Great read on the changes that are to come. Jim Kunstler gets it.

[Neshanic]

Amazing insight to how this thing will change everything.

"The "housing bubble" implosion is broadly misunderstood. It's not just the collapse of a market for a particular kind of commodity, it's the end of the suburban pattern itself, the way of life it represents, and the entire economy connected with it."

Excellent read.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/01/disarray.html#comments

[Angela Shelley]

1. Great!

May I quote from the article in the link above:

"Voters and candidates in the primary season have been hollering about "change" but I'm afraid the dirty secret of this campaign is that the American public doesn't want to change its behavior at all. What it really wants is someone to promise them they can keep on doing what they're used to doing: buying more stuff they can't afford, eating more shitty food that will kill them, and driving more miles than circumstances will allow."

[pbca]

4. I've said this before

What really needs to happen in 09 is not just a pullout of Iraq, but a massive scale-down of the military. It's going to take a very large tax increase combined with some drastic spending cuts to get the Fed. budget in line (not just balanced but running enough of a surplus to pay down debt) while at the same time making massive investments in health care, the environment, education and infrastructure. But no one who says this is going to get elected.

[Karenina]

2. K&R!

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. We have to go from suburban sprawl to sustainability

It means not only a change in circumstance, but a change in mind set. Looking at the cost of something not just from your own point of view, but from the greater view of society in general. We must learn to share again, make individual sacrifices for the common good. It's really not that hard, but it means stop being isolated and joining together with others, be they family or neighbors.

[dysfunctional press]

5. where are all the people who currently live in the suburbs supposed to go?

:shrug:

i don't think that jim gets it at all. peak-oil might be responsible for some of the things he mentions, but he never seems to mention oil. an efficient electric-car that works for commuting will pretty much keep the suburban dream alive- and that is something that's already been proven to be doable.

[Angela Shelley]

6. Depends on how the electricity is produced

[Bushwick Bill]

7. What are you talking about?

Do you really think if we all start moving around in go-carts, we can expand American suburbia forever? How are you going to move goods around the planet and this country on electricity? How are you going to run airplanes? What the heck would adding 240 million vehicles to the electric grid do to the grid? Where the heck are you going to get that electricity when North American natural gas reserves are gone in 10-20 years? You better be ready to either (A) support coal and nukes in that case or (B) shrink suburbia.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

[dysfunctional press]

10. solar, wind, nuclear, coal, geothermal, biomass...

the 'replacement' for oil & narural gas will be multi-pronged. and besides, the oil/gas isn't going to suddenly just "stop". it will decrease, and technologies will develop ways to extract more, and conserve what we have. nobody alive today is going to see the last of the petroleum- unless it's made obsolete. as newer technologies conserve fuels in one area, there will be more available for other more urgent needs- if more cars use less gas, there will be more available for trucking/aviation. increased use of rail travel will also take over a lot of the truck/air traffic. less resources will be available for personal pleasure uses- more bicycles, and less vacations by air travel.
there will also be other societal changes, including more communal living to pool & conserve resources.
and who said anything about go-carts besides you? :shrug: give yourself some education, and see the film- "who killed the electric car?"
and i'll ask again, and maybe this time you'll answer my question with an answer-
where are all the people who live in the suburbs supposed to go when you "shrink suburbia"?

[Leopolds Ghost]

9. We could start by legalizing Urban Development which is outlawed under the 1924 Zoning Act

And the 1926 Subdivision Act

:shrug:

Put it another way. Your question is like:

"If pot is legalized, where are the alcoholics supposed to go?"

[dysfunctional press]

11. and what would be the effect of repealing those acts?

for those of us who aren't as enlightened, and/or weren't around when they were passed in the first place, that is.

we just sold our two-flat and moved out of the city(chicago), to an older subdivision(1965), that's kinda-sorta rural- all the houses have wells & septic systems on lots of at least an acre. we're a few miles west of the fringes of a rather large suburban area about 40 miles northwest of chicago...and if the suburbs are to be shrunk/abandoned- there has to be some type of plan as far as where all the people are going to live.
i don't know of anyone in this area who's going to be too keen on the idea of becoming city-dwellers.
there are plenty of options available and solutions that will be developed before that happens.

