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Pittsburgh: When the oil runs out
Clarke Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh needs to get ready for an energy future with a lot less oil
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… For Pittsburgh, the peak-oil crisis is likely to have a profound impact upon the “ed-med” economy (higher education and medical institutions) that this region is betting on.
This comes from Dan Bednarz, Pittsburgh’s Paul Revere on the subject. Mr. Bednarz, an energy consultant, has been busy explaining peak oil and its ramifications through books, articles and seminar presentations since 2005.
… He says that his work in the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health made him realize how much our health-care industry relies on great amounts of energy. Hospitals almost constantly use numerous types of medical equipment and they always need to be lighted and either air conditioned or heated. As energy supplies dwindle and costs rise, will hospital systems have to curtail or abandon energy-gulping technologies that form the basis of the biotech future of health-care centers such as Pittsburgh?
Similarly, Mr. Bednarz points out, the research on technologies that have made Carnegie Mellon University a major asset for Pittsburgh will face energy-supply problems when peak oil really begins to hit.
… How might peak oil affect Pittsburgh’s future? In ethnic and class relations, the big question, according to Mr. Bednarz, is “how to share a smaller economic pie.” He sees an in-migration to Pittsburgh from drought-stricken and overpopulated areas in the Southwest and Southeast, a boon or bane depending on how this influx is handled.
A major asset for southwestern Pennsylvania is its abundant water — all the more reason to clean up acid mine drainage and other pollutants.
In health care, Mr. Bednarz believes there will be fewer hospitals, shorter stays, with the emphasis shifting away from doctors to nurses and prevention. Also, energy-demanding enterprises, whether Pittsburgh’s old industries or the newer high-tech ventures on which Pittsburgh and its academic institutions are placing so much hope, will be affected by peak oil.
Other predictions: Suburbs will decline or be radically transformed. Living near mass transit will be paramount. Gainers: electric mass transit and railroads for passenger travel as well as freight (our position as a rail hub is a great asset). Agriculture will become a source of employment growth.
(4 June 2008)
Stay home, read, have sex
Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle
Will insane gas prices finally pummel us into evolving? How bad will it get?
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It should be a truly fascinating — albeit possibly enormously grim — thing to watch, one of the more dramatic and revolutionary market-driven shifts in modern history, upheaving everything we’ve become so accustomed to and changing behaviors and attitudes and alliances and political agendas and ass-girths and no I’m not talking about the “Lost” finale or the new 3G iPhone or how Brangelina’s twins are a sure sign of the Second Coming.
It’s the massive, painful spike in gas and oil prices, that most wonderful/frightening harbinger of doom/change/turmoil known to modern society that is fast turning into a calamitous global hurricane, ready to wreak havoc on just about every aspect of modern life, and that includes food and transport and sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and just about everything else that makes America, America.
… It appears that the dour, much-maligned peak oil sages from a few years back were at least partially correct, and the let’s-drill-everywhere weasels from the war-for-oil Republican Party were, quite naturally, wrong. There are simply no indicators that gas will drop back to the $2 range anytime soon, there is very little “elasticity” left in the global petroleum market, and China and India are dipping larger and larger ladles into a smaller and smaller pot, all pointing to a very good chance that the United States will see seven or eight bucks a gallon just in time for the final SUV manufacturing plant to switch over to making Segways and sun visors.
… It will be heaven, it will be hell. President Obama will likely hesitate not at all to instigate a massive hybrid/plug-in/alterative fuel initiative, challenging inventors and Big Auto alike to finally get their asses in gear and knock it off with the internal combustion BS that hasn’t changed in any fundamental way in, oh, about 150 years.
Carpooling will soar. People will walk, bike, scooter, take the bus, work shorter weeks, stroll and amble and hum a merry tune, reacquaint themselves with the neighborhood, telecommute, vacation locally, have more phone sex. They will shop locally to avoid skyrocketing shipping prices, buy less plastic, recycle. The era of cheap oil that enabled hideous urban sprawl will now quite possibly flip over and begin to enable the exact reverse … whatever that is.
… In a perverse way, I love this place, this place where all predictions fail, this place where no one knows exactly what the hell will happen. Will an oil crunch force major nations of the world to work together in unprecedented, selfless ways for the betterment of all humanity? Or will it push insular, angry, fearful nations to kill each other over dwindling resources (aka: “the Bush Method”)? Or will it be a wacky, volatile mix of both? Let’s go for one last long, leisurely drive, and talk about it.
(4 June 2008)
Morford grokked the idea of peak oil several years ago and has written about it occasionally since then. -BA
With Gas at $4 a Gallon, We Need Public Transportation, But Why We Can’t Get It
Robert Reich’s Blog
… For years, policymakers have wondered just how high gas prices would have to go before drivers switch to public transportation. The answer has been assumed to be very high because Americans supposedly are in love with our cars. Yet now we know there’s a tipping point, and it’s not quite as high as policymakers have guessed. It’s around $4 a gallon. We know that’s the tipping piont because suddenly millions of Americans are switching to buses, trains and subways to go to work.
Rather than bemoaning this remarkable turnaround we should be celebrating it because public transit not only reduces congestion but also reduces the nation’s energy needs and cuts carbon emissions that bring on global warming.
Problem is, the nation doesn’t have nearly enough public transportation to handle the new demand. Even more absurdly, right now when it’s needed the most, public transportation across the land is being cut back.
Robert Reich is the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. This is his personal journal.
(3 June 2008)
Taking the Train to a Clean Environment, a Sustainable Economy & Jobs
Carl Bloice, Black Commentator via ZNet
There was once a train that ran straight from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica on the coast. I think it was painted red – memory being what it is and being that is was when I was a kid. My family would leave home in South Central and be at the amusement pier or the beach in about an hour. It was part of the Pacific Electric Railway, at the time the largest trolley system in the world, running 1,100 miles around Southern California. Unfortunately, it went the way of so many rail lines in the country as LA yielded to the oil industry and the auto companies in their desire to put everybody into a car (or cars; there are two and a half cars for every family in the state.) or an exhaust-spewing bus. Now the only way to traverse that distance is on a thick maze of congested freeways.
I got to thinking about the red train the other day when I came across Paul Krugman’s May 19 column, “Stranded in Suburbia,” in the New York Times. Noting that oil prices continue to soar, and the idea that oil production will soon peak and go no higher is being widely assumed, Krugman noted that Europeans “who have achieved a high standard of living in spite of very high energy prices – gas in Germany costs more than $8 a gallon – have a lot to teach us about how to deal with that world.” He was writing from Berlin.
… There’s been a lot of talk recently about the need to do something about repairing and upgrading the country’s infrastructure, including roads, bridges and levees (another area where the Europeans and Asians are way out ahead). But mostly it’s lip service. What we need is a massive public works program to create a physical environment suitable for the rest of the 21st Century. Any program to create a “green” economy or reducing dependency on petroleum must include the project of getting us out of the present cul-de-sac of over dependence on the automobile. There are new rail cars to be built, tracks to be laid, computer networks to be constructed and power lines to be erected. What better way to create meaningful work for those who can no longer depend on machinery production to fully meet the need and the urban youth increasingly faced with a dismal economic future?
Given the dismal depths to which the current electoral campaign has fallen, it would be hard to generate a sensible, comprehensive discussion of the country’s future transportation policies. But it would be a good thing if it were somehow injected into the debate. It’s a tall order but one that has to be faced up to if we are to avoid falling further behind. The future of train travel would be a good place to start.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union.
(4 June 2008)
Original posting at Black Commentator.
