Post-Peak Oil, Climate Change and Green Jobs

Post-Peak Oil, Climate Change and Green Jobs

PVs and Wind are somewhat of an illusion. Neither supplies the voltage and amperage needed to do the great majority of the electrical work that our society has grown accustomed to.

The key to a bountiful green building economy is the reversal of the thirty, fifty, one hundred year trend of sprawl development in the United States.

By rebuilding neighborhoods and reallocating goods and services to those renovated neighborhoods (made walkable, meaning that the great majority of Americans will be able to get what they need within walking distance of their homes), we can succeed.

Such a tremendous dedication of resources will be a boom to the building trades and will create the effect of reducing automobile usage by 80% in the next 20 to 40 years. Neighborhood commercial, community and work/telecommute centers will be centrally placed in what are now alienating, automobile dependent, strictly residential areas, alleviating the problems associated with post-peak oil and climate change and bringing with it the quality of life associated with communities and neighborhoods, that most individuals and families currently lack.

If we do this, we can take the opportunity to retrofit for weatherization, passive solar design (heating and cooling), electronic environmental controls, solar assisted hot water applications, limited PV and wind applications, etc.

Also, if done correctly, we can make changes in ownership arrangements that are much more fair and just, and work towards an equitable distribution of wealth among neighborhoods.

Please do contact me so that we can establish a working relationship and together build a great future for the building trades, for youth and children, for the world.


In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,

Mike Morin
Eugene, OR

Sprawl

Sprawl is the word.

Sprawl is associated directly with the development, improvement, diffusion, and direct sales and use of the personal automobile and its concomitant (and enabling) growth of the petroleum resource and industry.

According to James Howard Kunstler http://www.kunstler.com/Mags_Bruegmann.html , "sprawl was an emergent, self-organizing system made possible only by lavish and exorbitant supplies of cheap fossil fuels". Kunstler estimates that 80% of everything ever built in the United States has been built according to the sprawl pattern.

You astutely note that 1950 seems to be an approximate turning point for a form of more entropic, less dense, (more automobile oriented) sprawl. Continuing improvements in fossil fuel exploration science and technology, drilling and refining, and applications technologies had the United States awash in fossil fuel oil by WWII and after. The perceived endless domestic supply of approximately 1950 combined with a worldwide expansion in discoveries and production led Eisenhower to implement import quotas in the late 1950s.

A byproduct of the crude oil refining process is asphalt. As the oil industry grew along with the automobile industry in the early 1900s, so did the distribution network of fuels, filling and service stations, and the economic impetus to pave, pave, pave. A definite turning point in the sprawl/automobile culture was the National Highway Act of 1950, which imposed Federal gasoline fees to finance the Federal Interstate Highway system.

Ironically, about this time, a petroleum geologist named M. King Hubbert was mapping the history of exploration, discovery, and production in the lower 48 states and discovered a pattern which led him to predict that the production of domestic oil would peak in the early 1970s. He was mostly scoffed at, ridiculed, and ignored until his predictions came true in the 1970s. Petroleum Geologists, worldwide, have accepted Hubbert's methodology and applied it to worldwide oil (and natural gas) resources and have almost consensually concluded that worldwide oil and gas production has peaked about 2005 or at the very latest 2015. Most known, exploitable reserve fields, worldwide, are already past their peak production capabilities.

"Between 1948 and 1972, consumption in the U.S. grew from 5.8 to 16.4 million barrels per day. While significant, this three-fold increase was greatly surpassed by societies in other parts of the world: Western Europe's use of petroleum grew sixteen-fold and Japan's 137-fold. This global increase in fuel consumption was tied to the automobile; worldwide automobile ownership rose from 18.9 million in 1949 to 161 million in 1972. The United State's contribution to this growth was significant—an increase from 45 million to 119 million in little more than two decades."
(http://www.eoearth.org/article/Petroleum_history,_United_States#Further_Reading).

With regards to automobile-centric sprawl, I echo Kunstler warning as I quote him: "all the existing stuff built according to the pattern of sprawl ... will drastically lose its usefulness and its relative "market" value. What's more, the discontinuities to come in the global energy picture will pose challenges so severe to industrial society that we will be lucky to salvage anything resembling civilized life altogether."

That is why, I strongly recommend that we do everything within our human capabilities to educate, advocate, and implement a concerted rebuilding plan committed to reducing automobile usage by 80% in the next 20 to 40 years and begin implementing such a fossil fuel demand side management program and economic supply side reallocation plan almost immediately, if we are to have any hope, whatsoever, of avoiding the greatest extinction of life, particularly the human sort in the next 50 to 100 years.


