I asked several Mercedes mechanics before settling on an 81 to 83 240D, white, manual transmission, low mileage and then spent months on eBay looking for one :-)

The most durable and reliable car M-B ever made ! (i.e. the most durable & reliable car ever made). And economical with the manual transmission.

I burn ~6 gallons/month of oil products but can switch if I need to.  A mechanic gave me the "banana" comment.  Partially congealed biodiesel CAN be burned apparently.  Fuel lubrication not required.

My last car (accidents not withstanding).  And 30 mpg when I evaced for Katrina with 3 people w/o cars.  8 hours of stop & go traffic.  Sore leg from the clutch, but otherwise a perfect evacmobile :-)  Refueled north of Birmingham (hard to do till Tuscaloosa).

Best Hopes,

Alan

And yes, sustained 4MPH walking is really "on the shady side" of jogging. A marathon is 26 miles, and it takes quite a trained runner, without a backpack, to complete one of those.

What am I getting at here..... I can't define it.... let me say that I was amazed more Katrina "refugees" didn't simply take off across country. Most stayed put and waited for Mommy Gov't to take care of 'em. I think a number of people did take off across country but we've not heard about them, but it's tens out of hundreds of thousands. There's a reference on patrick.net of a poster's employee who basically walked to Baton Rouge. Was found with $10 in her pocket looking for a place to sleep. More gumption than almost everyone but still not enough to make it in a real SHTF scenario. (The poster on there loaned her enough to get by, the refugee started her own biz and paid back the loan, every penny - better than all but a vanishingly small percentage of us.)

Sigh. Mobility probably does matter, a lot. As "zero hour" narrowed down to a few hours for Katrina, I remarked to a neighbor I'd probably heist a Harley out of a dealership, and head on outa there - take it to a dealer a state or so away and say, "Well, I've taken quite a test ride, and I've decided not to buy right now", It's not that hard for inexperienced thugs to grab a person off of a bike....

But some seem to be actually wondering if they themselves are to blame, and not just Bush or Rummy.  

Notice that "we" does not include most of the American people. In fact most of the American people have more "stuff" and an OK job for now, but the Neocons don't consider us to be anything but Zimbabweans of a generally lighter color who just happen to be closer and just as easy if not more so to prey upon, especially as Government and Populace become more separate.

The lobby is already there, only at the moment it voluntarily remains under the sway of the liars of CERA and their ilk.  And so the emphasis for the transportation file is on highways, bridges, airports and so on.

How will electrified rail/street cars be paid?  On the backs of the working class (I think it's called the middle class in the US, perhaps to distinguish it from the underclass).  That part of the lobbying effort won't change.

What an odd term.  I am unfamilar with the concept.

I have heard of some literary mention of "basement" as an uncomfortable room that one went "down to".  But all such literature was written decades ago.

Certainly none in New Orleans (we bury our dead aboveground).  And in Phoenix where I will spend this Christmas, there are none.

Slabs in Phoenix, raised homes in New Orleans.

Are "basements' still being built ?  If so, where ?  Or are they obsolete and now removed ?

Puzzled,

Alan

The suburban poor will carpool to work thus they can afford the travel. Also I suspect we will finally have some increase in public transportation to help these suburban poor.

We won't destroy it for a long time. Also a revival of industrialization in these suburban area's would sustain a working class. So you probably will see a lot of the office towers converted to manufacturing. If you think this is strange I saw these manufacturing towers in Asia. On the outside it looks like a office building but inside they have assembly lines. Strange but doable. Large department stores would make excellent building for light manufacturing and assembly.

Eventually sure some of the construction will be torn down and farther in the future converted to farmland but it won't happen I think for 20 years or so at the minimum.

It won't be bright pretty new electric trains and trams but we will hobble along for a bit.

See my later post I expect the US to get a influx of refugees fleeing starvation not looking for the American dream they will be happy to live in these new suburban slums. Also I expect us to agian have a population of impoverished americans willing and able to work like during the depression.

I bet ue can imagine the social tension between newly poor americans and these economic refugess.

Short term the collapse of the housing bubble will basically stop growth for several years. Long term we can't put in the highway infrastructure to say increase suburbia by 20-30% that's at say 5% growth each year.

Take the 405 or 5 highways in Southern CA or the eastern corridor regions or basically any large metropolitan area in the US the highway infrastructure is saturated. To move much beyond what we have today would require a investment similar to that already made.

