Comment 18

By David (anonymous) | Posted None at

The problem with bio-diesel is that at the present time, you can make a statement on the relative use as "a few people playing with it". And could production ever reach the millions of gallons necessary to make a big enough dent in oil usage? Is there enough farmland left to feed people and cars too? Certainly people can't afford additional debt to convert. Will attritional conversion be fast enough? It seems more likely that inertial forces will keep oil the major player until the economy runs into a brick wall, and the conversion can't then happen fast enough to prevent total collapse, if such total conversion is possible. The high density green cities idea seems warm and fuzzy until you realize how many decades it has taken to move far from jobs - we seem to be out of time to reverse that. Also - how are you going to operate these new cities when the infastructure to support them (trucking, electric generation, etc) will be out of business? It would be a rare city indeed that could exist as an island. I think the most plausable scenario is opposite. Everyone agrees that suburbia will be the first major problem. But could enough walk-to-workers exist to keep the economy afloat by themselves? Doubt that - the economy has elasticity but we are talking about the rubber snapping here - most incentives will be gone to work for the collective good - crime for food might make cities very dangerous. It is more likely that both cities and suburbs will contain many homeless starving people, and only those who OWN rural homes and modify to an extremely low consumption Mother Earth News type lifestyle might make it. It surely does seem dumb in hindsight - configuring life on the whole planet to dependance on a vanishing resource.

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