> Of course it's cheap oil that allows those places
> to continue to be walkable: we'll see how your
> walkable little shops and services survive when
> the trucks that supply them grind to a halt. Just
> because you don't drive doesn't mean you're buying
> stuff that's made on-site or something ...
Certainly, cheap oil is a part of the transport of goods as well as people. It is also crucial to modern agriculture. It isn't exclusively the car, though for Americans the car is like a righteous extension of the self. People react to talk of losing their cars as if they were threatened with the loss of their souls.
Such cities have thrived before the dependence on cheap oil, and his hope is that they can do so again. What are the other solutions? The most favored solution seems to be taking the existing apparatus and tweaking and upgrading the technical innards, but I am not convinced.
Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> All this talk about our stupidity and techno-fetishism
> and expectation of cheap energy supposes that everyone
> spends everyday questioning the world's fragile structures.
What it presupposes is that we aren't addressing problems that will be harder to resolve the longer we avoid them. The problems require collective action and can *not* be solved by the lonely choices of disparate atoms, because those choices are interdependent. The entire point of talking to people about these problems is to make some sense of what solutions are both feasible and desirable. At least, that should be the point.
I tuned out AdBusters and the like years ago, and I have no desire to read them again. I read more game theory than green screeds. I am thinking here less in terms of moral choices than in terms of social institutions, which is only reinforced by the fact that I just finished James Galbraith's fine book _The Predator State_. So, those are my filters.
As I don't think I made clear at the outset, I'm not sold on "peak" oil. I am sold on 1) the importance of cheap oil to postwar America and 2) the fact that we should not take it as given.
Shane