced Republican states like California thanks to a forward looking policy of the Hydrogen Highway.   Hydrogen is cheap and plentiful and can come from any source.  Now, it appears that using resonance to "loosen" the molecules of saltwater can give us bountiful overvalue energy on demand.

We are poised on the brink of a clean energy future.  

Thanks to GM and the Bush Administration!

Just burn the natural gas in your car and you'll come out ahead.

We'll see, as I said I'm betting on strong economic growth and sustained prosperity- the fact that oil is so high and it's having so little effect on economic growth is what's encouraging me- also, Econ 1- as the price rises so does the incentive for substitutes and conservation.

Either I'm woefully naive or rightly confident that this will all work out. Until proven otherwise I'll settle for confident that the sky isn't going to fall.

Economic Illiteracy Harms The Planet! www.voicesofreason.info.

If you want bets, are you suggesting that this is the safest way to make money, no Black Swans to bite you, not opportunity costs?

Heck, why does anyone work when all we have to do is play the commodities market, right?

Odo -- What's really bothering me about die-off types is this: in order to have a rational argument, they need to build a few possible models, or point to a few possible models already out there, that purport to show how we could make it through "the bottleneck", to use E.O. Wilson's phrase, and then disprove those models.  In other words, they need to falsify a theory of why we could survive, but they don't do that.  Oil is very important, but it's not that important.

Sorry I got Kunstler's "worker bees" comment in there, I did my best to avoid his misanthropic verbiage.  His main point, at least for me, is that we need to start building some rail, fast.

Bailo -- Sprawl is very inefficient precisely from a graph-type perspective.  If most movement occurs in the very small area of a city, then obviously the paths are much smaller than in a suburb, particularly if you have a full north-south/east-west (or equivalent)grid, then using public transit is pretty direct, you gain more from having less distance to have to move around.  Second, and this doesn't have to do with graphs, cars are an enormous waste of capital, they aren't being used the vast majority of the time.  If factories worked that way, they'd all go bankrupt.  Public transit vehicles can be used virtually around the clock.

That noted, I'm not firmly in the camp of the darkest gloom-and-doomers. I do think that catastrophic collapse is among the possible outcomes, but I suspect a prolonged decline of the industrial economy with periodic hard shocks is more likely. The first of those hard shocks may come as something on the order of 2 million more adjustable rate mortgates reset to much higher interest rates over the next year--especially if the Bush administration bombs Iran next year, too, perhaps sending the price of a barrel of oil over $200 in a few days. The peaking of global oil production and North American natural gas production cannot be considered in isolation because their effects won't be experienced that way.

Either way, I think we need to move with all possible speed to a renewable and regenerative economy.


"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith

The car and oil companies implanted this dream of car based mobility in the american psyche in the World's fair of 1939, and they did a great job. Anybody who knows about projecting, visioning, NLP etc. should study this as a test case how it needs to be done.

Sprawl, and what the dream of spawl promises (individuality and physical and emotional distance from each other) is one of the main reason why the world is in trouble. Few of the promises of sprawl have come true. Instead of distance and tranquil solitude, we get stuck in traffic jams. Instead of having lavish private estates our individual houses are so jammed together that we look into each others sideyard windows and we can hear our neighbors whisper. And instead of indivually styled residences, we live in PUDs that dictate which shade of beige is the approved one. And for that we gladly accept spending hours in cars going almost nowhere.

Yet we are still operating with the dream that 'getting away from it all' into our suburban enclaves is the best thing that we can achieve in life, even though our conscious mind knows that it cannot be done. But we hope. And even though by today this once understandable dream has turned into a grotesque nightmare in almost every way, we are still all programmed to desperately cling to it.

We need a new dream, one that eveybody (inlcuding the proverbial Joe Sixpack) intuitively can grasp and strive for; a dream where we all can live happy and fulfilled lives and don't need our neighbor's resources to do so. A dream with fewer cars, for sure, and better cities.

SOLAR GREG

you might want to look into
http://www.ruf.dk/


Gerhard W. Mayer The Conceptual Motion Company an urban repair enterprise

Also,
There are others here that are sighing for how beautiful, peaceful and 'kind' cities are, when in reality, it could only be further from the truth. Ironically, most people within cities are much more isolated than in small communities. Further, you gotta love this, courtesy of Grist:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/ ...

