The end of Suburbia

Traduction : 

"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a fool look at the worst" (Thomas Hardy, 1887)

"Nous sommes littéralement coincé dans un cul-de-sac avec un 4X4 en ciment, sans plein " (James Howard Kunstler, 2003)

En noir et blanc

Et en couleur

Dans les banlieues

Dans les banlieues

Les banlieues. Almost as much written about is Madison Avenue. And just as much in need of reflection. Like Madison avenue, la vie dans les banlieues a ses bons moments, et d'autres moins bons.
Oh non.
Découragés? Contrariés? Mais non ! Ils sont heureux d'habiter ici. Il faut du temps à un jeune couple pour réaliser tout ce qui les attend lorsqu'ils achètent une maison. Ou lorsqu'ils ont un enfant. Et lorsqu'ils achètent une maison et ont un enfant.
Ils réalisent à peine qu'ils entrent dans leur période d'achats frénétiques. Et les voilà partis pour un trajet sans fin. C'est un monde d'achats heureux, qui se reflète dans les vitrines des supermarchés de banlieues où ils viennent faire leurs achats.
La vie facile
Le supermarché voit ces jeunes adultes comme des gens dont les maisons ont toujours besoin de s'agrandir. Des gens qui achètent en grande quantité pour tout emporter dans leurs voitures.
C'est un grand marché. Ces jeunes adultes, qui achètent avec la même détermination qui les a mené dans les banlieues, font partie d'une nation qui roule. Living by the automobile. The first young adults in the age of the push button.

Les Américains, en majorité, aiment les banlieues. It has promised space, affordability, convenience, family life and upward mobility. Après un demi-siècle de développement, plus de la moitié de notre population s'y est installé. And as the population of suburban sprawl has exploded, so too, the suburban way of life has become embedded in the American consciousness. Les banlieues, et tout ce qu'elles promettent, sont devenues le rêve américain.
Mais alors que nous entrons dans le 21ème siècle, de sérieuses questions émergent quant à la durabilité de ce mode de vie. Le rêve des banlieues a t il un avenir ?

Vide 	Plein
La fin des banlieues : 
L'épuisement du pétrole et la fin du rêve américain

The whole suburban project, I think, can be summarized pretty succinctly as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. America took all of its post-war wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future.

The basic cause of it all is the end of cheap and abundant energy.
Cheap oil is the party that we've been enjoying for the pas hundred and fifty years. And that party is coming to an end. Within our lifetimes we're going to see the end of the age of oil. And the result of that will be the end of the American way of life.

Here, in a typical American suburb, life seems to be carrying on much as it has for the past fifty years. With every passing year, more and more streets like this one replace farmers fields as more and more people come here for their share of the good life.
History however has proven itself indifferent to people's hopes and dreams for a better life. Even the best of intentions have often not been enough to avoid calamity. And suburbia began with the best of intentions.

The dream of the suburbs was the antidote to city life, and in particular the life of the industrial city and the industrial town. And the antidote was going to be "country living for everybody". The suburbs was a way of delivering that to the masses.

The industrial city and the industrial town were really things that had never been seen before. You know, they were new. Human beings didn't have experience with them and with all the terrible things that they produced, so you know the towns and cities of north America grew up in tandem with the industrial processes and were very much products of industrialism.
And what happens pretty early in the process by the mid nineteenth century is that the industrial city becomes a fairly horrible place. There's all this noise and effluents and pollution and stenches, all these terrible by-products of factories, and people don't wanna live around that stuff anymore. And then you get the additional problems of you need armies of workers to toil in these factories which are assuming increasingly immense scale. The quarters that they lived in end in these vast tenement slums.
You know this idea establishes itself, I think, in the collective consciousness of all of us north Americans that the city's not really a very good place to live. And what is the alternative ? Well, there's the city and there's the country. Certainly the first suburbs in the late nineteenth century enabled the better-off upper middle class to get away from these moiling and toiling workers and all their vulgar work of culture of the cities.
In the eighteen seventies and eighteen nineties you get the first template which is the suburb based on the idea of the manor in a park, the estate in a park. And these are subdivisions like Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, and Riverside nine miles outside the Chicago loop, which are basically large Victorian villas deployed in a park-like setting. You know in the beginning there must have been elements of it that were lovely, because the first people who were moving out there were pretty well-off. And they weren't moving to real country side. There were no K-Marts in 1897.
Then in the late nineteenth early twentieth century before World War One, you get something quite different : you get the streetcar suburbs which is based on this idea of the streetcar lines now leaving the city, and these new suburbs which are still fairly civic in their physical design.
There were these stops, and each one of these stops created a beautiful little main street, and smaller higher density housing cottages bungalows nearby, all very walkable in the most traditional sense.
And they are some of the most wonderful neighbourhoods in America. They're just outside the central cities.
Than what happened is in the nineteenth twenties you get the mass motoring democratization of suburbia, and that results in the boom of the nineteenth twenties, largely based on creating these automobile suburbs, and all of their furnishes and accessories. And that project is interrupted by the Great Depression and the Second World War.
No sir, all this can't keep a fellow from putting down his ideas. Something is going to add up here his own air conditioned castle with a deep freeze. Cool for beer, great big long with a bed balcony and home.

The veteran's emergency housing program is launched, to help solve the housing emergency in hundred of cities. The target : 2 700 000 homes and apartments started by the end of 1947.