[Selatius]

13. When the oil runs out, people will either move back to the countryside or back into the city. Simple

Either that, or the country actually invests in mass transit like Germany, France, and Japan, but that would mean turning away auto industry lobbyists.

[dysfunctional press]

16. nobody who's alive today is going to see the oil run out...

so it's not something that i will have to face, anyway.

[barb162]

24. I'm not so sure; the Saudis aren't exatly open about the amounts

left in their fields.

[dysfunctional press]

26. there's lots of oil left around the world- but it's harder and more expensive to get to.

oil will be with us for a little while yet.

btw- did you know that any product that can be made with petroleum and its by-products can also be made from hempseed oil?

[Selatius]

28. But everybody is going to be there to see 4 or 5 dollars/gallon for gasoline.

It's a lot closer than you think. The oil won't run out, but it's going to crush everybody who can't afford to live in this kind of infrastructure anymore. Either they invest in mass transit, or people are going to be buried.

[dysfunctional press]

33. it wouldn't suprise me if it's around 4 or possibly even 4.50 by the end of the year

what needs to be invested in is electic vehicles and other means of propulsion that don't require petroleum products.

the american suburbs are designed around the car- automobiles are not going to go away anytime soon.

[Selatius]

34. Yeah, but I generally shy away from hybrids as the mainstay solution for several problems.

1) High cost because of high demand. There's a backlog for hybrids that are tens of thousands long, but this is a temporary problem until mass production is ramped up, so it's not that big a problem.

2) Auto insurance. That alone is a bitch. With city buses and light rail, you can get a better deal on insurance rates, simply because the city, state, or federal government has more bargaining power in negotiating premiums to insure a fleet. An individual could never achieve that kind of collective bargaining power.

3) Fuel prices. If a bus can seat 50 people, the bus can do the work of upwards of 50 cars. The larger the bus fleet and the higher fuel prices are, the fewer privately owned vehicles will be driven, which may reflect positively in the amount of pollution in cities and the level of gridlock in urban areas. The city where I commuted to everyday was experimenting with biodiesel/hybrid buses, but Katrina destroyed much of the fleet and the infrastructure.

4. Maintenance. It simply costs less money for 50 people to maintain a bus that can seat 50 compared to the same 50 people trying to maintain 50 cars or nearly 50 cars. Even if the 50 cars are hybrids, you still lose out in terms of insurance costs. It's cheaper to insure one bus vs. 50 vehicles.

I'm not saying we should abandon hybrids. We should encourage the replacement of vehicles with hybrids through tax breaks and the repeal of tax breaks for purchasing SUVs and cross-over SUVs, but at the same time, I think it's really important to get away from the notion that everybody should own a vehicle. It's a waste of resources in terms of steel and space for living.

[dysfunctional press]

36. i don't think that hybrids are a solution at all. what's needed are electric cars.

the technology is there. it's been done.
if buses were the workable solution, it would have been the solution with internal combustion as well- it's not what people want. especially when electric cars are completely doable.

and i have no idea why you dragged insurance into the mix...???

electric cars pretty much make your 4 points moot

[Selatius]

37. I'm talking in terms of costs, which is why insurance is in the mix.

As far as electric cars go, in order to replace most or even all vehicles with electric cars, you must radically expand the electric power grid; otherwise, the grid would collapse with tens of millions of electric cars sipping up power in addition to tens of millions of homes. Nuclear power would likely be the cheapest way to do it. France powers three quarters of its grid with nothing but nuclear power. Solar power would be another, and wind power still another, but if the power grid is still largely based on fossil fuels, electric cars will still contribute to carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, since the power plant would either be burning crude oil or coal.

If everybody owned an electric car, everybody still must purchase auto insurance. A fleet of electric buses and light-rail infrastructure would be more efficient in terms of cutting down total insurance costs as well as helping to defeat gridlock.