Mike Morin
Eugene, OR

Benevolent Direction (While Discussing Peak Oil)

All this talk about "benevolent dictator" misses the point.

What we need is benevolent direction.

Patience makes the point that people will not "get it" until it is too late. Is that not a self-fulfilling prophecy?

It is true in countries that at least profess and/or desire to be "economic democracies", that there is more continuity in leadership. That continuity in leadership exists in at least part due to a consensus among the people relative to what that leadership represents.

Allowing Obama to serve for the rest of his life, for example, would not extricate him, or us, from the dominance of the for-profit, acquisitiveness, standard of living, military and economic hegemonic Capitalist Dictatorship mindset that governs the resources of the United States and dominates the culture into a ravenous swarm of lemming consumers.

Obama's (or someone else's) "seeing the light" and becoming a benevolent consistent spokesman for the improvement of education in the United States to make "the world more cooperative" (as opposed to his claim for the need to make "the Nation more competitive" would not require that the man become a Dictator. As a matter of fact, any attempts to act like a Dictator will be summarily rejected by the people of the United States. Yet, we truely do need a world spokesman, one that can speak to national interests, in perspective, a continuing ministry of education that is radically different from the Capitalist propaganda machine under which we now suffer.

We need not only an economic paradigm shift so simply stated as "cooperation not competition", we also need an economic and cultural shift that fundamentally changes direction away from the National Highway Act of 1950, and away from one that places the automobile (a world annihilating super-nova) as central to the economy and culture.

We need a paradigm change around the issues of community, human needs, and community betterment including the desired principles of equity, inclusion, humanity, quality of life, peace, and SUSTAINABILITY (both economic and in relation to finite natural resources (e.g. peak oil)) and away from domination of of a self-serving, manipulating and dominating Capitalist minority.

Mike Morin

In Response to Obama's "New Beginning" Speech Regarding Peace with the Islamic World

To David Axelrod - Senior Advisor to the President of the United States,


You wrote:

"The President outlined some big goals for this new beginning in his speech -- including disrupting, dismantling, and defeating violent "extremism" "


My response:

Why threaten with violence to stop violence.

Such an approach is counter-productive.

Lawlessness is the strength of the violent, not the non-violent. The law is the strength of the violent, not the non-violent.

Can non-violence work?


I like the word equity, because it means equality and it means ownership. Until people feel "enfranchised", they are going to do desperate things, like acts of violence.As long as others think that they have "God's blessing" or some other way of describing an earned or unearned "right" to superior economic holdings then there will be oppression, exploitation, enslavement and/or disregard for the poor. There will always be resistance to that. Moslems know the American History of and proclivity to genocide, and it is antithetical to their faith to yield to such.How do we convince a huge minority that hold Capitalist competitive advantage, and hide their "invisible hands" with obscurity and privacy, and either espouse or disingenuously practice disregard for their fellow humans, how do we convince them to reconsider and join in an effort of world unity?

Obama and the US need to do much work to reduce the US and Capitalist ally exploitation of the Moslem world, particularly the fossil fuel resource. For purposes of inter-factional peace, as well (pun intended) as to the domestic and worldwide survival and quality of life considerations regarding finite resources (most particularly oil), the USA must immediately commit to and undertake a program to reduce automobile usage by 80% over the next 20 to 40 years by implementing a demand side management and supply side reallocation plan, which would be a comprehensive socialist plan to rebuild all plans and reallocate goods and services so that all, or almost all, communities are "walkable" meaning that all folks can get what they need and reasonably want within walking distance of their homes. In most of the country, particularly environs further west, this will require substantial REBUILDING of neighborhoods. Think of the massive jobs and equity opportunities, domestically, and the opportunity to increase the quality of life for all, especially our least fortunate, while setting in motion a massive relief of tension that contributes to discord in the Middle East and South Asia, the unfair thievery and thuggery involved in the USA Geopolitical activities concerning the oil resources in that part of the world.

Face it, Mr. President, and have the courage (and I know you have the grace) to address the gluttonous squandering of such a precious natural gift (fossil fuels) and convince the people of the USA that we must fundamentally change course from a genocidal, ecocidal, suicidal "standard of living" paradigm to one that incorporates equity, inclusion, humanity, quality of life, sustainability, and PEACE...


With much love and care,


Mike Morin

No Alternative to Socialism

We need some perspective.

