The other day I expressed disappointment at Kevin Drum's fifth peak oil post -- the one where he lays out his recommendations for oil policy. In my inimitably oblique and unfocused way, I was simply trying to say that I wish he'd been more imaginative.
If nothing else, peak oil is going to be a major inflection point in our collective history. It's a sharp turn in the road, and we can't see clearly around the bend. The stakes are huge, and call for a commensurate greatness of mind and expansiveness of thought.
What Drum did is basically gather the conventional wisdom in one place, without considering at all the myriad ways that the CW might be constricted and warped by the vested interests of society's current power brokers. Nor did he deign to consider things that might seem, in the current sociopolitical scene, impossible, or at least out on the fringe.
One example: U.S. suburbia, as Kunstler never tires of telling us, is built on cheap oil. It takes lots of oil to transport goods around the world to a Wal-Mart, and lots of oil for suburbanites to drive back and forth to it bazillions of times. The dominant land-use paradigm in this country is oil-sucking. If oil's running out, it's got to change, right?
Drum doesn't bother to mention the many innovative thinkers out there pondering how we can make cities greener and more attractive (the very subject of World Environment Day). He doesn't consider how we might refashion our remaining farm land and open spaces in more ecologically friendly fashion. He doesn't consider how we might encourage people to buy locally grown food and locally made goods.
Instead, we get this extraordinarily banal post on why people don't like mixed-use developments. (See also the Atrios post that preceded it and the Jim Henley post responding to it.)
It's late, so I'll just make two brief points:
- Despite the widespread acceptance of the "that's just what most people want" chestnut, it is absurd to think that U.S. land-use and residential patterns are the result of a pure market exercise. There are deep and knotty cultural issues involved, of course, but there's also the small matter of public infrastructure and investment over the past century, which suffice to say was not driven by egalitarian or green concerns. Modern-day American exurbians are living in a way that's making them obese, diabetic, asthmatic, and disconnected from communal support, not to mention dead from heart disease and auto accidents. It's an awfully odd preference to be so widely shared. Maybe there are other forces at work?
- To the extent that most people do want it, why is that a deal-breaker? It's somewhat telling, is it not, that Drum thinks we can get drills into the Arctic Refuge and off the coasts, raise taxes, raise CAFE standards, and lavish public money on new technology, but the one immoveable object in the equation is the preference of the American homeowner. That's inviolate. But why? If our collective preferences are driving us to ruin, it's up to us to change those preferences, not accept them as fait accompli.
With that I'll succumb to exhaustion and go to bed. But let me ask you. What did Drum leave out of his list?
Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!
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ben Posted 11:13 pm
05 Jun 2005
The biggest point that wasn't really emphasized strongly enough: Price energy at what it's really worth - which has to include the negative externalities of using oil
Get into people's heads that public transportation is better than driving cars (maybe by making parking much more expensive or by taxing drivers the way London does)
Some other things recommended by the IEA:
Support telecommuting
Support flexible work schedules
Support odd/even day driving bans
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jdhlax Posted 1:05 pm
06 Jun 2005
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mtneuman Posted 2:19 pm
06 Jun 2005
I love this statement by Dave Roberts: "Modern-day American exurbians are living in a way that's making them obese, diabetic, asthmatic, and disconnected from communal support, not to mention dead from heart disease and auto accidents." It says it all. We are victims of our own success. The dominant land-use paradigm in this country is most definitely oil-sucking, as Roberts says. And it's got to change. It's just go to....
But it won't change by itself. Positive lifestyle changes don't just happen by themselves, they have to be prodded somehow. The negative ones might, but not the positive ones. So we have to find a positive way to do that, one that doesn't create the kind of anarchy nobody wants in this country.
The government has to have a role; it's up to the people who created the government to tell it what is needed, because the government in this country has gone adrift, off into never land, and has taken us all there with it. Mostly because of those three little letters: o-i-l.
I propose we tell the government we want our taxes to go to the right kinds of things, not the things like oil that will destroy us and the planet along with us. We need to do that now, with a sense of urgency, because we don't have much time left anymore. We have waited too long to act on this already. We have to act now.
What it all comes down to is people need to be rewarded for saving energy. So that if they choose not to buy so much fuel, to not drive so much, to not fly, to use less energy in their home (per capita), they get financially rewarded at the end of the year with energy rebates for conserving energy. That's the basis concept. It's foreign to our economic system, so government has to be behind it. But they would be behind it unless people tell them it is necessary for them to hold on to their jobs.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClimateArchive/message/229
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birdboy Posted 11:17 am
07 Jun 2005
But I just can't see it happening in America without the revolt and anarchy. Our government tells us over and over that our economy must be forever growing bigger, converting more and more of the earth's resources into bigger and bigger piles of crap, or (presumably), our economy will simply collapse. If we stopped sucking oil and buying junk, our jobs would disappear. Our government, propped up by all that money and power, would crumble. The air would clear up; it would get really quiet, and people would smile and sit down together and plan a garden and share what they have and...
oops, sorry, I lost it there.
Doom, bloody, inevitable doom.
a liberal in redsville
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jdhlax Posted 4:55 pm
07 Jun 2005
The cities are surrounded by agricultural land (currently the hideously destructive suburbs), which produces all the food for the cities. Private motor vehicles are completely prohibited, and all cities have good, 24/7 public transit, including sufficient subway systems so that it doesn't take forever to get across town.
The rural areas have no industrial amenities. Those who really want to live in the country actually do so, without destroying the ecosystems in which they live with industrial crap. I envision possibly solar or wind energy produced by the homes that use it, and maybe satellite TV, but that's about it. Horses would provide high speed transportation. There should also be very large areas from which people are completely excluded.
Mainly, the selfish suburbs have got to go, along with their selfish lifestyles. Above all, we must greatly lower our population, or no solution will work. The idea of an ever growing economy or living areas is totally out of touch with the reality that space is finite and humans are already taking up far too much of it.
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