« The Price Of Political Paralysis | Main | Memo To Blinder And Zandi — Stop Your Bullshit! »

07/28/2010

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Edward  Boyle

You could let the roads and airports just rot (gasoline/kerosene prices too expensive in future) and let energy investment all go into alternative energy and all the transport investment go into rail. In other words this would be the ideal opportunity to rebuild in a different direction. Say energy gets more and more expensive and funds are rare in a depression. So suburbia becomes inaccessible as nobody can buy gas and housing is abandoned as it is too far out and mortgages unpayable. So abandon whole parts of cities and tear them down. Less roads and sewers, schools and bridges, etc. needed. People can live more centrally with larger, more compact facilities and tighter more urban density. It seems that the lack of money and oil and political inability to agree on anything or do anything is a blessing in diguise. A massive restructuring of the entire country in the sense of peak oil transition is going to happen almost automatically as things fall apart and people gather more centrally and use larger facilites more intensively cannibalizing older facilities/neighbourhoods for repairs. There is no need to simply repair things you don't need. Shrink healthily. Small is beautiful.

The comments to this entry are closed.