This is the pay-off to our soldiers who fought in World War Two. You get to come home, you don't have to live in a city anymore, you can live in a brand new home in the suburbs and you're gonna have a life, you can stay at home, and a family, that's the payoff. And that became a packaged American dream, but it's only a post World War Two American dream, it's not the true American dream of "anybody can make it".
Almost overnight, suburbia was born. A half million home sprang up around the country in 1946, nearly a million in 1947, a million in 1948, still more in 1949, 1950.
The empty farmlands, the quiet towns and villages surrounding the cities found themselves in the midst of a roaring housing boom.
You get the real full elaboration of the automobile suburb based on the idea of the cul-de-sac subdivision and that became the template for how we're gonna build things. This is the only part of the world at that time where plumbers and pipe feathers and sheet rock hangers can own their own home. The middle class is gonna go basically, from the winal level clear up to the doctors and the dentists. And everybody will be included.

You'll find a scene like this in nearly every village, town and city throughout the country. In the hopes and dreams of everyone, there's a home they can call their own. Home brings a sense of security to a man. Then to every woman, her home means a setting for gracious living.
And we'll have the living room right in here, and the kitchen, right here, so we can see the children playing in the yard. And we'll have shrubbery right along in here. And, oh darling it's going to be just perfect.

One of the things that happens is that suburbia ends up being a false promise. The post war suburbia is not what it promises to be, it's not country living. It's a cartoon of country living in the cartoon of a house. You know it has none of the real amenities of country life : no connections with real organic systems or other living things (rivers, forest fields, agriculture), none of that. You just get a lawn, which is an industrial produced artefact. So it has none of the amenities of country life and it has none of the amenities of the town. In effect it has all the disadvantages of both. All you really have is a six lane highway.

And so it is, that all of us are interdependent independently on wheels.

The idea is that everybody is gonna live in a country house. And one of the results of that is the American cities and towns are absolutely gutted in the period of 1950's, 1960's and 1970's.
Increasingly, we're seeing large scale demolition as the first steps in building modern cities. Getting needed space on our cities for our structures is the only way to meet the competitive force of growing suburban strength. Often the substance of our urban structures is such as to resist the power of the demolition hammer. From now on we should be seeing much demolition. The first step in making our cities better places to work, better places to live. It will take great effort and real leadership, but as a people we could do it a jobs. And as we see here the rubble of demolition at the feet of Columbus, let us remember that in many ways the continent is still before us.

The American city is decanted into the countryside, and all of its functions soon follow : the shopping, the office, the retail, everything follows.

As growing numbers of north Americans move to the suburbs, one of the challenges facing policy makers was how to get all these people from their homes to their shopping malls to their work places and their schools and back again.
The major American auto manufacturers were powerhouses of industrial might following the Second World War. And they had a plan for the masses. It relied, not surprisingly, on cars as America's future mass transit.

The growth of suburbs has brought another major problem : getting there and back. Without cars, suburbia wouldn't be possible. But once we live in suburbia, even where there are trains and busses serving the suburbs, most people have to depend on cars.
Each year there are more of it. Each year there must be more highways and expressways to take care of them.

Originally, the suburbs were places that developers actually paid for light rail systems and streetcars to got to, in order to maintain the land viable places to live. GM and Firestone and I think Standard Oil were actually convicted of conspiring to destroy the light rail systems across the United States. They literally bought them up and tore them out so they can sell GM busses with Firestone wheels and run with Standard Oil.
Simultaneously you had the federal highway program.

A better highways contest was recently conducted. Purpose ? Arouse nation wide thinking on how to plan and pay for the safe and adequate highways we need. Highway experts wrote essays.

I'm privileged to present the winner of the grand national award : Robert Moses of New York. Robert Moses, New York City construction coordinator, is a world famous highway planner, a man who knows his business. No magic will suddenly produce roads commensurate with cars. The remedies are neither easy nor cheap nor immediately realisable. But the task you have set is not beyond the capacity of the aroused American people.

Will you stop honking Mac, we ain't going nowhere !
You think you got it made. Good job, condo lease paid for, so you got a little home in the suburbs, away from the city smoke, out from the shadows of the factories. Raise a few kids, some flowers and vegetables. The big dream coming true.

There is this specific American dream that got packaged and sold, and subsidized. Highly highly subsidized. So subsidized that to continue it, it is a deep question of whether we can afford to continue that level of subsidy. It isn't sustainable.

The interstate highways have become continuous bans of suburban development. I mean you can go from Maine to Florida on interstate 95 and never see open countryside. It's become a continuous city. And the density of population in those areas is extremely low. It's not economic to build railroads, or even bus lines are uneconomic in these vast areas of sprawl because population density is so low. The only efficient way to travel is by individual automobile. Distances people drive are quite considerable. 50 or 100 miles a day is not unusual for commuters who live in these outer suburban areas. Every county within 50 miles of an interstate highway has shown population growth, and every county outside 50 miles of an interstate highway has declined. This is essentially completely going in the wrong direction.

The suburbs wouldn't exist if it weren't for cheap oil. The US is a car culture, the automobile industry started in the US and really the automobile industry got its start here because we were looking for ways to use that cheap oil. The US was awash in oil in the early twentieth century. In the 1930's they were discovering the stuff so fast oil in Texas was cheaper than drinking water by the carload. Car companies quickly became the engine driving US industry and economic growth. The result of this is that we have created this new system of habitation, where people live miles and miles from where they work, from where they get their food and all the other necessities, based on the idea that they can, and they must open their car at any moment and travel miles and miles. And the only way that works is on the basis of cheap energy.

Now we're stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV with an empty gas tank.

Across North America we arrive in our cars, trucks and SUVs to gas stations like this. We expect to fill our tanks with gas at prices half those of Europe and much of the rest of the world. We expect endless natural gas to heat our homes and we expect endless natural gas to generate the increasing amount of electricity that we consume. Cheap, plentiful and dependable fossil fuels have made our contemporary life possible. Everything, from our trains and buses, our cars and trucks, our heating in the winter months, and cooling in the summer, all are dependant on cheap and reliable fossil fuel energy. And there is no other way of life that uses more of this energy than suburbia. It is cheap and abundant fossil fuels that pave, lubricate and drive the turbo growth of our suburban development.

