The suburbs of 50 American cities will soon be bulldozed in order to let the remaining city cores run more efficiently. This will, of course, begin with the more distressed places, like Flint MI. James H Kunstler should be chuckling right now. First, these places get bulldozed. Then the streets get depaved and turned into gravel.

Then they disappear.

Then the nightmare of the North American suburban disaster unwinds and we get to go on to the next downshifting of civilisation from this decidedly UNcivilised disaster to something perhaps more civil. Perhaps.

I don’t know if I should be happy or not. I am happy to see worthless suburbs disappear. Every time I spend anytime in those environments I get really depressed and angry. Still, I am sad to see all that sunk cost go to waste – this more than half century of investment into an ill-conceived lifestyle. It’s just frustrating and sad to know it was all a big mistake. Oh well. It’s the first step in a long road down the back side of Hubbert’s Curve.

HW

OK, so I’m a typical guy who finds that when there’s a problem, I’m not interested in sharing, I’m interested in a solution. After some consideration, this is my solution to the present crisis in the USA:

1. Nationalise the banks, forthwith. They will no longer be “for profit” institutions. Since they don’t need fancy investment instrument designs, they don’t need hotdog CEOs etc. Therefore: they keep their jobs with a top salary of $300k p.a. They can’t make a living on that? Fine. Leave. In this model, they’re little more than managers anyway. We don’t need geniuses running banks, we just need people who are honest, ethical, and competent.

2. By nationalising the banks the USgov repudiates the bank debt. Life continues on, the Chinese still own huge amounts of American Paper, and they will get paid. Over Time. Like everyone else. Because this is money eating debt, it has no velocity in the economy and will not result in inflation. Allowing for low interest rates to boot.

3. And the money? Next step: disband the Federal Reserve. The USgov will be responsible for its money supply. My, just like an adult would do.

4. Nationalise USA Health Care. Face facts: This whole nonsense about “your health care decisions should be between you and your doctor” is total freaking bullcrap. You know who makes your health care decisions? The insurance company. I would absorb the health care industry directly (on the one end) and I would get really pretty damn stiff with Americans on the other end. But a lot of that will fall out naturally.

5. Gas will be USD$5 gallon. If gas is cheaper than that due to over production or demand destruction, then the remainder goes directly into alternative energy systems. No ifs and or buts. If it is over $5, then it rises to what ever price that is.

6. Car makers will do chap 11, and restructure under strict supervision. The focus will be: the development of hybrid trucking to last 10 years to be replaced by electric vehicles and electric trains. The largest private vehicle will be the equivalent of a minivan. Gas will be rationed, viz WW2. The auto industry will focus on making superlightweight electric vehicles. Electric Bicycles (viz Stokemonkey or Crystalite systems) will be subsidised and encouraged, as well as enclosed electric tadpole trikes.

7. The USA will abandon Empire. The Pentagon will cut its budget by 50% a year until it is the size of the Chinese rate of spending. American Troops will be brought home, decomissioned, and retrained for the powerdown.

#7 is actually #1, but the banks need attention.

8. Crash Infrastructure improvements geared around livable homes and communities worth caring about. LOTS of insulation. Lots of geothermal. Lots of all that joy. Not so much in the massive giant office box development.

The above should result in a vastly improved economy.

Jeavons is correct if prices are stable or supply meets demand, on demand. When that ceases to happen, conservation is the only path to economic growth: if demand falls below production consistently year over year, then conservation will result in “economic growth”. Such a curve is not sustainble due to granularities in energy requirements – i.e., you can only drive down the energy curve so far before people die of starvation. These inelasticities can be seen as “granularities”: things that don’t divide.

But we are FAR from there (yet) and once we get a new energy / economic regime into common practice, then substitution can come to the fore and the machines can run, albeit fewer of them, and on a tiny fraction of the energy they once used – it will never get to granularity.

What I described above can happen and work. I would expect countries with more centralised govts (China, Russia, etc.) would do the above by decree. Nations filled with citizens may also find the political will to co-operate and bring the system down to reality. (Denmark, EU, etc.) but nations composed of TAXPAYERS, are screwed, as they have replaced their social contract with an economic one: they buy gov’t services as consumers. And consumers want one thing: SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. Hence, countries with taxpayer mentalities will fail.

That’s my opinion and I’m stickin’ to it… for now…

Sunday, November 05, 2006
Interesting mileage data

On an energy list I subscribe to (sf-bay-oil) an fellown named Earl Killian did a bunch of research on the actual mpg of various forms of transportation. The data follows. Basically, trains, as they are presently implemented, are not as efficient as one might think.

