A very touching tribute from a son to his mother.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
An Open Letter to Congressman Jack Kimble (R-CA) - UPDATED: It's A Parody!
Thanks to blogger and frequent commenter Annette for bringing this to my attention.
It seems yet another House Republican is taking credit for stimulus money received from a bill he didn't support with his vote. He's even bragging about it on his new blog which I find extremely odd. Not odd that Congressman Kimble would be a conspiracy fearing, Obama socialist name calling, climate crisis denying, creationism supporting hypocrite, but odd that I can find his personal blog, but his name doesn't show up on the House of Representatives government website. You'd think that with an agenda like Kimble's, he'd have his official site up and running instead of calling Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi "a mean one and when she stares at you with those cold dead eyes, well you just wilt" in the comments section of his blog like a high school teenage girl talking about her evil chemistry teacher. If fact, I think I'll screen capture it before he decides to delete it.
So I thought I'd comment to Representative Kimble on the amazing job he's doing using taxpayer dollars he didn't vote for to supply Walmart with its non-union minimum wage greeters from a slew of retired veterans who now have to work because government sponsored deregulation helped pillage their retirement savings in no time flat. Here is my comment.
So I thought I'd comment to Representative Kimble on the amazing job he's doing using taxpayer dollars he didn't vote for to supply Walmart with its non-union minimum wage greeters from a slew of retired veterans who now have to work because government sponsored deregulation helped pillage their retirement savings in no time flat. Here is my comment.Congressman Kimble:I hope you'll all join me in telling Rep. Kimble what you think of his ideas, his newborn blog and have an honest and open debate with him on his ideas and values. Don't hold back but please be respectful. Plus, it's a new blog, so he needs the hits.
Congratulations on the new GI to Greeter Center in your district. I'm glad there is enough of a call for Walmart greeters that it constitutes the necessity of building a training facility to handle such a large demand. And here I thought that Walmart greeters simply stood by the door and "greeted" you as you arrived and bid you farewell as you exited with occasional directions to the knick-knack aisles when asked. How silly am I? Our seniors, especially our retired GIs need help finding work these days what with the economy being what it is these last couple of years.
I find it rather incredulous however, that you are touting "stimulus funds, that I helped push hard to get for us" when not a single Republican in the House voted in favor of the stimulus bill. Not one. How do you account for this? How do you stand in front of the "GI to Greeter Center" participating in a ground breaking ceremony with a smile on your face and a shovel in your hand, shaking the hands of your constituents and taking credit for bringing home the bacon when you had absolutely no effect on the passage of the stimulus bill? How can you take credit for something you voted against? Had Republicans been successful in blocking the passage of this bill, you wouldn't have had the opportunity for your shovel ready photo-op. What would you have said to Mr. Roger Wainwright then?
I hope the citizens of your district take great advantage of the stimulus money passed by Congress in the hopes of jumpstarting the economy and eventually realize that you had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Sincerely,
Broadway Carl
(H/T Annette, JMLPOTW)
UPDATE (4/8/09 10:05am): I'm beginning to think this Kimble blog is a parody. Commenter Vast has this to say:
I don't think this guy exists. He says he represents Fulton - Barksdale corridor and sliver of Blake county.
I can't confirm the existence of a Blake county in California.
His most recent posts read like an article from The Onion:
The interview has already been taped and Linda Ellard is not only extremely nice, she's a news babe with a capital B. I think I did a nice job stating the reasons why nursing home staff should be armed in the event that al-qaeda tries to get to us through our seniors.Yep, definitely a parody. If you go to his website you'll see his face is obviously photoshopped into the pictures. Pretty damned good if you ask me. The blog, not the photoshopping. Looking forward to future posts with amusement now that I know what I'm reading. You got me, Mr. Kimble!
Damn, and I wasted a pretty good letter too. Although, I could just change the name, change the pork project and address it to any of the other Republicans actually doing the same thing.
The Mighty Wurlitzer
by Armadillo Joe
I'm a big fan of our president and our first lady for a great many reasons that I assume don't require enumeration to this erudite and urbane crowd. The most succinct way I can describe why and how much I love B. Hussein Obama and his wife Michelle is to imagine all the reasons the Rethugli-bots, Rethugli-goons, glibertarians and conserva-tards all hate him and then imagine the opposite.
I largely felt the same way about Bill Clinton for the same reasons ten years ago. I even once said to my father, when he and I were in yet another one of those blood-shot eyes and spittle-flecked screaming matches about politics, that I judge a man even more by the enemies he gathers than his friends and when you can count among your enemies Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms, you must be doing something right.
And so it is now. But different.