On and on this way of life expands into farmers fields, meadows and hinterlands, offering up six lanes of the American dream, with no end in sight.

14 août 2003
Toronto, Canada

Tons of listeners telling us that the power is out. It appears the entire city is now under a massive power outrage.
This massive black out is affecting as many as 50 million people at the moment.

What the blackout actually was, it was a whole series of fuzz boxes all tripping as we approached the 100% capacity. And at the heart of the matter, was the fact that we basically had a very mild summer, and on the 14th of august that was the first day all summer that we were approaching 90° temperature at peak, all the way from the eastern shores of lake Michigan to the Atlantic ocean. From Toronto, Montreal, Québec, all the way down to Washington DC Cincinnati Saint Louis. And as we were approaching that, we were clearly getting higher and higher towards the 100% mark because of air conditioning demand. And when are you the most vulnerable ? You're the most vulnerable in peak summer weather between 4 and 5 o'clock in the afternoon, because A) that's when weather tends to be the hottest, and B) that's when you have all three uses of electricity online at the same time : industrial, commercial and residential. So when did the blackout happen ironically ? 4:13. 
The question wasn't the event. The question was why did we ever allow ourselves to get so near peak capacity, that it took just a branch or two to end up denying 57 million people light for several days. Every thing in society that we cherish ended when the blackout came. And it that wasn't a fire drill for how important energy actually is, I can't imagine. But you know what. People didn't get it. It wasn't a yellow light, it was a big red light, and I don't think we basically learned to think from it.

Matthew Simmons is the president/CEO of Simmons & Company in Houston, Texas. It's the world's largest energy investment bank. Its clients include the World Bank, Carnegie, Halliburton, Bechtel, I mean he is among the biggest of the big. Matt Simmons was incredibly clear and articulate that "look folks, we've backed ourselves into the corner". We have committed to natural gas fire plants, there's really no alternative. Coal fire plants are very polluting, nuclear is way to expensive, and there's too much opposition. And hydroelectric is all used, so we're stuck with gas. But he said we there's no gonna be any more generating capacity built. Why ? Cause there's nothing to power the plants with. And who he asks would take a 1% return on investment, for a 150 million investment in a power generating station if they know there's nothing to power the plant, no way to generate any revenue from it.

We're coming to rely more and more on natural gas for electricity generation and natural gas is becoming more scarce.

Natural gas is no longer able to be extracted out of the ground at the same colossal rate as it has been to satisfy the enormous hunger and growing demand of North America for natural gas. 

Once any one that knows what they're talking about comes to the realization that natural gas supplies are in decline, then immediately you have to jump to the next consequence. We have to grow electricity or we will not grow our economy. Because I don't think there's any serious economist that could argue that our economy could grow by 2 to 3 % per year and keep electricity use flat.

Economic growth is predicated upon more electricity. Electricity is predicated upon hydrocarbon energy. Period. And Matthew Simmons made a very clear statement. He said future growth is not possible. And for a guy with is background to say that was one of the most, that's like the catholic church saying the earth is round before Galileo.

Normal for us is using immense amounts of electricity and oil to transport ourselves around. Normal is living in the suburbs. Normal is consuming like there's no tomorrow. At some point, we will discover that this normal way of life is coming to an end.

The 2003 blackout that denied power to 57 million people has been officially blamed on falling branch and faulty transmission lines. Matthew Simmons believes that deeper causes exist. That North America is reaching the limits of its generating capacity, due to short sighted energy planning and political hubris. The future of electricity generation in America is being committed to a resource now on decline in America : natural gas. If it's conceivable that such gross mismanagement is leading us into an energy crisis, if it is possible that our policy makers and specialists have made such an historic mistake, what other mistakes might they have made ? What have we not been told about the future of oil ? 

Most people when they think about oil think of when are we going to run out. And really that's the wrong question to ask. Because oil in the earth is not like oil, gasoline in the gas tank of your car. When your car runs out of gas, then you know there's a problem. But it doesn't run out until you get to the last drops. But with oil in the earth that's a very different situation. We can't just pump oil out of the earth at any arbitrary rate.

All oil production, whether it's in one oil field or one country or the planet as a whole always follows a bell curve. When you drill your first well and the oil is close to the surface you got a gusher, you drill more wells the pressure goes down, the table goes down, but also you're pumping the light sweet oil which has risen to the top. The heavier more expensive oil to refine, hard to get oil is obviously way down deep. 

And you have to start pumping in water or carbon dioxide or natural gas if you got some around, and start forcing the oil out, just as is happening in Saudi Arabia. So what you get is this curve. It starts, pulls up quite quickly, get more and more and more out, than reach this peak or plateau.

When you get to about the half way point, the rate that you can extract the resource peak, and after that point, no matter how much effort you put into it, you can't continue extracting the resource at the same rate. The rate of extraction peaks and begins to fall.

We're sort of in the middle right now. We're right at the peak, we're at the point when the world is producing the most oil that it will ever produce, and we're going to enter the ark of decline very shortly if not already, it's a little bit unclear whether of not we actually already entered it.

It's one of these phenomenons that you only can say that yes we are sure when you look back in the rear view mirror and that you say gosh obviously we peaked. But usually by the time it's clear it's so far in the past that you're well into a totally different era. 

And once it goes into that decline, it's a permanent kind of decline, it might be a bumpy decline, and then you've got yourself a gap between what you want to use and what the supply is.

Peaking means categorically that you no longer grow.

The effect of crossing over the peak means in essence, that every barrel of oil that your produce from that moment on will be more expensive, it will require more energy to get out of the ground, and be a lesser quality of oil.

The guy that basically is most renowned for peeking the peaking concept was a person named Dr M King Hubbert.

