In case you haven't seen it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ

Salem paying the price of ignoring the signs

More than a year ago, a citizen told a meeting of the Salem-Keizer Area Transportation Study group (SKATS) -- the federally required metropolitan planning agency for the Mid- Willamette Valley Council of Governments -- that oil at $100 a barrel would soon be a fond memory, and that instead of planning an unnecessary third bridge for the Willamette, they needed to start thinking about how to preserve vital public services like police, fire, and ambulance, and to be thinking about how the impact of high oil prices would devastate their budgets.

Oil was under $60 a barrel at that point, and the SKATS members were, with the exception of Lloyd Chapman, uniformly unreceptive to the message. The SKATS members went on about their business, figuring out how to pour more pavement to serve the ever more cars and driving that they expected to see. Like ostriches sticking their collective head in the sand.

Today, the Salem Statesman Journal reports that the ostrich strategy doesn't work all that well:

Gas burns through Salem city budget

Spike in fuel prices was not factored into its planning

The spike in diesel and gasoline prices has city government suffering from sticker shock along with consumers.

In the next fiscal year, fuel for Salem's fleet of police cars, fire trucks, public works vehicles and other equipment is expected to cost nearly $559,000 more than was estimated last fall.

Salem City Council on Monday approved additional money for fuel in the city's 2008-09 fiscal budget. City funds set aside for fuel purchases will go from little more than $1.2 million to about $1.8 million.

"We knew there was upward pressure on fuel over the last few years, but we didn't expect it to skyrocket,"said Debra Neville, Salem's budget officer. . . .

Fwd: $4/gal gas is having an impact on travel

[Click image for a larger version (in Firefox anyway, your browser may vary).]

Something to think about as we're told that between Portland and Salem, we have to spend nearly $5B (before overruns, and presuming that materials prices don't keep skyrocketing) on two bridge spans or else the world will end.

They Can't Say They Haven't Been Warned

The letter below was just delivered to the

• Mayor of Salem
• eight Salem City Council members
• two Salem officials (Community Development Director, Public Works Director)
• three Marion County Commissioners
• two Mid-Willamette Valley Council of Government Staffers (the Executive Director and the Transportation Planning chief), and
• the editorial board of the local newspaper

With each letter came a free copy of the Post Carbon Institute book "Post Carbon Cities."
====================================================

June 6, 2008

Dear Salem/Marion County policymakers and influential people:

As an engineer who has studied climate change and energy issues intensively, I am quite concerned about our area’s unpreparedness for several significant emerging challenges, namely the global peak in oil extraction and the need for what many people would today call unthinkably aggressive actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Every day, careful scientists produce more evidence that we have little time left to prepare for a new world. In this world, energy, instead of being cheap and abundant, will continue to become and remain ever more costly and even scarce at times. Climate disruption will compel us to see our atmosphere as the very limited and irreplaceable resource that it is and not an infinite sewer that can absorb whatever we care to (or carelessly) emit.

Given foresight, inspired leadership, and great effort, Salem and Marion County can adapt to the new reality. However, like fire insurance, this assurance cannot be obtained once the calamity is clearly here. We have only a limited and fast-dwindling time to act: to inform ourselves, to educate the community, and to develop an action plan for responding.

You no doubt have heard about the Portland Peak Oil Task Force. You may not know that Bellingham, Washington has improved on that model, commissioning the first joint city/county task force to begin planning for peak oil and the climate crisis. It is time for Salem and Marion County to do the same. I offer you this book, Post Carbon Cities: Planning for energy and climate uncertainty, as an introduction to the problems. I hope you will read it and that you will take the time to look into the many additional resources highlighted. At the least, I ask you to read the executive summary and pass the book on to your staff members and advisors.

I would be delighted to speak with you about this matter, privately or in public work sessions, and I hope you will set aside time to consider these important issues as soon as possible. We need to start a serious community conversation on this subject, and we have very little time to lose. I would like to do everything possible to assist you in helping the people in Salem and Marion County prepare for these daunting challenges.

Sincerely,

"Reinventing Collapse" author's perceptive comments

The invaluable EnergyBulletin.net has a nice piece by Dmitry Orlov, author of "Reinventing Collapse," an important book for our future. A choice excerpt:

"You compare the US to the Soviet Union, but didn't the Soviet Union fail because of its backward Communist system? We have the free market, we can innovate and solve our problems in ways that they just couldn't even imagine!"

"The central planning system in the Soviet Union was quite inflexible and inefficient, and caused hoarding and black market trading. It directly allocated resources to things like central heating for entire neighborhoods, public transportation and government services. Market psychology had nothing to do with it: these were all physical flows of energy. Our system is certainly better during normal times, but when key resources become scarce, it suddenly becomes much worse: people are priced out of the markets for the things they need to survive, hoarding and profiteering become the norm, municipalities are driven into bankruptcy while oil companies make record profits and find nothing better to do with them than buy back their own stock, and so forth."