Back then, the American Right was still in ascendence and The Left -- apart from the old, liberal establishment, squirreled away in corners of Congress and a few university campuses -- had no way of organizing itself or of even knowing how large its numbers were. Back then, the economy was booming and the nearest thing The Left had to a standard-bearer was a centrist sell-out like William Jefferson Clinton -- the best Republican president ever -- so no one would or even could attack the failures of Grover "Bathtub" Norquist's smaller government crowd. Back then, Faux News was in its infancy, no real power to speak of, no media stars, no following and all The Left really had as a counter-measure to a power-worshipping MSM and the very loud bullhorn of right-wing hate-talk radio was a disorganized smattering of free weekly newspapers, headed by The Village Voice.
Which is why the rash of shootings in recent weeks (the death toll is up to 53 people in just 25 days!) scares the bejebus out of me. It isn't just some minor uptick happening in a vacuum. Over the last several decades, the Right-Wing Media Machine, also called "The Mighty Wurlitzer" -- even as it loses power now -- has still done a bang-up job of pulling the center of gravity of public discourse in this country to the right, hard to the right, such that issues like opposition to the War in Iraq were simply off-the-table for any serious political candidate even just a few years ago. Just like gun control is off-the-table now for any serious political candidate. Since the NRA has so perfectly executed (pun intended) its role in the The Mighty Wurlitzer, it now has to resort to simply making shit up to continue to have any relevance in the current debate:
When they impeached Bill Clinton for getting a blowjob in the White House, the winds of history were at their back as they imagined they were one disgraced president away from dominating the globe in perpetuity.
I am scared for the health of our president and for the soul of this nation.
I'm a big fan of our president and our first lady for a great many reasons that I assume don't require enumeration to this erudite and urbane crowd. The most succinct way I can describe why and how much I love B. Hussein Obama and his wife Michelle is to imagine all the reasons the Rethugli-bots, Rethugli-goons, glibertarians and conserva-tards all hate him and then imagine the opposite.I largely felt the same way about Bill Clinton for the same reasons ten years ago. I even once said to my father, when he and I were in yet another one of those blood-shot eyes and spittle-flecked screaming matches about politics, that I judge a man even more by the enemies he gathers than his friends and when you can count among your enemies Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms, you must be doing something right.
And so it is now. But different.
Back then, the American Right was still in ascendence and The Left -- apart from the old, liberal establishment, squirreled away in corners of Congress and a few university campuses -- had no way of organizing itself or of even knowing how large its numbers were. Back then, the economy was booming and the nearest thing The Left had to a standard-bearer was a centrist sell-out like William Jefferson Clinton -- the best Republican president ever -- so no one would or even could attack the failures of Grover "Bathtub" Norquist's smaller government crowd. Back then, Faux News was in its infancy, no real power to speak of, no media stars, no following and all The Left really had as a counter-measure to a power-worshipping MSM and the very loud bullhorn of right-wing hate-talk radio was a disorganized smattering of free weekly newspapers, headed by The Village Voice.
Which is why the rash of shootings in recent weeks (the death toll is up to 53 people in just 25 days!) scares the bejebus out of me. It isn't just some minor uptick happening in a vacuum. Over the last several decades, the Right-Wing Media Machine, also called "The Mighty Wurlitzer" -- even as it loses power now -- has still done a bang-up job of pulling the center of gravity of public discourse in this country to the right, hard to the right, such that issues like opposition to the War in Iraq were simply off-the-table for any serious political candidate even just a few years ago. Just like gun control is off-the-table now for any serious political candidate. Since the NRA has so perfectly executed (pun intended) its role in the The Mighty Wurlitzer, it now has to resort to simply making shit up to continue to have any relevance in the current debate:
The NRA is circulating printed material and running TV ads making unsubstantiated claims that Obama plans to ban use of firearms for home defense, ban possession and manufacture of handguns, close 90 percent of gun shops and ban hunting ammunition.And it is crap like that which drives the fringes of the Right Wing movement to act. Their "Base" has the guns, the authoritarian personalities, the simmering hatreds of all things "different," the paranoid persecution-complexes, the chip-on-the-shoulder political beliefs and the history of violence to enforce them. As we slide into a likely Depression, leading that base are The Right's "intellectuals" who have been discredited in the marketplace of ideas and who now know the jig is up (though they keep dancing that jig to a tune nobody wants to hear anymore), their dim-witted accomplises in Congress and elsewhere in government (looking at you Michelle Bachmann), their media meat puppets who need ratings (especially as they lose market share to lefty media outlets), and all of it financed by those oligarchical cockroaches who wrecked the world's economy as they imagined themselves Masters of the Universe astride Wall Street & The Whole World, greedily hoarding the money they fully believe they've "earned" simply because they already posses it, the logic of the thief.
Much of what the NRA passes off as Obama's "10 Point Plan to 'Change' the Second Amendment" is actually contrary to what he has said throughout his campaign: that he "respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms" and "will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns."
The NRA, however, simply dismisses Obama's stated position as "rhetoric" and substitutes its own interpretation of his record as a secret "plan." Said an NRA spokesman: "We believe our facts."
When they impeached Bill Clinton for getting a blowjob in the White House, the winds of history were at their back as they imagined they were one disgraced president away from dominating the globe in perpetuity.