M King Hubbert was probably the most famous and influential geologist of the 20th century. He worked for the US Geological Survey, he worked for oil companies like Shell in their research division.

In 1956 at some industry convention, he made a startling speech and put up a bunch of graphs that basically said that from all of his calculations some time in the early 1970s the United States of America would peak as an oil province, and once we reach that point, it didn't matter how much we drilled, how fast we drill, what the price of oil was, we would basically start into decline.

Très peu de monde le prit au sérieux, malgré le fait qu'il soit universellement respecté. Of course, US oil production did in fact peak in 1970-71, and as a result of that, a few more people started to take him seriously.

If you go back and read the US petroleum history, one of the most incredible argues in my opinion, is that in 1970 Dr Hubbert's reputation was in shambles. And the thing his critics just said in glee and print all the time : remember that old guy that said we will run out of oil in the early 1970's. Look, the United States has never produced more than this year (The year we peaked).
It seemed to take the better part of the decade or more before the oil experts in the United States looked back and said "This is interesting : we clearly peaked".

He went on to predict global oil production peak for the mid 1990's, which probably would have been accurate, had it been for the oil shocks of the 1970's, which drove oil prices so high that they destroyed demand. And as a result of that, oil production actually decreased for the first time in history during the early 1970's. And this had the effect of delaying the global oil production peak for probably 10 or 15 years.

The only scientists that seem to have taken this seriously are the old timers. Whereas the young guys are mesmerized by the technology. We created a generation and a half of Nintendo geologists, that sit at their workstations and basically, move around images until they say, "wow, look at that bright spot".

Les chiffres du pétrole ont autant été truqués que les comptes d'Enron.

In the late 1980's, virtually all of the arab oil countries reported extraordinary reserve increases, something like 50 to 100%, just within a year or two. And this wasn't related to any huge discoveries. It was mostly political because OPEC was contemplating new rules at the time that would say that country could expand its rate of production in oil sales commensurate to its reserves. So there was this incentive to report increased reserves in order to increase market share. But the evidence that oil that has been reported as reserves is actually there is very flimsy. So we don’t actually know how much oil is in Saudi Arabia, or Irak for that matter. Is there 115 billion barrels of oil in Irak as noted in the press again and again ? Or could it be 40 billion or 60 billion ? We don't really know. Experts like Matt Simmons, the pessimists, are saying that it's probably on the low side. Saudi Arabia may have already peaked.

S'il s'avère que l'Arabie Saoudite a attaint son pic, alors le monde a catégoriquement atteint son pic.

The debate over the peaking of oil on the planet has begun. And for the scientists involved, it is not so much a question of if, or how, but when.

It's a pleasure for me to open this ASPO seminar. We need to recognize that this issue of the peak oil production is an open ended debate. My feeling is that we are going to run into serious trouble by 2010 more or less. The peak has happened. And now, instead of being prophets, we're now historians. When it comes to estimates by the wellon world folks, it almost feels like you're throwing darts. There's so many, and yet they're starting to group tighter. Most of them end up projecting the peak by or before 2020.

I detected on many sides now that there is a growing awareness. We moved beyond asking if there is a peak to ask how big it is, how soon it is, and more than that, what we might do about it. It's no longer the words of some crank in the wilderness. It's becoming, and it has to become very topical.

It's going to come to suburbia probably much sooner rather than later. I happen to agree with many of the people we heard here that peak oil is here now.

Now that we know that there's no unused surplus oil in the Middle east, sorry that's it. And we probably have passed the Hubbert's peak.

I think it's between 2005 and 2007. That's what my model shows.

And we always were afraid. What would it be like to live after the Hubbert peak with world oil declining. And I have this list of things : 7 trillion dollars lost out of the US stock market, 2 millions job lost in the United States, federal budget surplus gone, state budget surplus is gone, the middle class disappearing.

Peaking is not equivalent to running out, everyone in the room knows this, but the lack of the people outside this room understanding that is, that's a serious problem.

The problem of oil depletion which will result in an increase of prices of petroleum is the way it will be experienced by the ordinary American, will have a catastrophic effect on American society because in the past 20 years American society has been more than ever before dispersed outside of central cities into the bans of territory around the major cities, what we call sprawl. You know, the outer suburbs.

I'm sorry to say, really, that the suburban family in America is really going down the wrong path. So what is the impact on the ordinary citizen around ? Well for a few years he can buy another large car, he can smile that there's not a cloud on the horizon, and then the crisis when it hits, is that much worse. And there's a strange irony in this business because the more efficient you are in producing the stuff, the more skilled you are, all the good things that one generally sees as positive attributes, the better you are at doing this, all you're really doing is accelerating the depletion, and making the situation worse.

The other big squeeze in the suburbs is going to be home heating. And as most of us already know, at times that can get expensive. And this past winter it was particularly wild. We almost run out of gas in the North east. We barely made it. In the sense that the red light lit : it says "low on fuel".

The United States is relying for "only" 15 % of its natural gas from Canada. Conversely, the people in the United States are clueless about the fact that very same 15% is over half of Canada's production. If people in the United States think that that relationship can go on forever, given the natural gas production has just peaked in Northern America, they're crazy. And we need to adjust the natural gas realm more rapidly, more aggressively than we do in the oil realm. There are absolutely no quick solutions. Zero.

God does set his own limits. I believe god he likes to test humankind from time to time. And I think the test is going to come very very soon.

The end of cheap oil and gas is coming. But we've all come to take for granted their benefits. Our affluence in North America, our new cars, our suburban lifestyle, all this is dependent on an abundant supply of cheap oil and gas. What will be the consequences as fossil fuels become more scarce and more expensive.