"But still, can't we innovate our way out of this? I was shopping for a new car yesterday, and there are all kinds of new hybrids and electric cars appearing on the market... when there is a crisis, the free market system responds, and gives us products that solve the problem!"

"The idea that the problem of too many cars and too much car dependence can be solved by making more cars is preposterous. What makes the problem insolvable is that Americans have been conditioned to treat access to private automobile as a birthright, and taking away their cars is about as advisable as trying to take away their guns. The most commonsense thing to do would be to ban the manufacture, import, and sale of new vehicles, except for some specific fleet vehicles used for public services, as was done during World War II. But this problem will work itself out to some extent: it takes a lot of energy to make a car, and new cars are still affordable only because the new oil prices haven't percolated through the entire economy yet."

"Some people are concerned about the falling dollar and what the Federal Reserve is doing. What do you make of their policies?"

"They are making a strenuous effort to make insolvent financial institutions look solvent by lending them bushels of newly printed dollars. The effect is ever more US dollars chasing after same or smaller quantities of key commodities, such as oil and food, causing huge run-ups in prices. This is what the start of hyperinflation looks like. Eventually, this will ruin our ability to continue borrowing and financing our huge trade and budget deficits. It will also cut off our access to key imports, such as two-thirds of the oil we use, because nobody will want to continue stockpiling our worthless dollars. If that happens, the US economy will go into a state of severe shock.

"The economists have suddenly been thrust into a world they can't understand. They are used to thinking of energy in terms of money, and in terms of driving economic growth. They can't possibly be expected to turn around and learn to think of money in terms of energy, and of driving a gradual powering-down of the economy in ways that will provide the population with the essentials and avoid needless suffering. What it means to the rest of us is that we should stop looking to the economists for answers. There would be too much retraining involved to make them into competent practitioners of this new discipline."

A great blog to get to know

Low Tech Magazine

Sample:

Excerpt from an article on why electric (wireless) cars have no future:

So, then, we have green cars, right? Alas, no. The electric car has a serious environmental drawback compared to a car running on a combustion engine: the battery. The ‘fuel tank’ of an electric car consists of hundreds of connected batteries, each of them comparable to the battery of a mobile phone (the Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car, has more than 6,000 of them). After some years, they all have to be replaced, and already before that time there is a reduction in storage capacity.

The environmental profit gained by a higher efficiency (or by green electricity) will be negated completely by the massive amount of batteries required. Batteries have to be manufactured, and that process is very energy-intensive and environmentally harmful. Batteries also have to be discarded or recycled - both processes again require extra energy and inflict environmental harm.

A history of what we've lost

Great two-part series in the Oregonian on what we've lost -- a rational transportation system that let people get around without having to own a car.

Part 1

Part 2

Kunstler's "Farewell to Suburbia"

James Howard Kunstler is an incisive observer who, years ago, started warning that our devotion to carburban design was going to come to a bad end (See The Geography of Nowhere). A couple of years ago he wrote a terrific book, The Long Emergency, expanding on the themes of TGON and tying into the emerging recognition that we are at an energy transition point (called "peak oil," after the shape of a plot of oil supply vs. time) that is going to be most wrenching to those places that have gone the deepest into the madness of converting themselves into carburbia -- the sprawlscape that defines much of Salem (and especially West Salem) today.

The effort to build a third Willamette Bridge crossing is probably the last gasp of the disease, as carburbia is expiring before our very eyes. A culture built on cheap energy -- literally built around the premise that, in your every decision, you would not have to think much about the cost of energy -- cannot long survive when energy costs start to approach its true value.

The essential question is whether we blow two-thirds of a billion dollars on a bridge that would be like the great pyramids of Egypt: monuments to the egos of the builders and their waning ability to extract the necessary wealth to do so from the masses. Or can we be foresighted enough to recognize a tsunami before it hits?

Anyway, good article from Kunstler in an Ottawa paper:

Farewell to suburbia
Car-dependent communities, the greatest misallocation of resources in history, have no future -- but that's just one of the shocks the global oil crisis is going to bring

James Howard Kunstler
Citizen Special

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Huge efforts are being made, and hopes invested in, what are called 'alternative fuels' in a desperate effort to keep all the cars running by means other than gasoline, writes James Howard Kunstler.
CREDIT: Peter J. Thompson, Reuters
Huge efforts are being made, and hopes invested in, what are called 'alternative fuels' in a desperate effort to keep all the cars running by means other than gasoline, writes James Howard Kunstler.