Think of it this way you have a highway that can handle
say x amount of cars per hour at peak. If you add additional traffic it simply slows the system down the only answer at this point is to add a whole new highway or multiple lanes to and existing road.

Also I did not say that the sprawl was not huge esp in southern CA just that its basically saturated around most urban centers. In fact Southern CA is a perfect example of saturated suburbia. I think the bubble both initiated the collapse early and prematurely stunted the growth of suburbia. Suburbia was built because we had large tracks of cheap land these are basically no longer available in any metropolitan area.

Here is a article on urban sprawl in CA.
http://www.rut.com/misc/beyondSprawl.html

The basic thesis is the highway infrastructure has reached its limit and little cheap land is available within a reasonable commuting distance of most of our metropolitan areas. Therefore to grow much beyond our current bounds would require either adding even more lanes to existing highways or building a number of new highways to handle the traffic.
In addition the highway routes would probably need increased speed limits and fewer more controlled on ramps.

Thus to have suburbia continue to grow as it has since WWII would require developing a infrastructure that allowed up to 150 mile one way commutes within the two hour maximum commute window. This means speeds of 75 miles and hour during rush hour. I don't think this is feasible and therefore my assertion that suburban sprawl is dead.

It should have peaked later say 2010-2015 but the recent bubble simply caused a early peak and growth will decrease every year from now on out. Its crashing right now but I think you will see it won't recover. Since by the time this bubble is really over say 2010 we will almost certainly be past peak oil. I think by 2012 we will either see suburban areas develop into real towns with real mixed used infrastructure or simply decay like the small towns did in the late 60-70's.

If you read this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_freeways

If current trends continue you would have the population of southern California almost double from 17 million to 30 million in the next few decades. I just don't think this is going to happen or at least if it does these people will not be living in traditional suburbs.  In fact moving data shows
California losing population at about 5% a year. Since most of the recent growth in southern California centered around the hosing industry your certainly going to see population loss for at least a few years as the bubble deflates.

Certainly new homes will continue to be built but the rate of growth will slow to basically zero soon. We can probably safely assume it will follow a logistic curve over the next 30 years.

Any finally again I feel comfortable calling the peak of suburbia expansion as this year because by the time the bubble has sorted itself out we will be well into the effects of peak oil. And finally the focus on southern california is simply it was one of the first and worst regions for the creation of suburbia and it should be one of the first to enter post suburban decline. Other regions of the US such as the eastern seaboard and chicago could also be picked as examples but I think that southern california is good enough to watch as a indicator. Finally the collapse of the economy built up around ever expanding suburbs will probably result in slow or no growth in oil prices at least for the short term since demand will probably be less than supply for a while. This massive economic slowdown may actually delay the onset of spiraling price increases from peak oil for a number of years as the economy contracts and the debt bubble unwinds. But this is tricky to call basically the demand will lesson since people leaving the exurbs and suburbs over the next few years will be leaving because they bought homes they could not afford as they move to renting they will generally locate close to their employer reducing the demand for gasoline. And of course demand from industries associated with housing which is practically every industry in the US today will experience lower demand.
So at least for the short term demand destruction will probably match or exceed lower real oil supplies over the next few years. I'm guessing it will be 2009 or 2010 before demand rebounds to overtake supply.

But if WestTexas export land model is correct we will experience massive price increases in oil as the economy tries to rebound. This is really tough to call since demand destruction in fuel use from the collapsing housing industry might be as low as say 1% a year so it could well be swamped by natural overall population growth in the US. In any case housing prices will be chasing a overall loss in purchasing power in the US as the recession takes hold. Thus even as the price of suburban housing and office space decrease affordability will not grow significantly since less and less of the population will be able to by a home. On the other side of the coin the WWII baby boomer population will be leaving the work force and will not be replaced since the economy will be slowing down. I think Detriot is the perfect model for this effect. A significant number of these people can afford to sell there homes below current market rates and they probably will finally downsize since the condo prices will be tempting. I suspect in a lot of cases the homes will be converted to rental properties.

This of course means we will probably see a CERA like undulating plateau for a few years but its cause is the end of suburbia not peak oil. In a really weird kind of way this last housing bubble may have been the best thing to happen to the US since it gives us several years of breathing room before the effects of peak oil really kick in.