Interesting story, but you'll notice that the problem is suburban and urban.  When the word "urban" is used in many articles, they are referring to urban and suburban.  I could trot out my old joke about living in NYC and not needing to go to the country because we have Central Park, but I won't, but there are certainly lots of pressures, as the article states, preventing kids from learning about nature first hand -- although I still think a kid in a well-run educational system in a big city has access to more natural history museums, zoos, and aquariums than most kids in the suburbs.

Also,  a la Kunstler and others, the cities were pretty awful before WWII in the U.S., partly because of a lack of investment from the Depression, partly because nobody did anything, but it is certainly possible to construct a city in a beautiful way, as Europe shows

As far as delivery goes, the same graph principles should apply -- if not more so, you don't have to move freight in big trucks all over the place, you can ship the freight to a main area via rail -- which is much more efficient than trucks -- then distribute relatively short distances.  As to restocking, I don't know enough about it to say, except perhaps warehouses should be positioned near the freight rail yards.

Jason -- there's a good post at theoildrum.com about the alleged "above ground" reasons for the high price of oil.

I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called "Max". To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time. When the world was powered by the black fuel. And the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled.....
-Road Warrior (1981)

The whole point of the doomers is that it isn't just the price of oil that will rise. Has anybody but me noticed the rising prices of food? They sure have noticed in other parts of the world where food riots and demonstrations have followed the conversion of food crops to ethanol production. The failure of Australian agriculture hasn't helped.

How is the state of the roads in your burg? If it's anything like mine there are shiny new streets in new develpments and crumbling asphalt everywhere else. Municipalities are faced with fixed budgets and rising costs of operations. Try and drive a Prius on some of the larger potholes and see how long it lasts.

Where does the working class live in your town? Demographically younger and more productive people live in the cheaper outskirts of town or in apartments. In some cities virtually all of their medical and emergency services workers live 30 minutes or more from their jobs. In my town the pickups and SUV's line up for miles heading to the ex-urbs at 5 pm. Meanwhile many 3bd. 2 ba. houses are occupied by a single retiree.

Our health systems are collapsing. New strains of staph and TB are spreading due to the myth that the rich are exempt from infection when you deny the poor health care.

I've seen multiple point systems failure in action when Oakland lost 3,000 houses in a single afternoon due to fire, poor plannning and lack of foresight. Everything works until it doesn't all at once. If the ATM's are down and your emergency workers can't get a tank of gas and the bridge is down your city can burn also.

High oil prices stress the systems as resources otherwise spent maintaining systems gets spent on fuel. If you put off fixing the roof because there was a cold winter you can lose the house. Put off a bridge repair because of higher asphalt prices......

Our economic system is based upon growth fueled by increasing availability of cheap oil. Our Congress has repeatedly refused to increase CAFE standards and automobile companies would rather go bankrupt than produce efficient vehicles. A recent run on the stock market was halted due to the massive printing of money by the worlds banking systems. Digital money cannot heat houses in the winter or fuel our jets and tractors.

San Diego and New Orleans were examples of multiple point systems failures. Iraq is another example.  Atlanta is close to failure territory. High energy costs encourage false economies in order to continue a graft ridden economic system. Then something breaks.

Screw up slowly and suffer all at once.

Put the Carbon Back

The problem is that each one does not stand, without selective editing, on its own.  Take this one:

"I've seen multiple point systems failure in action when Oakland lost 3,000 houses in a single afternoon due to fire, poor plannning and lack of foresight."

So what's happened since then?  Does Oakland have fewer homes, of less value, now than before the fire?

Or did they build back from what was actually a small tragedy, typical of human history?

Odo, in "the upside of down".  Thomas Homer-Dixon explored the problem of multiple simultaneous failures making things much worse,sort of a reverse of the whole is more than the sum of the parts.  the book should have been called the "downside of up".  When you use up the resources of an ecosystem, much less all ecosystems at once, as humans are doing, then the stresses can come fast and furious, sort of like algae blooming in a pond and then collapsing.  I'm not saying that will happen, as I've said before, but there should be a global model of resource/ecosystem/economic viability the way there is for the climate.  "The limits of growth" type of model, only bigger.  Without going off into another discussion of prediction, we're just left with good rants, at this point, without the models.

We should not worry about a profit (or loss) that is three orders below our principal.  If you start with a thousand dollars, plus or minus one dollar is nothing.

Now when people build these mental images of "multiple simultaneous failures" are they doing so with data that is actually significant?

Or are they doing so with images that are heart-wrenching?  Are dealing with something rational, or something that seduces the emotional side of ourselves?

(was the pool of homes in the US greater or smaller than 3 million?)