The fog of cluelessness that hangs over North America about the gathering global oil crisis and its ramifications seems to thicken by the hour. One reason for all the fog is that the key part of the story is so broadly misunderstood -- namely, that it's not about running out of oil; it's about how the complex systems we depend on for everyday life begin to destabilize as the global demand for oil starts to outstrip the supply.

By "complex systems" I mean very precisely:

- the way we produce and distribute our food;

- the way we do commerce and manufacturing;

- the way we move people and things around the landscape;

- the way we accumulate and deploy capital investment;

- the way we get and allocate energy resources (i.e. the oil markets themselves);

- plus many other activities such as education, medicine, governance, and so on.

All these systems are visibly wobbling these days, and mutually reinforcing each other's instabilities, multiplying and accelerating our problems. For instance, our ventures in bio-fuels are affecting worldwide grain prices so severely that food riots have broken out in several poor countries. Whoops! Bitten by unintended consequences.

The capital markets have been faltering conspicuously for half a year now and the failures occurring there are not so mysterious if you understand that a major implication of the oil story is the prospect of industrial economies being unable to generate the kind of regular "growth" that we've become used to. Hence, a loss of faith infects the common investment "instruments" that represent the conventional idea of growth. Under these conditions stocks, bonds, and currencies themselves lose legitimacy and a desperation sets in among the financial community to find some other way to make money.

It is no wonder, then, in the face of this crisis of confidence, that sharp minds on Wall Street turned to the creation of unconventional new "engineered" securities -- based on algorithms and equations incomprehensible to non-insiders -- and that many of these new paper investment vehicles, such as mortgage-backed-securities, have turned out to be badly engineered, shall we say. These failures, in turn, amplify the instability in the financial markets and make things worse, with banks now fearful of each other's holdings and the regular operations of credit falling into a state of paralysis -- with further ramifications for the mortgage markets, for the house-builders, the suppliers of lumber and sheet-rock, the furniture-sellers, the strip-mall builders, and a long chain of other participants in the so-called "regular" economy.

That economy is not so regular anymore in light of the oil predicament.

Look at it from another angle. The big builders and the realtors seem to think that we've entered the lower arc of a cycle that will turn up again sooner or later. I think they are mistaken. This is not a dip in the real estate cycle, it is the end of the entire suburban program in North America as we have known it.

The new reality of the oil situation informs us that we will not have the energy to run this automobile-dependent infrastructure for daily life. The material assets of suburbia are destined to lose both their monetary value and their sheer usefulness as 100-kilometre daily commutes become economically insupportable, not to mention the cost of heating 3,000-square-foot houses.

We're going to discover the hard way that the project of suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. We will have to occupy the landscape differently in the years ahead. Yet, the enormous sunk costs of suburbia are very likely to provoke a furious campaign to sustain the manifestly unsustainable. The political implications of that are pretty unappetizing.

As in our living arrangements, so in our manner of moving around the landscape, a.k.a. transportation. Start by recognizing that the entire system of Happy Motoring is unlikely to continue as we have known it. This should be taken for granted by anyone seriously reflecting on our future. Unfortunately, the wish to rescue this system trumps the desperate need for us to make other arrangements. Thus huge efforts are being made, and hopes invested in, what are called "alternative fuels" -- the desperate wish to keep running all the cars by other means than gasoline.

I think the stark truth of the matter is that no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run the North American highway network, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney World -- or even a substantial fraction of those things. Because of our sunk costs in Happy Motoring, we will surely try everything -- solar, wind, nuclear, bio-fuels, used french-fry oil -- and we will surely be disappointed by what they can actually do for us. The problem is that they don't scale.

Indeed, the whole question of scale is another key element of the larger story. I would state categorically that the energy predicament implies we will have to downscale all of the systems of daily life named above, and that we will also have to live far more locally and self-sufficiently than has been the case in recent history.

The notion that the global economy is a permanent condition of life -- famously touted by Thomas Friedman in his book, The World Is Flat -- will prove to be erroneous. The world will get rounder as our energy diet ramps down. Globalism will prove to have been a set of transient economic relations that came about because of special circumstances during a particular period of history: five decades of cheap, abundant oil, and relative peace between the powerful nations. The first of those two conditions is now palpably over, and the second may fade as the great nations commence a contest over the remaining oil resources in the world, which is sure to affect our economic relations.

The public discussion in both the United States and Canada about how we will manage this epochal transition out of the oil age ranges from incoherent to delusional these days. For instance, among the "other arrangements" we must make, which I alluded to, is the desperate need to revive the North American passenger rail system.

