BIKE: Kunstler on the future of the automobile

[Roger Baker]

Future growth in Central Texas?  I think the cumulative effect of  
TxDOT's toll roads everywhere, high cost air conditioning, insufficient  
water for normal urban development, air pollution, and the hidden  
energy guzzling costs of sprawl raising living costs will take care of  
Austin-area growth, much as Kunstler sees for Phoenix in Rolling Stone,  
below. -- Roger


http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633? 
pageid=rs.NewsArchive&pageregion=mainRegion&rnd=1111689845570&has- 
player=true&version=6.0.12.1040



"... The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say  
the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue,  
our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more  
delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as  
traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree,  
problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate  
partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or  
they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be  
ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004  
mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then  
there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few  
decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its  
knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining  
gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced  
air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars,  
trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to  
electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to  
maintain than our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones  
surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally  
sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and  
smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will  
probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful  
and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and  
St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further  
to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being  
oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of  
declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have  
long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of  
necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities'  
problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban  
entities will exist where they are in the future, but prob! ably not  
the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long  
Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that  
it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth  
century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will  
become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of  
water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without  
cheap air conditioning.

I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons.  
I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the  
grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the  
delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded  
behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of  
individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the  
defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems,  
from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The  
Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat  
better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into  
lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits  
and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at  
some level.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is  
going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe  
that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be  
brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will  
have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and  
comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is  
any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the  
benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work  
intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an  
enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful  
social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom.  
Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves,  
and we will sing with our whole hearts.
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