on Jan 16th, 2009The Peak Oil Crisis: Renovating Suburbia
There has been a lot written lately about the coming demise of America’s suburbs. The general thesis is that without cheap fuels for cars, lawnmowers and heating, suburban living will become untenable.
People will be forced to abandon their homes and make their way to cities, small towns or rural communities where they can survive without gasoline. There is, of course, another side to this coin.
I will be the among the first to grant that suburbia is a creature of cheap energy, particularly gasoline, and unless there are some radical changes in the way we power our homes, feed and clothe ourselves and move about, there will be great difficulties ahead. There are two major problems that need to be solved in order to keep the widely scattered housing of suburbia habitable without cheap energy — transportation and excessive residential consumption of energy.
Not everything about the suburbs will be a downside when the era of cheap fossil fuel comes to an end. Nearly all suburban dwellings have broad roofs and yards that are suitable for collecting some form of solar or in some places wind energy. In many cases, suburban yards are suitable for growing food or perhaps even raising poultry or other small livestock. Most have yards allowing for easy access to subsurface geothermal energy. They are clean and have adequate sources of water and a means to handle sewage. These are not inconsequential assets when trying to maintain large numbers of people in some form of civilization in the face of dwindling supplies of energy. There are already places in Asia that are facing life-threatening water and sanitation problems due to the lack of electricity to run the pumps.
For the immediate future, an unappreciated aspect of suburban homes is easy access to a source of electricity for recharging electric vehicles. Wiring of urban streets and parking areas for recharging plug-in electric cars will cost billions and likely take decades. This week’s Detroit automobile show stands as a monument to the closing era of the internal combustion engine. Nearly every automobile manufacturer is showing some form of electric powered vehicle that should be available, for those that can still afford them, in three or four years.
Some, with good reason, doubt that there will be enough resources, energy, and money to replace the 250 million passenger cars and trucks that we have in America so that we can continue motoring with electricity rather than gasoline. These skeptics are probably right if one assumes that the motor vehicles of the future will be electric clones of the of the 3-6,000 pound behemoths that are clogging the roads today.
Transportation to, from and around suburbia ten or 20 years from now will have to be markedly different than today. While some will have plug-in electric cars, it is unlikely that electricity will continue to be cheap in an era of dwindling fossil fuel supplies, carbon caps and emission taxes. Wasting energy will become a thing of the past. Driving to work or the store in a 4,000 pound electric car will simply become too expensive for most. In place of today’s ubiquitous automobile will be a variety of light electric vehicles, ranging from electric bicycles, tricycles, and scooters, to very small cars that will be inexpensive to produce, use minimal amounts of electric energy and provide much of the mobility that will be required for everyday life… [ More ]
[ Via Falls Church News Press Online ]