From his post:

The good news is that I dug up yet more efficiency data, which shows that some mass transit can be pretty efficient. I found a reference which claims they measured BART energy use and passenger miles for two weeks and computed 136 MPG, which is pretty good (a fair bit better than a Prius, and a lot better than the Amtrak commuter rail numbers). Better numbers were claimed for BART rush hour use, but for the same reason as above, I think you need to look at the global picture. BART is of course electric, like the RAV4-EV (176 MPG at 1.57 load factor). Even better is SBB, the Swiss Rail system: 279 MPG. (It is also electric, and their electricity is primarily hydro, so little greenhouse gas emissions there.)

I am wondering where an ebike fits into all of this. when I find out I’ll post that. What is startling is how lousy the trains fair. It could be that they do poorly because they are so underutilised and have a great deal of embedded energy, but I could be wrong… More soon.

Sunday, October 29, 2006
how we get around…

A gentleman on the ROE3 list wrote about the 30mph solution, where the speed limit would be limited to 30mph, and infractions would be dealt with severely. He is correct in one sense: faster vehicles eat more energy, so drastically reducing the limit would certainly reduce demand for gas.

What he failed to realise is that many cars are tuned for optimal mileage at a much higher speed – as one cruises the highway at a steady 2000rpm, it is easier for the electronic fuel distribution to optimise. At lower speeds, one speeds up, slows down, speeds up, slows down, etc. This results in suboptimal mileage, even though you are technically going slower.

The Toyota Prius purports to fix this a bit by shutting the gas engine off when stopped or otherwise not needed. This helps.

The biggest obstacle to such an idea is not technical, but social, and it has to do with the fact that most people are stupid and lazy, and are not going to give up the Ford Excursion until the keys are pried out of their fat dead cold fingers, because, well, they’re lazy and stupid.

I replied to the gentleman, and this is my reply:

The 30MPH Solution (30ms) is right but incorrect.

Earlier someone posted that they get better mileage at higher speeds. This was also true of my recently deceased Audi A4. But – that’s really not the point, oddly enough.

We have to look to what we use transportation devices for, and that’s a variable. I have to go visit a friend for breakfast. I have to go to work. I have to collect gorceries. I have to take my daughter to school. I have to move some furniture.

Visit a friend? I can ride a bike. Because I live almost 180 m above sea level, and only a few km from the beach, getting home is a climb, so I find an electric assist bike is extremely efficient.

According to Heinberg, an electric bike uses less energy than actually pedalling, due to the embodied energy in the food – but that is also a digression, albeit an interesting one…

So, I roll down to the Haight, stumble into All You Knead, and chat up the lovely blonde bespectacled waitress, Sarah, until my friend Jerry shows up with a copy of the Guardian. After a big breakfast that’s damn hard to beat for the dollar, I can climb back on the ebike and make my way up the hill. All told? just a fraction of the 24v 500w battery was used – VASTLY more efficient than the A4, which had to not only haul my giant frame up the hill, but also the 1500 kg of its own glass, steel, and plastic.

The ebike is extremely efficient and does the job.

I also have to go to work. that is also handlily accomplished with the ebike, as it is only a few miles away.

But: on the way – I have to take Avanti to School. So, the eBike isn’t going to cut it. I *could* do it, but she finds riding on the back of it too scary… So, Mrs S. drives us both in the Fambly Car, once, an Audi A4, now a Toyota Prius, and I take the subway home to face a long nasty uphill trudge, which is what passes for exercise around here.

And moving furniture? If it doesn’t fit in the Prius, we rent a truck.

Now, most of America doesn’t have the dubious blessing of the San Francisco Municipal Railway System or the Bay Area Rapid Transit. And a large portion of America has a double digit IQ. And so, when they work their pointless job they want the comforts of “home”, they want “comfort”, they want to suckle on the breast of the motherland and rather than think about an appropriate vehicle, they will think “Fuck that shit – I’ll just drive an SUV and be done with it.”

And they will have barbecues and tailgate parties, and all the other princes and princesses will come and feed from the mad largesse of a planet depoiled and with fatty stained tongues say, “oh my, how delicious, how delicious, oh how boring…” and their children will move to the city, just like they did, where they meet their mates, and dance the dance, and collect a career and a mortgage, and a car payment and a divorce, and an endless monotonous slogging excuse of a life where they will wonder where the time went, and why it’s all coming apart, and they will blame the faceless empty OTHER for their problems and deficiencies, not seeing how it all made sense; because to them, the notion of a “level of abstraction” is something they forgot about in junior high school math, and they don’t, can’t, and won’t understand.