We had this incredible period of 50 years of relative world peace and stability. And I think it has put the American public into a kind of consensus trance, that the world has always been stable, that there's little relative danger to us and these things that happen all around the world and that we'll probably prevail in the face of all these things and that our so called economy will just keep chugging along no matter what.

It's in everybody's interest to maintain the façade that this way of life is normal. This is what we should expect, this is what we should expect for our children, and by going we should go out and continue buying and consuming like there's no tomorrow.

The economic benefits of living in a very stable world meaning we're not in war with China. That means that we can enjoy a lot of benefits of having them manufacture all of our stuff. We've used to have all of our household goods now for 12000 miles away? They're made in China, you know everything from frying pants to underpants. What's gonna happen if those supply lines to China are interrupted ? What might happen if we have a contest with the Republic of China over the remaining oil in the Middle east and central Asia ? Is Wal-Mart gonna continue to get a steady stream of everything from toilet seats to fishing rods from Chinese factories ? In North America I think that we're gonna have to downsize and downscale everything we do. Everything from farming to education to the way we deploy ourselves in living in the landscape, sports, you know everything that we do is going to be made smaller. The age of the 3000 miles Caesar salad is coming to an end. We're gonna have to grow more food closer to where we live around our towns.
Not only will food prices skyrocket, but the ability of the North American continent to produce food will diminish rapidly. The so-called "green revolution" which took place in the 40s and 50s saw an incredible explosion in the amount of food produced on North American continent.

A field of carrot never touched by a hough. A petroleum derived weed killer knocked out the weeds when the carrots were only spots. Agricultural experts fight an endless battle against insects pests that ruin millions of dollars worth of crops a year. Oil based sprays and oil derived chemicals are among the most effective weapons.

Soil degradation has effectively rendered much of our agricultural land to be nothing more than a sponge onto which we pour petroleum based chemicals to grow food. Not only are all fertilizers made out of natural gas, all commercial pesticides are made from petroleum. Not to mention the energy that you use in planting, harvesting, pumping the water for irrigation, packaging the food, processing the food, transporting the food etc.

There's really gonna be an end to that and when it ends we're gonna be in real trouble. You know, it's not gonna be just a matter of being able to drive to the mall, it's gonna be a matter of not knowing how you're gonna feed your children.

In the US, in North America, we consume ten calories of hydrocarbon energy for every calorie of food we eat, not counting transportation and cooking. That's an enormous out of balance equation.

A lot of people I think are going to be engaged in the production of food, in ways that they can't imagine right now. Farming is liable to become a lot more labour intensive in the years ahead, meaning a lot more people are gonna to have to work at it. How are people gonna get to their work ? What kind of work is there going to be ? Who's actually going to do the real work of creating things of value ? Especially when we can't get toilet seats from China anymore. We're gonna have to reorganize local and regional networks of economic interdependency in which local people produce things, sell things, move things around on a much smaller and much more local scale. In the United States we have a railroad system that the Bulgarian would be ashamed of. We desperately are going to need railroad transports for moving people around, for moving goods around. We don't have that. What we do have is a trucking system which is probably gonna become increasingly dysfunctional. Especially as the expense amounts of maintaining the tremendous interstate highway system, which costs so much money every year to maintain what the engineers call a high level of service, which means that the trucks that are delivering things from the central valley of California to Toronto don't break their axles when they bring these Caesar salads to Toronto. Once you have a certain number of trucks that are breaking their axles in that 3000 miles journey, that's the end of transcontinental trucking. Which also implies, that's the end of certain economic relationships that we've gotten used to. The Wal-Marts of North America have very efficiently and effectively destroyed any local and regional network of economic commercial interdependency. And those networks are gonna have to be rebuilt. We're going to have to learn how to do retail again on a local level. And we're not prepared for that. And it takes tremendous awesome project.

Crude wakening : Tight supplies cause crude oil prices to top $38 a barrel : higher gas prices expected.

Consequences of global oil peak for the average family may not be immediately appearing. Because energy prices and the economy are so closely intertwined, that would probably result in an economic recession. The underlying direction of events would be toward decreased economic activity because there would be less energy available to fuel economic activity. And people would be wondering why we're in recession after recession and why every recession seems to be a little bit worse than the last one. And it takes longer to get out of it and then we never get out of the recession, until finally it would come to the point, after a few years, when the recession would turn really into an economic depression. And in this case it will be one that never ends.

Those who've been born in or moved to suburbia tend to feel that there's a birthright to the lifestyle they enjoy. The three car garage, the large lawn, the even larger house, consumption of resources is just something you take for granted and you pay a bill for monthly. That will change and that will be a jarring change when it comes. It will feel like an ambush.

I think we will see a lot of denial. I think we will see particularly when natural gas catastrophes happen, when we see natural gas prices go up ten times in the course of a month, by multiple attempt. And we'll see gasoline prices go to $4 a gallon, we'll see all those rationales to blame somebody else.

Their immediate natural gut reaction will be that they've been japed by somebody, they've been ripped off by the oil companies, they will smell some kind of conspiracy that somebody's to blame all for this. And when people feel themselves defaulted on, conspired against, they often overreact so you could even see some sort of violent scenes around filling stations in suburban America, simply because the unfortunate people have not been properly told.

Suburbia has very poor prospects for the future. But unfortunately, so many generations of Americans are now used to it and it has become so normal that there's gonna be a tremendous struggle to maintain it against all the terrible events that are coming down at us. And I think what you'll see is an attempt in North America to maintain the entitlements of suburbia long after the world has made it clear that you just simply can't continue living that way.

Oil depletion and the price of oil increase will have a devastating effect on those communities which will translate into political upheavals because it is people in these sprawling suburbs who carry a disproportionate weight in American elections. This will create tremendous pressure on politicians to solve the problem somehow by procuring more petroleum someway. I don't think there's a solution to this but it will create tremendous stress on the political system.