Fossil fuel use is about 150 years old and automotive use about 100 years old. Look how absurdly, the personal automobile dominates our life and is destroying any hope for a future.

We need to deal with more than incremental adjustments from the modern automotive age. If we want to continue the many benefits of precious fossil fuels, the many opportunity costs of those fuels, to personal automobile usage, then we need to set as a goal (here in the USA) and realize it, to reduce the use of the personal automobile by 80% in the next 20 to 40 years.

It is not encouraging, because Obama explicitly stated the other day that the automobile is such an important part of American history and culture and needs to remain so. This is a statement of a myopic politician beholden to special interests.

If you've never lived in the Northeast (USA)where much of the city, town, and village centers were built before the automobile, it may be hard to imagine a future with the greatly reduced automobile use, but it is very possible and absolutely desirable.

The key is the walkable neighborhood. That is, neighborhoods for everybuddy where everyone can get what they need within walking distance of their residence. This will take a major shift in the way that resources are allocated and products distributed to communities. The major over-supply side mall outlets (for those products and services that have utility) could become regional warehouses and older town and village centers, where they exist could be explicitly brought back as outlets for these products. Where the town and village centers do not exist, such as here out West (I'm in Eugene, Oregon), where the mindless assumption of the automobile has led to the mindless, endless residential districts with their equally alienating and squandering (strip) malls, communities could be rebuilt (think of all the jobs) to provide community centers and outlets.

Of course, this will not happen in the absence of a complete commitment to neighborhood/inter-community/inter-regional/worldwide ecological economic resource planning and allocation and redevelopment.

This Plan is too bold for American Politicians. This Plan is Socialism. With advances in communications technology, much progress, in the development of community centers, could help greatly increase the amount of tele-commuting that could help people work from and/or near their homes.

The resource allocation issue could be handled with a reformed economic system, an equity union, with a "plan and implement" modus operandi for economic operations. Reforming the financial system to take the fundamentally inflationary Capitalist aspect of "discounting the future" (i.e. assuming that money in the future will be worth less)could lead to a system of ecological economical redevelopment where only true growth in wealth would occur and be shared and could occur under the aegis of a mission emphasizing peace, equity, humanity, quality of life, and sustainability.

Removing the gluttonous oil resource use by the USA and Capitalist automotive oriented allies would slowly rescind the need for the hegemonic occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a world acting in concert would stand much better prospects for peace.

I'm a Work kin for peace and cooperation.

With much love and care,

Mike Morin

Oil Junkies

Oil Junkies
By Mike Morin


What’s the matter with me
I’ve got too much to say
I used to be out there yellin’ at the top of my lungs
and no one was listenin’, anyway
Think I’ll go down by the river, by the highway
Via the busy streets
Where the cars and trucks are rollin’ fast
And say, “do you know how much noise you make
And that we’re runnin’ out of gas”?

Because we’re
Oil junkies, oil junkies
Waitin’ for our next oil change
Yes we’re a thirty weight wonder
Slowly goin’ under
I think it’s time we rearrange

Well, those drillin’ men
Blackening their seas and lands
They’ve got them over a barrel
And Chevron, Gulf, Shell, Aramco, BP and the rest
Those oligopolies over here in the west
They’ve all got us over a barrel

Because we’re
Oil junkies, oil junkies
Waitin’ for our next oil change
Yes we’re a heavyweight blunder
Slowly goin’ under
It’s well past time we rearrange

Now, you’re drivin’ here
You’re flyin’ there
You’re shippin’ everything every which way
And where
You’re ruinin’ he soil, the water, and the air
There’s only so much oil
Left underground
Very soon there will be none around
But we don’t seem to even care



Because we’re
Oil junkies, oil junkies
Waitin’ for our next oil change
Yes we’re an overweight blunder
Slowly goin’ under
It’s well past time we rearrange

It’s well past time we reassess
It’s well past time that we reform
It’s well past time that we reimagine
It’s well past time we reorganize
It’s well past time we restructure
It’s well past time that we reallocate
It's well past time we relocalize
It’s well past time that we rebuild
It’s well past time that we reduce
It’s well past time that we reuse
It’s well past time that we recycle

It's well past ime we rearrange.

Transition Towns Initiative Website

There is an interesting initiative in the UK called the "Transition Network". They are primarily concerned with peak oil and climate change, which are very relevant concerns, and are organizing town planning initiatives accordingly.

You can access their work by going to: http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork .



Mike