[dysfunctional press]

39. americans would rather have their own cars than a fleet of busses and light-rail...

even if it means paying their own insurance- which is what they do now.

and they don't all have to be electric- there are a number of feasible ways to run autos that don't involve gasoline.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. The suburbs could be retrofitted for car-free transportation

For example, build sidewalks and pedestrian bridges so that you can get from one strip mall business to another without getting back into your car, build bicycle paths from each housing cluster to each island of stores and services, putting parking underground or on top of buildings and replacing the vast parking lots with green spaces or housing.

In Japan, they keep extending the rail lines to new housing developments.

[dysfunctional press]

19. or- they could develop an efficient and effective electric vehicle.

oh, wait...they already have.

gm has already shown that it can be done.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

20. Powered by what?

Are you so wedded to the ugly, environmentally damaging, socially destructive suburban way of life that you can't see any alternatives?

Is it really logical to spend two hours a day in your car? Is it logical to have to drive miles to pick up a carton of milk? Is it logical to drive your children to school and then set up expensive sports programs so that they "get some exercise"? Is it logical to fill the world's best agricultural land and wildlife habitat with more ticky-tack McMansions? Is it logical to take up the suburban way of life "for the children" when neither you nor they are home enough to enjoy it? Is it logical to live in a place that has no natural community gathering spots (making it ripe for the megachurches to exploit)?

Are you in the suburbs out of habit--we are now on our third generation of people who know no other way of life--or did you consciously reject city, small town, and true rural life?

[dysfunctional press]

21. ...

:eyes:

btw- in answer to your actual question- electricity.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

22. So you've bought into the whole suburban myth of "the good life"?

This is why America will be unable to save itself. Too many people say they want change but are unwilling to actually make changes.

[dysfunctional press]

25. you're really good at making assumptions about people you don't know, aren't you...?

too bad you don't know shit about it.

we moved from the city, where we owned a two-flat. we sold it for over 3 times what we paid for it 11 years earlier. we bought a house next door to a childhood friend of mine, in an older subdivision(built in 1965, it hasn't had a new house built there in over 20 years), where all the houses sit on lots of at least an acre- ours is just under 1.5. it's just a little west of the suburban town i grew up in.

we have a large vegetable garden, whereas in the city, we couldn't. we'll be doing an addition this year, and we hope to incorporate both passive and direct solar in the project, as well as converting to a geothermal heat pump.

we're a few miles west of town, but it's an easy bike ride to the grocery store, drug store, and hardware store. i'm on permanent disability, but my wife works as a graphic designer. on those days when she has to go into the big city, i generally drive her to the train station a few miles away, and when she comes back in the evening, if it's nice out she runs home.

my friend next door, as well as the guy who lives across the street(we all 3 went to high school together) have already started talking about setting up some type of communal/co-operative lifestyle arrangement if things start to get really bad.

i spent 20 years living in chicago & evanston, and i have no desire or need to return to an urban lifestyle.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

27. Excellent--those older inner suburbs still retain some essence of community

It's the exurbs, the edge cities, where the only way you can tell what part of the country you're in is to look at the vegetation, that will be the death of us.

[dysfunctional press]

29. i did give a lot of thought to future conditions before we decided to make the move...

and yes, anything west of us couldn't really be considered a "suburb" of chicago. the amazing thing is the number of new development projects still being started, while all those that broke ground over the past 2 years are pretty much just big graded fields with stakes marking the lot lines where the houses that were never built were supposed to go.

it may be that staying with the income property in the city would have been the better financial move- but we really wanted a change of scenery and lifestyle...that, and my best friend/new neighbor has a really sweet in-ground pool.

overall, as long as the aquifer doesn't go dry, and we don't get taxed out of our house, we should be able to make it just fine where we are. if i had my druthers, i'd prefer a small 'hobby farm', raising fresh-water eels or something...but being as i'm disabled with chronic pain and in the second half of my 40's, what we've got is probably as close as i'll get.