Demographically in america this means a lot of the new immigrants will be basically refugees esp if Mexico's economy collapses as they cease to export oil. Also we will develop a new underclass of economic losers similar to what we had in the depression. Both of these effects will cause America and probably Europe to have large populations of desperatly poor people which has not happened since the 20's. It would be great if we knew the number of intact families seeking goverment assistance over the next few years. In any case underlying this end of suburbia will be a increase in the number of two parent families at or near the poverty line. Initially this will be caused by job loss in the construction trade as low skilled and unskilled workers are no longer needed but it will be pernacious and continue for the forseable future with more skilled workers from and increasing cross section of america surviving on minimum wage jobs.

I'd suggest you start watching for older non-immigrant workers in service industries such as fast food and retail.
This will tell you right off the economy has tanked.

In reality we will simply have the same demographics as the rest of the world.

Right now, you don't have a bunch of nukes planned because utilities still aren't comfortable with the economics and lead times.

In all this, of course, is the ugly reality that getting this done is, to say the least, politically daunting. But I still think we should challenge our representatives wherever possible to put up or shut up.  They like to talk about pie in the sky magic bullets in the guise of alternative energy, especially ethanol. But as long as coal is the cheapest alternative, utilities will choose overwhelmingly over the more expensive alternatives, including natural gas. But there is nothing more environmentally disastrous than coal. And that's even before you start talking about the ultimate impact, global warming.  

If all these coal plants get built, we're just whistling pas t the graveyard. Yes, of course, China will be able to screw the planet all by itself. But the U.S. should start by exercising some leadership.  California is leading the way in this country which will have a big influence over what Barbara Boxer will be doing in her upcoming hearings on global warming.

Colorado by the way passed an initiative two years ago requiring  a 10 percent renewable portfolio by 2020.  They are already way ahead of schedule and will meet that by 2008. That's why the Dems, who are now in power, plan to increase that to 20 percent.  That's a start. But they need to take the next step by requiring more increases in the outyears beyond that. They also need to focus on conservation as the best short to medium term investment.

Sounds crazy. But consider that molten uranium weighs more (has higher density) than other minerals and thus sinks towards the center of the Earth. It is believed that the molten core of the Earth is powered by decaying radioactive materials pulled towards the center by gravity.

Step back... Yes, I was aware of the CNTRL as zoom function in browsers (and in MS Word) but don't find much use for it... my eyesight is still pretty sharp for 55!!  :-)

Was aware of AutoHotKeys but not tried it...

My personal internet pet peeve is website colors.
I prefer a white on dark gray colorscheme when reading pages. It is much easier on the eyes. This works pretty well except that some pages will specify a backgroung color(white) and not specify a text color. This results in a white background and my default text color of white. You can imagine how easy that is to read. Thus my choice is to force all pages to adhere to my colorscheme or to force none and hope for the best. I wish they would not specify any colors. I also wish there was a fremework for setting content and allowing me to choose how it is displayed. This might help colorblind people as well.
TOD does a good job with this. Other pages do not.

I sometimes run my LCD in portrait orientation, but don't like giving up LCD anti-aliasing.  My system falls back to grayscale text anti-aliasing.  With the ever-expanding size of today's LCD panels, though, I only feel the need for portrait orientation when viewing high resolution photographs that were taken portrait.

Why on earth are you still using Internet Explorer?

.... after copying it from others.

That's because MS is the innovation leader and all others are lamenting losers. I can't wait until MS invents a "reveal codes" mode for Word just like the one the WordPerfect guys stole from Bill Gates </sarcasm>

Remember, this is the Internet, you're dealing with fucking idiots. Totoneila maintans humans are not smarter than yeast, and I agree, and I have seen personally that humans are not smarter than chickens. Ask me if you want the full rundown on that.

If this algae thing works so extremely well why is most biodiesel coming from environmentally apocalyptic palm oil?

I know quite a bit more about algal biodiesel than I did when I wrote that post. I would put it in the same boat as cellulosic ethanol. Technically, it is viable. But the process is complex, finicky, and expensive. The highest oil yielding species tend to be out-competed by lower-yielding strains. The process for gathering the algae and separating out the oil is pretty labor intensive. What is needed is a better process. Still, I give it better long-term odds for success than cellulosic ethanol at this point.

Algal biodiesel is probably the best biofuel option available to us.  The next tier down includes Miscanthus gasification, biodiesel from palm, Jatropha Curcis, Pongammia Pinnata, and and a few others.  Traditional crops are quite a ways below that.

I think Miscanthus to ethanol would be foolish. But Miscanthus gasification makes good sense.

Well pointed out on the merging, Freddy, but there's a long way to go yet before the IEA successfully merges with reality. I think if we're still producing 85 mbpd by 2030 we'll be ecstatic.