In case you haven't noticed, the airlines are dying. In mid-April alone, four smaller airlines declared bankruptcy: Frontier, ATA, Aloha, and Skybus. I happened to be in Minneapolis the other day when Northwest and Delta announced their planned merger. Minneapolis happens to be the headquarters of Northwest, and all the local chatter concerned fear that Delta would cut service to small cities all over the upper Midwest. Of course, this geographically large region has almost no railroad service (besides the daily Amtrak run through Minneapolis to Seattle).

There is no project we could take up right away that would have a greater impact on our oil use than reviving the passenger rail system. The infrastructure is already in place, rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. It would employ scores of thousands of people at good jobs, at every level. It would benefit people in all ranks of society. It would take enormous pressure off the airlines in serving short-hop routes that are much better allocated to rail. Most of all, it's a doable project that would build our confidence to address the many other systems that will require re-scaling and reform in the years ahead. The fact that there is almost zero political discussion about restoring the passenger rail system shows how un-serious we are.

Right now, with transport, finance, and food production in disarray, we have entered the period of history that I call "the long emergency." Despite the techno-triumphalism rampant among our governing classes, we are not likely to see (nor are we entitled to) an orderly transition from where we are now to where we are heading. We are unlikely, for instance, to "come up with" a miracle rescue remedy for motor transport. We will have to confront the sheer loss of capital that is at the heart of the financial fiasco rather than continue to play a shell game with loans from central banks to cover up for failed securities. The crisis in grain prices is an early warning that our current methods of food production are hostage to the petroleum markets.

In the absence of a coherent political discussion, we are fated to a merely reactive response to the linked failures of all these systems. One product of the long emergency will be the creation of a new social phenomenon called "the former middle class." They will be a large group of people who have lost jobs, vocations, and incomes. Quite a few are just now in the process of losing their homes. They will be full of anger and grievance and they will demand political action to return their "entitlements" to well-paid jobs, comfortable houses, and limitless mobility.

There is no telling how they will behave when they discover that those things are gone forever. We are not doing ourselves a favour by ignoring these issues.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, and a new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, both from The Atlantic Monthly Press. He lives in upstate New York.

Destroying Minto to Serve Commuters?

One of the best---if not THE best parts of Salem is Minto Island, a wonderful sanctuary ... or, according to this letter to the Salem paper from a reader who lives in Dallas, Oregon, it's merely a convenient platform for yet MORE concrete designed to serve cars:

Address traffic woes with third bridge
April 18, 2008

I am amazed by the persistent plans to build a new bridge in north Salem to connect to some part of Wallace Road NW and its congestion.
Indeed, that sort of traffic could be handled by a morning and evening one-way transit over a modification of the existing railroad bridge.

Consideration should be given to a bridge crossing onto Minto Island from the area of Mission Street SE. Such a bridge system would then connect with Highway 22 in the vicinity of Capital Manor or any suitable place before the river turns to the south.

Such a plan would cost more but would address the real problem of reducing traffic over the existing bridges by commercial traffic in and out of Polk County and the increasing volume of travel between I-5 and Highway 22 going to the coast.

The Mission Street plan would also accommodate a portion of the present commute traffic and open up the flow over the existing bridges.

Sleazy Public Process Lesson 101: Never give the suckers an even break

Now we really see the Salem River Crossing revealed for what it is --- a scaled-up version of a bad used car sales lot, where the hustle is intended to get the mark (that's us, folks) on the hook before he can even realize he's been had.

The first lesson they teach salesmen in boiler room operations and payday loan parlors is "Never ask the mark a question that has the wrong answer as a possible response." Thus, you never get asked "Would you like to finance that here?" Heck no, it's always "How long would you like to finance that for?"

So too with the Salem River Crossing -- they've come up with a spiffy new "funding tool" designed to get you to "interact" with it around the idea of figuring out how to pay for this boondoggle --- leaping right over the "Do you even need one of these?" or "What else could be done with all that money?" or "Does a new auto bridge conflict with the need to dramatically reduce vehicle miles traveled?" questions. Here's the latest "important update" on the hustle:

Important updates on the Salem River Crossing Project
In early 2008, the range of alternatives recommended by the Task Force and Oversight Team was modified to respond to advice from the Federal Highway Administration and the Oregon Department of Justice. View the revised alternatives now.

The project is also continuing to work on how to pay for the alternatives. Check out the new Funding Tool to learn more about these different funding options then take a survey.

What a surprise! A hand-picked "task force" steered by a "steering committee" of public officials bent on destroying a low-income neighborhood in NE Salem in order to ease the daily life and the commute for the wealthy white zip code on the other side looked at alternatives and recommended a new bridge! Imagine that! Now the only step left if to somehow persuade the rubes not already being foreclosed from their homes that they should tax their property even more to pay for it --- because the people the new bridge is supposedly going to serve have made it clear that it's not worth more than a buck to them.