[Leopolds Ghost]

8. Read Kunstler "The Long Emergency: End of Cheap Oil" and "Geography of Nowhere"

Also for a counterpoint to Kunstler's pro-small town,
anti-urban perspective, read anti-car urbanist Jane Jacobs
seminal work,

"Death and Life of Great American Cities".

Jacobs is the woman who stopped them from building freeways
through Manhattan.

If anything, Kunstler does not go far enough since he does
not provide hard numbers on the energy negativity of
hydrogen, solar/wind, the global corn supply (45% of which
is pumped by the US into the Third World, depressing
wages for subsistence farmers and forcing them to move
into the jungle or the city) and just about every energy source
that depends on fossil fuel inputs.

[tom_paine]

12. It may take as much as 50 years to get where Kunstler prophesies

but based on the data at hand, and failing some miraculous influx of femtowatts of clean energy like mass-produced fusion, we WILL get there.

And I think he is far too kind in his thoughts that we are capable of Soviet or Nazi-like atrocities. We are already there. The Bushie Propaganda Machine has already produced the 30% of people capable of monstrous acts with just the tiniest permission from authoirty with their Propaganda Program now stretching 25 years or mor, and wholly unopposed still, by anything more than a handful of Lefty Blogs.

We are ALREADY the 1930s Germans, lock, stock, and barrel. Bushie Gestapo and Block Captains, the Willing Executioners, the Willful Deniers, and the "I Know Nothing-ers" are already in place.

The only thing that shields it is our relative prosperity. My guess, far more realistic than Kunstler's, is that when things get tight, there is a 95% chance we will do horrible, horrible things to each other. As always, the atrocities will flow from the Authoritarian to the Libertarian.

In America's case, that would be from Right to Left.

[alfredo]

14. Remember, it was a total crash of the German Economy that set the

stage for Hitler's message.

[OneBlueSky]

15. "Americans are going to maintain their expectations for life as usual until" . . .

something breaks their psychological entrainment. Part of the problem is the entire system, itself. We live in a corporatist system. Everything comes from some bloody corporation, and the corporations are sustained by this fiat currency, debt-based, fraud-based, financial system. Unless it's activily trying to grow and consume resources, it dies--and it will fight till then end to maintain its power. People are just dupped into this belief system and they're going to go along with it as it's the only reality they know, which just shows how successful this corporatist system has been with the sciences surrounding human behaviors."
one of the comments following the article . . .

[BridgeTheGap]

18. The boom bust cycle of capitalism is alive and well with the bust

cycle pounding on the door. Let's see if the financial magicians can keep the "house of cards" from tumbling...but maybe that's exactly what they want - a repeat of the engineered collapse in 1929 that only those "in the know" saw coming, divested (helping to trigger the collapse) only to reinvest into bankrupt businesses.

[barb162]

23. The housing bubble/ ARM adjustments are affecting city housing too.

He's really talking about energy, not spread out housing. And when energy prices get super high, the cities will be hurt too. There's no getting around we have to conserve and try to find new energy sources.

[NashVegas]

30. These Are Two Separate Issues

Except for the very smart ones who saw what was coming and sold before the bubble popped, moved into a downtown condo.

For everyone else, there is the bubble and there are the rising transportation costs. There are still enough SUVs on the road to show that hasn't sunk in yet.

In a personal email group, we think there are going to be affluent downtowns, affluent or livable exurbs, and a ring of misfortune in the suburbs in between.

[Mike03]

31. THE LONG EMERGENCY is a book I have recommended to many people.

He's dead-ass right. And anyone who takes his work seriously is already very prepared for the future.

Thanks for posting this reminder that people need to think about the future.

[Mike03]

32. BTW, Kick and Rec.

People, PLEASE pay attention to this post, and this author's work.

[CK_John]

35. Buy, build or invest in rickshaws and learn to weld. n/t

[Ganja Ninja]

38. I don't know that he's right about that.

This is going to be an economic slow down for sure but I think it's only temporary. Once we get switched over to renewables for our electrical power and the plug-in electric cars go into full production the suburban lifestyle will resume. I expect the change over will be pretty well along in 10 to 15 years maybe 20 years tops and this crisis will be behind us.