I think that Americans will elect maniacs who promises to allow them to keep their McMansions and their housing and their commutes and their suburbs and their big box stores, no matter what historical events have to say about it. And that's gonna produce a lot of political friction, probably a lot of violence, probably a threat to our democratic institutions and it will call into question whether or not we can continue this project of civilisation in the context of a democratic republic. You know, I'm not saying there's gonna be a dark age, but I see a lot of potential for darkness. There's gonna be a big scramble out there to get out of the suburbs. There's gonna be a fight over the table scraps of the 20th century out there. I used the term clusterfuck to describe what we're heading into. I think that the suburban destiny is a pretty hopeless situation. I think it's gonna be a big mess, I think it's gonna be a political, economic and social shitstorm, and we're not prepared for it. And I use that term because it shocks people, but I use it because people need to be shocked into the awareness that we got to start preparing for a real problem.

I think there's a great deal of natural resistance at the political level, to try to communicate anything to consumers, voters about the need to change lifestyles.

Where is the media in all this ? Why is the American public not being clued in or educated or informed ? Well, that's really an amazing baffling mystery.

I thought I told you to kill that story. It'll cost us a lot of advertising. If that story goes out, I quit. Allright.

The media are silent on the subject of depletion, energy resource depletion, because there's no upside for them. If they decide to tell the people of North America that in fact we are running out of the very resource that fuel economic growth, well does that make anybody's stock price go up, except for a few tiny niche companies that make solar panels and wind turbines ?

The major media have been staggeringly irresponsible about this, and you know, it may be because the attention span of the people in the media is as short as the attention span of the American public. They are the American public, after all you know. It's just bewildering and mystifying. The hardest thing to accomplish right now is to get American's attention away from you know, recreation shopping at the mall, and Jennifer Lopez, and playing computer games and NFL football and Nascar, and all their other current preoccupations.

Reality is bad for business. What's good for business is the fantasy.

We're happily existing in that bubble of the consensus trance. The idea that everything's okay and that everybody agrees that everything's okay.

The coming global oil crisis is very very bad news. Yet the facts of oil depletion have been glaringly absent from the media. Few of us are aware of the extent to which our lives depend on cheap fossil fuels. And we have not been prepared for the shocks the coming crisis will bring. We are a society addicted to oil, and we don't want to hear that it's going to run out.

The title of tonight's presentation is "Is America running out of gas ?". We are making decisions now in our lives and decisions are being made for us that will determine the fate of future generations. We are living in the age of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, and it is an empire of oil.

Where is the oil that's left ? We've heard it three of four times tonight. 60% of all the recoverable oil on the planet is in the Persian gulf.

And so comes the Carter doctrine in 1979 which says that the oil in the middle east is of strategic importance to the US and we will use our military to defend our access to it.

The world is already in a position where we are not fighting over major oil reserves, we're fighting over scraps.

Enter the neocons. They have a plan. It's a plan, in fact, for world domination. They make no secret out of it, you can read it in the documents widely available of the Internet, including from their own websites, Project for the New American Century. The domination of the world will first require the domination of the planet's dwindling energy resources. Iraq was intended as the opening act in the general reshaping of the Middle east and Central Asia. We've been told, by our president and vice-president, to expect war for the remainder of our lifetimes.

US would not be in Iraq, if that country didn't have oil. The only interest of the US in the Middle east is oil.

Certainly from a military standpoint, we are witnessing a sequential war to control the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. That's the war that will not end in our lifetimes.

I think this war in Iraq was really what stimulated everybody's interest in the subject. Ironically, it did a little bit of good you can say in that regard, cause people would say "why the hell would you want to invade Iraq unless it had a critical role ?". It's now evident these weapons of mass destructions don't exist and never did exist, so it has to be some other reason.

The United States must deny any possible competitor on the world stage from controlling the resources.

Afghanistan and Iraq are the two opening engagements in what are bound to be a long series of wars and international contests over the remaining oil in the world. And over 60% of that oil is located in places where people don't like us very much.
What we're doing now is that we're expending a lot of money and energy in the direction of securing those overseas oil supplies. Can we control the pipelines and the wellheads and the refineries ? I doubt it. All it takes is 5 pounds of plastic explosive and a cammo to put down an oil refinery.

We're spending 50 billion dollars a year in other countries in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Qatar…) already, and then add to that tens of billions of dollars for Iraq. This starts to add up. This is having a tremendous drag effect on the US economy, resulting in increasing government debt, both domestic and foreign debt. Then of course there's the cost in human life. Americans coming home in body bags. Then there's the cost in American civil liberties. The American people are not going to sit back and watch this foreign policy of occupation and invasion continue indefinitely. There's going to be more and more dissent.

No blood for oil yo.

So how's the government going to deal with dissent. Well already we see there's been laws put in place like the US patriot act so-called, which significantly erode constitutional protection for freedom of speech in an assembly, and privacy. Are these gonna be used against average Americans who simply decide to voice their disgust with US foreign policy. I think that's entirely likely.

You will see a lot more global conflicts. You will see a draft reinstituted in the US, and you will see lots of protests, you will see lots of young men and women dying overseas in conflicts. This is the infinite war.

As this game of musical chairs unfold across the planet, the department of defence puts out a notice asking for volunteers to serve on selective service draft points. Do you think Cheney was kidding when he said the war that won't end in our lifetimes ? Do you think Cheney was kidding when he said this is gonna be the biggest conflict that we've ever seen ? It's happening.

OK, so what's the alternative ? Surely we can get our energy from some source other than fossil fuels. If we had 50 years, to say well in 50 years we can get 25 % of our energy. Yes, that would be quite realistic. But 50 years from now ? No, ten years from now ? No, five years from now we'll be past the oil production peak and we'll be needing much more than that.

