Kunstler Continues to Push Peak Oil Issues
James Howard Kunstler, author of now-classic books, The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere is pushing the peak oil issue on his blog which is known as Clusterfuck Nation.
Kunstler’s entry from today addresses the foolish thinking that hybrids will allow us to continue our auto-dominated society:
“The truth is that it does not really matter whether the freeways are crammed full of SUVs or nimble hybrid cars. The problem is car-dependency and the infrastructure for daily living predicated on it, not the kind of vehicles we run. I have yet to hear one US senator of either party propose that part of the recent $300 billion highway bill ought to be redirected to rebuilding America’s passenger rail system — even after the bitter lesson of Katrina, which demonstrated that people who don’t own cars can’t get out of harm’s way in this country.”
Kunstler’s latest book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, is on my reading list. From what I’ve read from the blog so far Kunstler is highly pessimistic about the future. Although maybe he is simply being realistic?
First up is home heating costs for this winter. It will be a serious issue and tragically we’ll have stories here in St. Louis of people dying because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes. But high natural gas prices will lead to higher electricity costs. Both will mean higher costs of goods and services. Can you say recession?
As a region we simply cannot continue subsidizing sprawl. All the experts predict the number of cars and auto congestion will continue to increase. I disagree. Within 20 years our auto ownership and traffic congestion will be less than, or equal, to today.
Yet our political leadership is moving ahead on massive auto subsidizing projects while more sustainable transportation projects take a back seat. The rebuilding of I-64 (highway farty to natives) and a new Mississippi River Bridge are just two examples.
Based on cost estimates to build two miles of street car lines connecting the Loop to Forest Park you can get about fives times as much coverage with street cars over light rail. For a cool billion dollars we can get a new bridge, the proposed Northside & Southside MetroLink extensions or 4-5 times as many street car lines covering much of the city. Currently the bridge is the highest priority. It should be the last priority.
The claim is we need the bridge and auto capacity to grow our economy. This, of course, assumes the cheap gas auto economy we’ve been used to. My feeling is we need to shift away from subsidizing the dead-end auto “experiment” and build a first-class mass transit system. Reactionaries will attempt to read into my views that I want to ban all cars from St. Louis but that is not the case. I want to shift the balance back to a sustainable means of moving people from place to place. That is walking, biking, and street cars.
Twenty years from now large McMansions in Chesterfield will be vacated like homes of Lafayette Square were thirty years ago. The difference will be that the vinyl clad boxes in suburbia will not be worth saving. Transit will be the key and the wealthier will move closer to mass transit and the poor will be left on the fringes struggling to get to jobs. Bedroom communities will be the hardest hit and will become the new ghettos. At least the poor can now get on a bus (or several buses) and get to the jobs. In the future we’ll finally have mass transit for the wealthier in the core and the poor will be on the edge with substandard service as they try to get back into the core for work. The new Mississippi River Bridge will be little comfort.
Man, I’m as pessimistic as Kunstler!
So what do we do? Again, I think we need to move now to connect as much of the city to mass transit as possible. But if my prediction of the wealthier moving to the core you are correct to wonder won’t this just serve the wealthy in the future? Well, yes and no. My thought is if we plan a network of streetcars to connect the city and inner-ring suburbs we can build denser neighborhoods around transit that accommodate all income levels. Waiting until the crisis point and we’ll see the affluent get transit and the poor get the shaft. If you don’t believe this can happen just turn on CNN for continuing coverage on Katrina.
Unfortunately we will probably ignore the warning signs and come into this crisis as unprepared as we were for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Major sprawl projects like the bridge and rebuilding of I-64 will be started or at least “funded” when the experts finally realize we need to support dense neighborhoods and mass transit rather than continue to subsidize private autos. Despite all logic against continuing these massive and misguided projects they will go forth simply to create needed jobs.
Enough of my rant because the Daily Show with Jon Stewart is about to start…
– Steve