So, they will feel threatened and destroy anyone who will remove their conveniences, and they will leave their pointless little lives behind, thinking they will go to heaven, never understanding that heaven’s just a metaphor by which one can measure one’s suffering in the here and now.

We will use it all up.

Sometimes I think it’s all downhill from here.

“Hey dad – Look! No hands!”

Friday, July 21, 2006
Ford: they lost money because they build gas guzzling death monsters.

What I find amusing about Ford and all the other hapless American car makers is this:

Even with “hybrid technology” the stupid Ford Escape still only gets (on a good day) about 25 mpg. My neighbour’s Toyota Prius regularly gets twice that much, and often more.

When my wife and I bought our car, an Audi A4, back in 1997, we bought it as a highway cruiser, because she had to drive all the way to Santa Clara for work (She’s been telecommuting since 2000 – so thank Bog those days are gone) Once it was paid off in 2002, we figured – heck – we don’t drive that much anymore, and the car is in perfect condition. To this day it still gets 32 mpg on the highway, and 24 in the city. When we bought it, high test was about $1.50 a gallon. Now it is $3.50 a gallon. about 2.3 x as much, Which means our car’s mileage per dollar of gas is 42% of what it used to be.

So, our 32 mpg car, for the dollar spent, now gets 13.4 mpg per dollar.

This means that an SUV that once got 12 mpg is effectively getting 5 mpg per dollar. So – doubling your mileage from 12 to 24 is really only getting you back to 10 mpg, which is less than where you were…

That is the razor of PeakOil – “we’ve doubled the mileage on our SUVs” isn’t going to wash because the mileage they’re starting from is so absurdly low and isn’t keeping pace with the increase in expense.

America IS ready for hyper-efficient vehicles. I also believe that America IS ready to let go of the SUV. It will start with commuters and city dwellers, and eventually sink into the brains of the suburbanites who still labour under the illusion that they NEED an SUV to get their spawn to soccer practice, or that driving an SUV three blocks to the liquor store to get some beer and a pack of smokes is any more effective tan driving a Prius three blocks to the liquor store to get some beer and a pack of smokes.

Monday, April 03, 2006
Chevy Tahoe Commercial – Culture Jamming Opportunity

Those are cool, but why leave culture jamming to the professional agitators, when you can do it at the request of corporate giants?

Here’s One I Made
(LINK IS NOW BROKEN – 22 FEB 09)

that’s a quick example of what I am talking about.

It seems the witless dinosaurs running the show over at Chevy haven’t been able to come up with any good ideas to sell their gas guzzling Stupid Useless Vehicles. So they are enlisting the General Public to make ads for them. you can enter a contest. I have no idea what the prize is (probably one of those stupid Tahoes) but the fun part is this:

1. They supply a bunch of video clips and music
2. You can put any text you want over the images

When you’re done, remember to email yourself the link to the movie, as if you’re letting a friend know how cool your Tahoe Commercial Is. As If.

Then pass the link around (I put mine through tinyurl.com for the sake of clarity…)

They see it as advertising, but it’s an open invitation to massive criticism, IMHO.

Make your own here:
(LINK IS NOW BROKEN – 22 FEB 09)

Chevy puts a sign on its back saying “PLEASE KICK ME”

What a bunch of idiots.

Thursday, December 15, 2005
My Next Car – probably not…

So I did some digging and found some rather discouraging information. Clearly, in the process of reducing energy consumption and going to a lighter, slower vehicle fleet, regulations are going to have to change, a lot, as they are clearly antiquated and exclusive of anything but heavy gas-guzzling death monsters if you want a powered vehicle that runs on more than 2 wheels.

For example, in my lovely home state of CA -

CA VC Section 407. A “motorized quadricycle” is a four-wheeled device, and a “motorized tricycle” is a three-wheeled device, designed to carry not more than two persons, including the driver, and having either an electric motor or a motor with an automatic transmission developing less than two gross brake horsepower and capable of propelling the device at a maximum speed of not more than 30 miles per hour on level ground. The device shall be utilized only by a person who by reason of physical disability is otherwise unable to move about as a pedestrian or by a senior citizen as defined in Section 13000.

