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72 comments on Peak Oil and the Environment Part 3 - Day 1

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Cherenkov on May 9, 2006 - 1:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Again, the theme seems to be, "How the hell do we keep the automobile paradigm going?" Not, "Jeez, this automobile paradigm is a stupid f*cking thing that is screwing us royal." Not, "How in the hell can we get this damned automobile albatross from around our necks?"

Why?

The stock answer gets shouted from the wings, "Because it will screw the economy."

Of course it will. The whole damned economy is based on the automobile.

Someone shouts from the cheap seats, "Go climb back up into the trees!"

What trees? Didn't we cut those down last week to fuel the Hummer with cellulosic alcohol for a ride down to the gym to get some exercise?

A few days before the 1929 stock market crash, an economist proclaimed that humanity had reached permanent growth. No more crashes.

Well, all those people who are telling us there will be no peak, at least for a long, long while, will be sucking hind teat when the SHTF.

For those who ask, "Well, what are you doing about it?"

I say, "I'm watching it all come down." We all die someday, but the last thing I'm going to do is die for some capitalist who says we should screw the environment with CTL in order to continue this moronic car cult. At some point the people will have to face their culture's mortality, and you can take it to the bank that the yayhoos will be sure that someone else dies before they do. My guess is they will off the rich first; after all, that is where the gasoline and food and money will be, cause the regular joes sure aint got it.

Up the revolution.

V

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Magnus Redin on May 9, 2006 - 2:07am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I globally hope for an average of about one car for each family but it usually do not need to be big and they should usually not have to use it every day. The unsustainable idea is that everyone should use their automobile for everything.

And to get rid of the car and the option of small scale personal transportation between random places of a few humans and some goods is about as dumb as having it as the only solution.

We need multiple transportation systems that complement each other and a sound mixture of dense and disperes housing. Then we can live with different lifestyle choices depending on what we enjoy, can afford and can handle in different stages of our lives. Again, having the same ideal and solution for everybody is lunacy.

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ChrisPhoenix on May 9, 2006 - 2:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Just-in-time carpooling. Networked carpool requests (integrated with GPS navigation) could recruit a driver who's going your way in real-time. A lot like hitchhiking, but accountable (with biometrics, if desired), and you can easily recruit drivers who are going very close to your destination.

Now it becomes possible to plan a convenient trip in two or even three rides. The first takes you from your origin to a well-traveled point somewhere near your destination. Then you catch another ride to get exactly where you want. If you had even a small fraction of the population participating (like, 1% or less in high traffic zones), you would wait just a minute or two for each ride, which is what makes the multi-ride trip convenient.

Also, with the network doing the negotiating, there are lots of opportunities for subsidies, taxes, and incentives for drivers. "<BEEP> You can make $2 by driving an estimated one-tenth mile out of your way and taking one male non-smoking verified passenger with an approval rating of 93%. Do you accept?"

Chris

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 7:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
When I was a kid (I'm 44 now) there were 300 bicycles locked up at the school I went to for K...Grade 6 on a nice day (the student population is 600 students) I went by there the other day and counted 6 bikes, 2 of which were adult sized, thus teachers or staff.

Why? Because of the new perception that we live in a world of sex offenders and serial killers, parents now drive their children to school

Check out the new releases section at your video store. A significant percentage of Hollywoods income is produced by stoking fears about "demons" of various sorts lurking around the edges of our culture.

The movie they would make about this idea would no doubt be called "Carpool". The plot line such as it is would involve a quite, unassuming guy living in a neighbourhood "just like yours" who passes himself off as a telephone installer, or computer programmer, or something, but who has hot wired the fingerprint scanner in his car to send false data and spends the day crusing the expressways of L.A. picking up single women, who wind up in mason jars under the floor of his basement crawl space.

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BrianT on May 9, 2006 - 7:59am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Good post. What used to be luxuries of the rich (getting driven to school) have now become necessities in the consumption-driven economy. Drive the kids to school then enroll them in an expensive weight-watchers program.The society has bought into the idea that the worth of something is measured by its expense.
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jim burke on May 9, 2006 - 12:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
YOu are exactly right. In my small town, the kids used to bike or walk around in their spare time, and go for hikes in the mountains or desert.

As near as I can tell, those are lost arts. I never see kids bicycle or hike, and rarely walk. In fact, I rarely see them at all, except for hitching to grassy park downtown to hang out. I guess they spend their time in the net (much as I do, which is why I'm writing this; but I still hike and occasionally bike...)

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 2:29pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Most urban North American children in this day and age who's parents would allow them to "go for a hike in the woods" would percive it as a pointless activity. Things "worth doing" are, by and large, activities that have been packaged and marketed to them as being "worth while" by television advertising / pop culture, and a walk in the woods has no "cool".

Hanging out with their peer group is sort of an exception to this, because even though it lacks a direct purchase component  children do have a hard wired developmental need for group acceptance and validation by peers, but you'll notice that importance is placed on donning the outward markers of "coolness" prior to them leaving for the mall/park/wherever What these are will vary depending on current and local fashion and the tribe or clique with which they identify as members i.e. "branded" clothing, hair, makeup, i-pod, goth garb, etc.

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 2:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I sould add that many of the things that "the walk in the woods" now has to compete against are very powerful, and in some cases addictive.

Examples:

Television viewing: This is how most children aquire their culture (mostly from the commercials, but somewhat from the actual program content), as do their parents. Children have a powerful need for cultural knowledge, also, if you watch someone watching T.V., without watching it yourself they are clearly drugged, or at least "held in thrall" which I count as the same thing

Video games: Addictive, but not in the way t.v. broadcast programming is. Broadcast programming is a clearly a depressant, video games are a stimulant with the drug being adrenallin and the brains other fight / flight hormones

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tochigi on May 10, 2006 - 12:08pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hi JM,

A shockingly good couple of posts IMHO.
you are right about the tv brainwashing. it applies to radio too.
i know because I've seen it.
we don't have a tv so when our 8-yr-old watches it for a while at someone's house, the impact is amazing. and after he listen's to commercial radio in my wife's car for a few hours he parrots the ads for days.

and your comment about being held in thrall is dead right too.
when our son was about 14 months old, we went to an acquaintance's place who had a daughter 4 months younger. when the twice-daily public tv program for mothers and under-2s came on, this lively little girl just sat there motionless with her eyes fixed on the screen for the whole 10 mins. she was in a trance. and then it ended and she became human again.

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