There's no combination of so-called alternative fuels that are gonna allow us to run what we are running in the United States, the way we're running it now on oil and natural gas. No amount of solar or wind or even nuclear is gonna allow us to continue living this way of life. A lot of people think that hydrogen is gonna rescue us. I think hydrogen is an interesting example of a kind of a public delusion. The kind of delusion that arises when people start to feel frightened. And they have reasons to be frightened because we don't have a plan B.

People need to ask very serious questions about alternative energy before jumping into a lifeboat they have no idea whether it's gonna float or not. And we see a whole bunch of almost hysterical applauses for hydrogen. Hydrogen is a joke, this is a myth. We will not have an hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is not a form of energy, it's a form of energy storage. And all hydrogen now is produced from some other substance which requires the import of energy.

Generally it takes more energy to make hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen.

It's fabulous because you only have to have electricity and water. Well, to have electricity you have to have some other form of energy. The single easiest way to create hydrogen is using methane. Methane is just a scientific term for natural gas. So in a world that we're short of natural gas, the last thing we need is a brand new user.

Hydrogen is tremendously problematical as an element. It's very hard to transport it.

Advocates of compressed hydrogen say well I can get a 300 miles regular car with a 190 gallons of compressed hydrogen in a vehicule. I say great. Who's gonna do the crash tests on that ?

You also have to look at infrastructures requirements. 600 million internal combustion powered vehicles on the planet. 200 million in the United States. People say "we'll just go to hydrogen cars". Who's gonna build the hydrogen cars ? Somewhere around 90 barrels of oil goes into the energy to make one car. Who's gonna pay for the factories ? Where's the capital for the factories ? Where are the filling stations ?

We're just gonna take everything we're running now on oil, and we're just gonna change that, we'll run that on hydrogen instead. It's not gonna happen that way.

Net energy : energy returned for energy invested and people just don't think about this. If you're converting biomass into diesel, how much energy went into creating that biomass. If that's plant mass, how much fertilizer, oil, water went into creating that. You have to complete the full equation from start to finish. Ethanol is a net energy looser. It takes more gasoline to create and fertilize the corn and to convert to alcohol than you get from burning it.

It's mathematically and agriculturally impossible. There isn't enough land to do it. Even if we were happy, as we unfortunally are, to turn over entirely to corn ethanol, we then probably would have no land left to grow our food.

As you think these problems seriously as we've been doing at From the wilderness, you see that there is nothing, there is no combination of anything that will allow planet earth to continue consuming the way it does, and go on our merry way.

There is no quick or easy fix for our oil dependency. There are no affordable, scalable alternatives. Yep the political will to address oil depletion does not yet exist. We do have one surplus, and that is a surplus of ideas about how to meet the challenges of living with less oil. Some of those ideas are coming from a movement called New Urbanism. It advocates quite simply a return to more traditional, walkable communities.

The New Urbanism was a reform movement in town planning and civic design and architecture, that started in the late 80's among a group of young architects and planners, who realized that we were reaching a dead end with the suburbanization of America, and they sort of look back on history and the way human beings have done things in the past, and they concluded that there was a great deal of benefits for us, in relearning the principles of town planning that had been thrown in the garbage since World War II by the traffic engineers, and all the people who've been putting together our everyday world.

Ironically New Urbanism has been town criticized heavily for being historicists, and back to the future and all the rest of that, and I don't think that's at all the case. I mean, you have to pick up the threads of culture and history and carry them forward. But carrying forward is the challenge of New Urbanism. That's the New in New Urbanism.

First we have to just revive the idea that the town, and the neighbourhood in the city, can be a wonderful place. And I think the new urbanists have been very successful in beginning that process.

Fissional American town, and the great American city, were fabulous form of urbanism. Even while you're talking of architecture. The ultimate form that classic American grid, both at the city scale and at the village scale, was pretty unique. It's just trashy, the kind of environment that we're creating, when we compare it with what we used to build. It's tragic.

The marketing of contemporary suburbia has become so abstract. You know, it's a dirty secret that none of these places are real places. They're not real communities that have any kind of social network or economic network, they're just dormitories on cul de sacs. So the marketing of them is strictly abstract, and sentimental really. The housing development are always named after things they destroy. If it's called "Quail run", that means the quails have all been exterminated, if it's "Oak ridge", it means there's no oaks left.
Even people who live in suburbia find it rather easy to ridicule it. So that tells you something about, you know, what the real deep basic awareness is of its shortcomings. It really hasn't delivered what it promised. It's not really real country living. It's kind of a mockery of the idea of country living.

Everybody votes against sprawl, they hate strips and subdivisions and the rest of the garbage that we built, and they love their historic main streets older neighbourhoods that are more diverse and more human scale.

The cultural hochet is tremendous. The home builders have certain ways of delivering their product in a cul de sac subdibision of Mc Houses. And they're used to it, they know exactly how to do it, it's still working for them, and they don’t want to change.

I should think the trend, especially in housing, is pretty clearly away from traditional subdivisions, when people are given a choice. We designed this project in Denver called Stapleton. Stapleton is being redeveloped a lot on New Urbanism lines. And it now sales at a premium of about 25 % compared to typical subdivisions in the same region. What that demonstrates to me is that the market place really wants more walkable and more diverse neighbourhoods.

Pretty soon, you know, because of the oil situation in the world, you know, the New Urbanism will be the only urbanism. Circumstances are gonna compel us to live differently in North America, whether we like SUV's or not.

I think it's more important to rest the alternatives strategies on the multiplicity of implications, rather than try to be reductionist here and say "this is an energy issue". Maybe the global warming issue is yet another one to address in rethinking our patterns of development. There should be and there are a million good reasons for good urbanism.