The thing is, I can separate small tragedies from the overall trends of human history.

Picking one out from your list above Jon, do you think we have a housing crisis?  Something that has jumped up and become significantly different than the concerns of the last century?

Recently I have worked in the property management business. I have become very familiar with how termites work. They are a great example of multiple system points failures.

When a termite eats a single two by four your house doesn't fall down. This is obvious. It has to eat a significant percentage of the wood in one section of the house. There has to be a water supply for them like a roof leak or a plumbing leak. There has to be an access point from the soil to the wood in the foundation or by means of debris piled next to the house. One failure is simply not good enough to let the termites run free.

Termites eat the wood hollow and leave a shell exposed to light and air. I've seen 4x6 beams that you can push a finger through. The house infested with termites can look exactly like the sound house next door to it. Even the day before it slumps and collapses. Other  parts of our world have looked just fine until the moment of collapse; bridges, levees, housing tracts.

In our culture we are far more worried about explosive dangers to our (metaphorical) houses than the termites. Airports check everyones shoes for bombs yet we allow deathtrap SUV's to roam the roads. Auto accidents killed more Americans in September of 2001 than terrorism did. On average more than 3K people were killed in auto accidents every month since then. We're still checking shoes and selling SUV's.

The issue of Peak Oil is that the extra cost of energy is simply not absorbed by the economy. Other things, some of them necessary, get put off to pay for more expensive gas and heating oil. In my town that amounts to crumbling roads. Something important is crumbling in your town too.

In San Diego they couldn't find the money for fuels clearance. All over the US public safety officials are falling sick with staph infections. The bridges in the Northeast are in horrible condition. Farmers are pushing their land harder in order to meet fuels costs; depleting the soil. Termites.

Explosives attached to pipelines in Nigeria, Iraq, Mexico and Burma raise your gas prices at home. The oil companies take another bite out of your monthly budget. People everywhere put off installing new roofs and clearing the brush behind the house. The termites keep eating at your house. Rust chews on the rebar. A sewer leak creates a sinkhole under the intersection. A little crack joins another crack.

Then it falls down or burns down or the bridge goes out, the power goes out, the levee collapses, the wings come off the plane.......

The system fails.  

Put the Carbon Back

having said that, it is clear that town centers of a small size worked very well before cars killed most of them. Here in Evanston, Illinois, the downtown has revived (as it has many other towns) and I don't need a car.  So the question is density, mixed use, and walkability, not necessarily huge size.

Pangolin, surely you know someone could have done that kind of hit and run, bad news summary, at any time in the last 2000 years?
The problem is that each one does not stand, without selective editing, on its own.  Take this one:

"I've seen multiple point systems failure in action when Oakland lost 3,000 houses in a single afternoon due to fire, poor plannning and lack of foresight."

So what's happened since then?  Does Oakland have fewer homes, of less value, now than before the fire?

Or did they build back from what was actually a small tragedy, typical of human history?

by odograph at 6:48 AM on 31 Oct 2007

The point is that small failures can build up to much larger failures. San Francisco was destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906; relief expiditions were sent immediately from Sacremento and San Jose. In Oakland the people from the hills ran down to the flatlands where I was watching the fire.

There was a refuge available. People could get help from the folks down the road. All over the world the folks down the road are announcing a tough shit policy. Ask an Iraqi refugee. Ask a former resident of New Orleans.

Peak Oil affects the entire industrialized world. France, with all of it's nuclear power, still relies on diesel trucks to move it's freight around. Oil drives all of their heavy equipment also. Oil fires the boilers of the worlds shipping fleet. Oil IS the road.

There just isn't another cheap source of liquid fuels down the road. The stress on our system is stressing thiers also. If it was fossil fuel we shouldn't burn it due to Climate Change anyway.

The doomers have it right.

Put the Carbon Back

We recovered.

How do you get off just naming smaller, unrooted, fears, and saying that therefore you know our future?

The Organization 'Walkable Streets - www.walkablestreets.com' includes an article that is called 'NYC is the greenest city in America'. There might be some interesting reading there.

By the way, just to be clear, I am not personally advocating to make us all live in Manhattans; been there and done that. But surely, there is a lot of middle ground between ranchettes and megacity, and in this huge middle is where the solution lies to our sustainable future.

Gerhard W. Mayer The Conceptual Motion Company an urban repair enterprise

I challenge both of you to name one large dense city that has not spread into surrounding area, creating suburbs, which then further became redeveloped, and created more dense development, which then further pushed out the suburbs.

