Sincerely Yours
Howard Roark

Editor’s Note: We’re pretty sure Mr. Roark is just kidding - ref. “Slobovia.” Solar powered steam mopeds indeed!

Our agriculture/grocery requirements won’t drop in a recession. We might see more Netflix, less theater, and more dehydrated grocery products. Amazingly, while most grocery costs have doubled in the last decade in LA, soda and breakfast cereal have remained stable. Apparently consumers won’t stand for artificial inflation anymore. During the earlier gas crunches of the decade, night life on the boulevards died around here, but it seems to have mostly returned (people couldn’t hold out indefinitely?) Bicycling is actually gaining ground here and I hear auto sales are at all time lows.

The potential for global catstrophe is strong, with an industrialized China competing for use of our already strained agriculture as fuel, but I’m not too worried. We can manage to adapt just in time with wind, tidal, and solar. I’m hoping to get into those industries myself in a few years, working my way up to atomic particle streaming for hand-held replicator devices. The biggest puzzle piece we need now is transnational power delivery with minimum transmission loss. Oil/H2 freighters powered by kites may actually be more efficient than masers and superconductor cables.

As is though, I think it’s already too late to rebuild a sweat labor infrastructure for places like LA. Katrina was a lesson in how non-liquid our rebuilding resources really are, When HUD and Habitat pointed out that we couldn’t increase plywood and tar paper production to fill emergency construction demands.

The other real issue is of course water. This planet has always lived on recycled water, but we need to step up the assisted degree of such as we move further away from living on the river banks. Alas, water recycling also translates almost directly into increased fuel demands.

I think the most promising route is city-state skyscrapers lined with hydroponic farming and total water reclamation, surrounded by wind/solar/tidal feeds. Commuting from home to factory, office, school, the mall, grocery, and entertainment would be done by elevator. Renting a car for a trip would be more like renting a plane or boat is now. Considering though that our metropolis’s are filled with 50 years old skyscrapers now, changes will be slow to come unless we simply retrofit. They won’t happen before oil peaks out, even if we radically redesign our new-construction infrastructure model this instant. For a place like LA this means tighter logistical control, making sure employees live near work, and replacing the sprawl of stores with online conveyor-belt-like postal delivery; or people moving out of the big cities entirely. Agriculture, ports, and factories are the physical anchors we need to congregate around to reduce distribution and commuting, but we already do for the most part, except for all the suburbs.

Tighter pricing would influensce that (supermarkets reflecting exact local distribution costs), though ‘what the market will bear’ will probably continue to reign instead.

All told, I think our only timely survival option is to create new energy sources. My vote is making a ground tethered sattelite launcher and robots to build nuclear reactors on the moon. Iron smelting and ceramic firing up there would be a hitch though. That tether would also have to plumb water up there for interrim solar hydrolysis processes. Even that plan is far fetched, and I think solar powered H2 generators in the mid–east is the first route to go, besides local jet-stream and gulf-stream kite turbines. I think diverting agriculture to fuel is a huge mistake. Solar based nano-ceramic-mettalurgy (growing building materials like crystals on-site) would be real useful around now.

Lastly, it’s absurd that we even have dumps in this age. I foresee robots with RFID chip scanners picking through all our garbage for recycling, perhaps starting at household dumpster locations to monitor individual garbage practices. Currently we aren’t informed if it’s efficient water/fuel usage to rinse a jar or can, or just recycle it dirty. Did you see The Island, in which the toilets monitored dietary concerns? I think that’s where we’re headed unless we have another dark ages, which frankly is easily possible within a century if no one with global power and vision steps in to change things. Bustling efficient civilizations have died in the past over the simple inability to rebuild infrastructure to reflect weathar changes. Running low on oil while the population increases is fairly comparable. We’ve come to rely on it for food, water, housing, clothing, building materials, construction, business, manufacturing, entertainment, commuting, and distribution. The average American will use 9 living rooms of oil for travel alone. It had to run out eventually.

I have heard (not sure if it’s true) that lighting is our main use of fuel. If so, we could just get up at sunrise and tell ghost stories at night, live a slower life. I got a new fridge which actually cut my electrical bill in half. Alas, my gas bill doubled now that coals is taking the place of diesel electric generation. I’m not too happy about tearing apart our beautiful mountains or drilling Anwar either. It’s an indication that we just go for desperate stop-gap measures and in fact do lack any powerful compasiionate visionary leadership. That model of infrastructure development will drive us back into the dark-ages when we run out of stop-gap measures. Things will get awfully tight if we plan to run the world on bio-fuel. It sounds green, but won’t be if we have to tear out the last rain forests to plant crops, and beef up global warming. It was already clear two centuries ago that we couldn’t sustain ourselves on bio-fuel when we moved from firewood harvesting to coal mining for the factories and home heating.

Living off the land isn’t going to happpen. For So. Calififornias 40M residents to live off the land at 5 acres each would require another 63,000 of our 40,000 arable square miles already producing global agriculture.

Here’s a useful article http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2006/10/23/brazilian-vs-californian-ethanol/ which states “For California to replace 10% of its current petroleum consumption with ethanol, California would have to convert 50% of its existing farmland to grow biofuel crops. Not a chance.” The way I try to demonstrate it, I ask people to envision plowing through a ready to harvest cornfield everywhere they drive.

I do have plans for a solar steam moped though, and most of the parts gathered to build it. Alas, I almost only travel at night.