Amended Ch. 1292, Stats. 1993. Effective January 1, 1994.

Basically, the law defines a motorised quadricycle as one of those motorised wheelchair thingies you see advertised on daytime TV and AARP magazines.

However, if the vehicle has 2 or 3 wheels it falls under:

Definition of a Motorized Bicycle

(3) Is incapable of further increasing the speed of the device when
human power is used to propel the motorized bicycle faster than 20
miles per hour.

To thoroughly complicate things, at the same time there is this little bit of joy:

HR727 is the House bill that was enacted as Public Law 107-319.

A two- or three-wheeled vehicle with fully operable pedals and an electric motor of less than 750 watts (1 h.p.), whose maximum speed on a paved level surface, when powered solely by such a motor while ridden by an operator who weighs 170 pounds, is less than 20 mph.

Apparently the full text of bicycle regs appear in the Code of Federal Regulations at Title 16, Section 1512. You can access the CFR at the Government Printing Office website www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr. Type in 16cfr1512 to go straight to the bicycle regs.

Which makes all this rather complex.

What I think it really DOES do is kick quadricycles out of the mix of easily assimilable vehicle forms, while permitting tricycles.

My guess is this was on purpose – if you could build an electric assist quadricycle that had a range of 60 miles, there would be no reason for people to spend countless sums of money on automobiles.

Especially if that quad had a body fairing to keep the rain and cold out. As I noted earlier, delta trikes are scary, and tadpole trikes are low to the ground and get a little “wiggly” under power in a curve, unless they can camber (lean) into the curve. In anycase, trikes with a fairing are fast as hell in the flats due to their aerodynamics. The power assist is mostly for getting them up hills, where the recumbent position is less efficient.

What I thought was simple and straight-forward seems to be much more nuanced than I thought….

The idea of a slow lightweight quadricycle cuts directly to the essence of the automobile in contemporary society as a technological practice in transportation.

According to This Webpage filled with this kind of info from a motorcycle advocacy point of view, “The average United States driver travels 29 miles per day and is driving a total of 55 minutes per day. (This is an average vehicle speed of 32 mph.)”

So, if one halved the average speed to 16, and doubled the amount of time one travelled, people would naturally seek to live closer to work. This would tend to rejuvenate cities like Newark and Jersey City NJ, Oakland CA, Camden NJ, South Central LA and other ruined close in cities and neighbourhoods, as employed and somewhat less dysfunctional people will seek to reduce their commute and living expenses. At the same time, the expense of owning such a vehicle (which would weigh around 70 kg instead of 1500 kg and use no direct fossil fuels. Such vehicles would be most useful in the south and west parts of the USA, which have better weather.

And such gas free vehicles, as they enabled this shift to higher density, would help blunt the edge of the Long Emergency and help form a more peaceful and orderly transition and die-down of the species, instead of a rapid and violent die-off. However, the automotive companies will have to start building these things en masse, ASAP, and the legislation that makes them difficult to implement and the highway speeds that make them impossible and dangerous on said roads will have to change.

(I want to thank Doug from Utah for challenging me to look into this.)

Tuesday, December 13, 2005
My Next Car
RHOADES CAR

Seats two, top speed 18 mph.
Weight of vehicle: 135 lbs.
motor: 24 volt 750 watt Powerdrive motor assist
Range: without electric assist? as far as you can pedal in a day.
With ONLY electric assist? 30 – 60 miles, depending on weather, load, and terrain. Which is about as far as I would want to pedal one of these in a day, anyway…

I figure all I need a car for is to schlep a few miles to work, pick up groceries, liquor & drugs, clothes, etc. and occassionally go downtown so I can dance to the boogie (get down!) with my sweeeeeetie pie, and “the next morning”, take the weeee child to school. This thing would more than suffice.

It’s open, so winters would truly *suck ASS*, but you just do what motorcyclists do: dress appropriately, or move someplace warm.

(In that regard, I was thinking this vehicle could benefit from an actual “body” perhaps made of doped canvas and safety glass. I’m uncertain as to how it would effect the range and speed – it would certainly have less drag than an open vehicle, and be more comfortable in the cold, but it would increase the weight, and could be kind of stifling in the heat of summer… perhaps a removeable canvas body?)

In any case I think ultra-light electric assist vehicles are the bee’s knees. If anyone who commutes less than 5 or 10 miles to work owned something like this, the world would be a much better and cleaner place – we would see a dramatic reduction in fuel consumption, and people might actually lose some weight. What a notion…