No, really, find me one.

Just one.

Well, I guess you will start talking about Portland. The reason it's an outlier is due to the lack of population in that area and the way that the area of a city vs. suburb is defined. By that I mean, do you count the cities that are incorporated over a much larger area than its core and suburbs, similar to San Antonio?

Also,
I challenge the notion that Manhattan and New York is 'the greenest city' simply because I have lived there, and it strikes me as one of 'the most steel and concrete cities'. There's hardly a tree in sight, except for the Ailanthus trees, which themselves have spread into the burbs and beyond.

And finally, when Peak Oil does wind down to No Oil, who's going to feed the hypothetical 40 NYC's  and their fine array of professionals who have never seen a tomato plant? Or maybe they'll engineer it out of sewage?

And still, find me that one city that has not pushed out and created sub-urban sprawl. Maybe they call it URBAN sprawl for a reason?

Peak Oil spells the end of suburbia because suburbia is entirely dependent on oil. Not just for the cars, but for the sprawl, strip malls, cheap and unnecessary goods, and cheap housing built on farmlands, wetlands, and desert ecologies for the worker bees as they flit back and forth to their low-wage no benefit service sector jobs and other shallow distractions from our near total disconnection from anything meaningful.

Thinking that hybrid vehicles present a solution to global warming ignores the fact that about 50% of the greenhouse gas contribution a vehicle makes during its lifetime occurs during the extraction of the resources and manufacturing for that vehicle. Peak Oil won't make only gasoline more expensive, but everything cheap oil makes possible such as the 1500 mile Caesar Salad grown on lands depleted of nutrients, and then packaged in plastics and smothered in creamy processed foodstuffs based on oil. When the "green revolution" of agribusiness comes to an end, suburbs and the expressways that lead to them are going to have to return to farmland. A growth economy that is dependent on cheap energy will not continue functioning when oil is at $200-$300/barrel, unless money becomes completely valueless (although a good argument, based on international currency trading and derivatives markets, can be made that it already is).

Global warming (actually, catastrophic climate destabilization) isn't just from gasoline powered internal combustion engines. A major contributor is loss and degradation of natural carbon sinks from sprawl, excessive consumption, and population overshoot. Driving electric cars to the suburbs will only put off the inevitable. Trying to power them with cellulosic agro-fuels will most likely speed up the overall process of the demise of the American lifestyle.

The rise in the price of oil is a reflection of one thing--it is a finite natural resource that is on the downward slope of its depletion curve. This is the point at which it is very important to become aware of and to understand the difference between environmental economics--the greening of orthodox growth economics where technology can substitute for energy--and ecological economics, which looks at the whole system, its interrelationships and carrying capacity, and ways to continue improving once the steady-state of maturity is reached.

I mean, what we're talking about here is the possible end of life as we know it, or in the more optimistic scenarios, merely the collapse of what is known as Western civilization. Who honestly thinks suburbia is going to survive 1) the imminent collapse of a growth economy based on cheap and abundant fossil fuels, 2) a two-thirds human population reduction to the sustainable global limit of about 2 billion, and 3) the mass migration of the majority of that population into habitable areas as changes unfold from catastrophic climate destabilization that are on track to occur even if tomorrow we stop all greenhouse gas emissions, razing the rain forests, and polluting our air and water? When you combine the rational, emotional, and spiritual evidence for the shape we and our planet are in, the worship of material consumption and mammonism isn't a system that's worth protecting and prolonging.

And "greenness" in the built environment is not solely a function of density. While it may be that big cities such as New York have access to a greater number of natural history museums, zoos and aquariums, teaching about nature is not functionally equivalent to being in nature. We've long known this to be qualitatively true, and it can now be shown to be quantitatively so on a number of indicators as well. The economic principle of perfect substitutability doesn't hold any better here than on thinking that technology can substitute for energy.

The conversation we all need to be having is the best and quickest way to put an alternative in place that improves quality of life and provides expanded opportunities and support to develop one's potential. Where we create the quality goods that we need, within carrying capacity limitations, and have the time to enjoy and benefit from them. The pieces of this alternative already exist, we don't have to wait for a techno-miracle. They include powering down, relocalizing, and overcoming our disconnection from the natural world, each other, and our own inner nature. It involves shifting our mindset from having more to being more. It involves giving up the unfounded assumption that economic growth is necessary for prosperity and that we can consume the entire planet with no ill effects if we call it "green." It involves working with the creative energies of life in building mutually supportive relationships

This is the direction we would head if we were to allow our rationality to be fully informed by our emotions and spirit. We could press our intelligence into service and admit that reverse is the proper gear to select when you're going the wrong way down a narrowing path.

Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.

That is not true. When liquid-fuels are expensive, mining companies run their trucks on grid-electricity.
google.com/search?q=Liebherr+T282+trolley
http://www.digitalcar.sae.org/ohmag/origeq_12-00/origeq3. ...

As an option, the ac drive system for the Liebherr T 282 can operate with a pantograph and overhead trolley system.

Here is an overview of historical and modern electrically-powered mining trucks. There are plenty of photographs:
hutnyak.com/Trolley/trolleyphotos.html

The following photos are from actual trolley operations around the world.
[...]

Valtellina Dam Project - 1936 to 1962

The Valtellina trolley system was built in 1938 and operated until the early sixties. A total of 20 trolley trucks were used to carry concrete, sand and equipment for construction of the Valtellina dam in northern Italy.

There were 16 three-axle trolley trucks, 4 two-axle trolleytrucks, and 2 trolley buses for transporting personnel. These trucks were NOT trolley-assisted, but were FULL trolley - operating on 650 volts dc power from overhead lines. Two trolley lines were installed, having a total length of 80 kilometers.
[...]

Riverside Cement - 1956 to 1971

This truck was NOT trolley assisted, but rather FULL trolley. It did NOT have an engine, and was driven by an overhead trolley line on haul roads or by an "extension cord" when at the shovel.
[...]

Kennecott Chino - 1967

In 1967 Kennecott Copper Corporation conducted the first feasibility study and prototype test of trolley-assisted large mining trucks. [...] testing was successful
[...]

Quebec Cartier Mine - 1970 to 1977

QCM at Lac Jeannine, Quebec was the first successful application of modern trolley-assist. This trolley system collected power from an overhead busbar using a trolley pole arrangement. Trolley trucks included KW Dart 85 ton, Unit Rig M85 (85 ton), and Unit Rig M100 (100 ton) trucks.
[...]

Palabora Mining, South Africa - 1980 to 2001

Palabora's initial trolley test system incorporated a trolley pole/conductor arrangement. At conclusion of the testing, the poles were discarded and replaced with pantographs. The early trolley fleet was comprised of 75 Unit Rig Mark 36 trucks, with 170 ton capacity. Euclid R190 trucks were later added to the trolley fleet.
[...]

ISCOR Mining, South Africa - 1982 to 2001

ISCOR is presently the largest user of trolley assist in the world. These photos are primarily of the "early" ISCOR trolley system, with the exception of those showing the Euclid R280 AC truck. ISCOR has perfected a "lightweight" overhead line system, which is fed by many small substations. It is hoped to add photos of the current system in the near future.

As of February 2001, the Sishen mine was operating a trolley haulage fleet consisting of 32 Komatsu 730Es and 9 Unit Rig M36s. The Grootegeluk mine was operating a trolley haulage fleet consisting of 14 Komatsu 730Es, 11 Marathon-LeTourneau 2200s, and 1 Euclid R280 AC.
[...]

Nchanga Mine - 1983 to 198?

The ZCCM mine at Nchanga installed a trolley system that collected power from an overhead busbar using shoes mounted on trolley poles. Many of these pictures are screen shots from a GE-produced video.
[...]

Rossing Uranium - 1986 to 2001

Rossing was a "sister" mine to Palabora, and when they installed their trolley system, sometime around 1986, they patterned it after Palabora's.

As of February 2001, Rossing was operating a trolley haulage fleet consisting of 11 Komatsu 730Es.
[...]

Barrick Goldstrike - 1994 to 2001

Barrick conducted numerous trolley feasibility studies and in 1993 gave the go-ahead to proceed with the installation of a system at their Goldstrike mine in Nevada. The system was patterned after Palabora's, except that the equipment was upsized to accommodate Goldstrike's larger trucks (190 ton vs. 170 ton).

Overhead lines and substations were supplied by Siemens, and were of a full-catenary heavy-duty design. Pantographs, from TransTech of South Carolina, were used for current collection. Their "half-scissor" design differed from the "full-scissor" design used at Palabora.

By October 1994 five trolley lines, which totaled 2.9 miles in length, were in service - along with 50 Komatsu 685E haul trucks that had been converted for trolley operation. Barrick continued to expand the trolley system, with a total of 74 trucks and 4.5 miles of trolley lines in service.