In any case, the suburban idea really, has it has been known in the late 20th century is really coming to an end.

It is hard to imagine, that all this, even now under construction, may lose much of its value in the coming years. That the suburban way of life may become increasingly dysfunctional as the global oil crisis deepens. The New Urbanism offers one possible alternative to make our communities livable, walkable quieter places once again, to make our communities sustainable. But this initiative may be too little too late for the many who already live here.

The residential subdivisions don't have very good prospects for being retrofitted because you can't really move the houses closer together, that would be pointless. Most of the optimistic ideas about repairing suburbia kind of revolve around fixing up the shopping centres and turn them into mix use places where people can live and work and buy stuff. In other words, turning what was single use places into true urban villages.

The thing about sprawl is, you've got all these big arterial roads, that are oversized, and they've got all these strip development on the edges which is basically, under utilized land. One story buildings with big service parking lots. And you have these huge ribbons, which are also perfectly located for transit, and then allow high density development to redevelop those corridors. You can completely reconstruct that strip, because nobody is in love with this strip. And all of a sudden, those neighbourhoods have something to plug into, to walk to. And all of a sudden there's an urban environment for say young people and older people who don't want yards can live it.

I myself am a little pessimistic about the kind of resources that we're gonna have available to do that. We're actually now leaving behind these tremendously affluent period when we handle this great wealth. We're now entering a period when we're gonna just have less money. And less ability to invest in the future. So I think that what we're gonna see is a lot more kind of provisional impromptu kind of behaviour. People making due the best they can, with the remnants of what remains.

First ring suburbs are already becoming the ghettos. They don't have the underlying beauty and structure of our historic cities and towns to the kind of we build on, so they become quite a challenging situation. But I don't think that's something that might happen, it's something that is happening.

The suburbs that were really built after the 60's, the ones that are really past the inner rings are gonna become pretty deeply dysfunctional. We may see more than one family living in a Mc Mansion, and we may see them growing crops in what used to be the front lawn. But I think that they'll basically be the slums of the future. I think we're going to see a meltdown in the value of this living arrangement that we've created in North America. This tremendous infrastructure for daily life, that is not gonna function very well in a world that doesn't have cheap fossil fuel.

What will happen to this massive suburban landscape, as the crisis deepens ? While some believe there exist few prospects for this way of life, others believe there are ways to adapt to the new reality of the 20th century.

Great crisis by definition are problems that got ignored until they were enormous problems. And I believe we have a great crisis coming on energy. What I'm most worried about is how long we've left, even addressing the issue, and the longer we ignore the issue the more painful the problem will become. If you start appreciating how finite and fragile use of energy is. There's small things that can be done. Can any individual solve the problem on a local base, no. It takes a massive, collective wake up.

The crux of the issue I think, for most ordinary people is "we're gonna have to live more locally, and we're gonna have to at least prepare mentally to do that". Ask yourself : what kind of job am I gonna have in ten years ? You know, I'm thinking about that myself. I'm an author, but I depend on the trade publishing industry to do my thing. The trade publishing industry might not exist in ten years the way it has been. It occured to me that I would start a local newspaper.

Luckily technology has really allowed a lot of people if they wanted to work at home.

Find a way to live with fewer car trips, with less driving, becoming less car dependent if you possibly can. Because believe me, we're gonna have to do that in the future.

Start paying attention to how you use energy, pay attention to the fact that the energy costs were too cheap, and they need to be a lot more expensive.

One of the most common themes that I heard which I really think would be a good outcome of peak oil, is that, I'm 52, my parents were raised in the Depression, is that there was a strong sense of neighbourhood and a sense of community, that there was a sense of local place. That will be an inevitable outcome of peak oil with the lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the lot of tantrum throwing. But I think people will learn how to become neighbours again. That may be a good thing for suburbia.

What we will end up doing is creating a lot more localized creation of energy sources. So that if you have an energy problem, it's the problem to your village, vs a problem for one third of the United States.

Alternative energies are going to be a best small lifeboats made available in local communities by people who say "nobody's gonna do this for me, we have to do it for ourselves. We have to get solar in our neighbourhoods, to wire our apartment, right now we have to spend whatever it takes because the grid's gonna go down. We have to find ways to create biodiesel in our own communities". Peak oil is going to reverse globalization. Survival will happen on a local basis, and we're going to see local economies, that's the only way the human race is gonna survive.

Some way or another out of all these great problems, comes the great ingenuity, and I think that we'll probably look back twenty years from now and say : "Look at all the new things that we developed as we basically got serious about our energy problems".

Twenty years from now there will still be oil in the ground. 200 years from now somebody somewhere will still be pumping it. But soon, within our lifetimes, the growing energy demand of the American dream here in suburbia, will eclipse our planet's ability to provide it. Will we learn to dream of something better for the world to come ?

Suburbia started out as this impulse to flee from the city, and it was a pretty successful thing for what it was, during the time that we were able to do it, namely the oil age. It had a good setting decade run. And now we're entering a period when the suburban way of life is gonna be increasingly difficult and dysfunctional and economically impossible.

Two or three centuries from now, people will be looking back, and formulating myths about the way people lived back then, in a, whether they look at it as a lost golden age, or an age of horrors and insanity. I'm not sure, I think it may be the latter. They'll look back on us, and they'll say "my god, who were those people ? How could they be so stupid ?"

Irony was the ethos of the late 20th century. But as we move into the 21st century, we're gonna discover that irony is a luxury we can't afford anymore. This stuff isn't just funny, our lives are gonna depend on whether we have an environment that's worth living in, and that can actually support the project of civilization. We're not gonna be able to sit back and make fun of it anymore, and enjoy it ironically. That part of our history is over. It's time to get serious.

But right now, you can ride along with a happy go spending byes now young adults of today.