Now, the world crumbles about them and everyone knows it is their fault -- which will only feed the psycho persecution complexes of The paranoid Base. They actually have no political power, as opposed to their paranoia of no political power even when they ran every branch of government -- which will only feed their resurrected, Clinton-era delusions of black helicopters and jack-booted thugs marching in to seize their Bibles and their guns, and otherwise embarking on a nation-wide campaign of forced abortions, anti-"white" racial suppression and forced gay-marriages. The last time we found ourselves in such a social predicament, a federal office building in Oklahoma City went up in smoke. Yet none dare call it terrorism, then or now (don't want to upset "The Base")."There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."George Orwell
1984
I am scared for the health of our president and for the soul of this nation.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Newt's Friggin' Lasers
Can you throw Newt a friggin' bone here?
Newt Gingrich has stated that if it were up to him, he would have done everything possible to prevent North Korea's rocket launch failure this past week. Even by using friggin' lasers. Well, thank Jebus it wasn't up to him. A war on three fronts? Good thinking, Newt.
Now some are trying to say that Newt's reference to "lasers" was to laser-guided missiles. To which I call bullshit. If you watch the original video in the VanSusteren interview, Gingrich first talks about an "electromagnetic pulse attack." Not the possibility of it mind you, just the scenario of it set in book that a friend of his wrote. Seriously. A book plug. He's not mentioning some scientific study on the effects of EMP which have been around since the 1960s by the way, he's mentioning what I assume to be a Doomsday book about what would happen to us in such a case.
At the end of the interview Gingrich does say that he would use any means necessary to stop the launch test, "either a small team go in, or a way to deliver either a laser or another kind of device..." If he's talking about laser-guided missiles, why didn't he just say so?
Either Gingrich isn't using his words carefully enough or he knows exactly what kind of audience he's speaking to. When talking about "lasers," not missiles, it's a lot easier to get your idea to stick if you're not talking about shooting missiles pre-emptively into another country. That sounds bad. But lasers? Friggin' awesome!
Finally, it's odd to me that this would be a feasible idea to the same people that were shocked, SHOCK I TELL YOU!, at the use of drones on terrorist camps in Pakistani territory. Is Newt's idea okay for North Korea's failure of a satellite launch but not okay for specific terrorist training camp targets in the ideology formerly known as the "War on Terror"?
On the other hand, I hear these lasers are relatively inexpensive. One. Million. Dollars.
Hannity Uses Dixie Chicks Reference While Criticizing President
Pot, meet Kettle.
The latest Sean Hannity head explosion found Hannity criticizing President Obama for comments made during his European Union trip and accused him of the "Blame America First" meme, said Obama was "doing his best Dixie Chicks impression" and then proceeded to bring up Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers and Angry Michelle Obama.
"America is arrogant. That's what Mr. Obama said today, doing his best Dixie Chicks impression.... [T]he liberal tradition of blame America first, well, that's still alive. But should we really be surprised from a man who sat in Reverend Wright's church, from a man who launched his political career in the home of a man who bombed the Pentagon and is unrepentant. Mrs. Obama may not be proud of her country, but I bet she's proud of her husband tonight. [...]So remind me again, what were the Dixie Chicks vilified for? Oh, right - for criticizing the President. The irony immunity continues.
The worst part of the whole thing, but par for the Hannity course was the omission of President Obama's statement in which he criticizes the EU for it's range of casual to "insidious" anti-Americanism, being too quick to blame America and ignoring the good that the US does. But that would blow a hole in Hannity's rant, right? Douchebaggery knows no bounds.
(H/T Steve Benen & Bob Cesca)
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Douchebag of the Week: David Gregory
Is Tim Russert turning over in his grave? Or urn? (I don't know if he was cremated.) I know I would be spinning if I were a proud member of AFTRA and decided to bring on to my program the new General Motors CEO and attempt to blame the company's troubles on the union who manufactures their product.
Nicole Belle: ...David Gregory has presumably been a member of at least one union as a television "journalist" for the last ten+ years. Apparently, it's a "great for me, but not for thee" kind of thing for Gregory...David Gregory: Douchebag of the Week.
[...]
If the US actually had single-payer health care coverage for its citizens--like every other western country--then the auto industry could actually be relieved of those expenses.
But David, it would make FAR too much sense to propagandize FOR something that benefits the country instead of propagandizing AGAINST unions, wouldn't it?
*Note - Last week I failed to choose a DOTW because I was away, but without a doubt, last week's Douchenozzle Extraordinaire™ was Michele "Armed and Dangerous" Bachmann for this and this and was a runner up this week for this.
(H/T Crooks & Liars)
Frank Rich Agrees (sort of)
by Armadillo Joe
Frank Rich in today's NYTimes:
EVEN among pitchfork-bearing populists, there was scant satisfaction when the White House sent the C.E.O. of General Motors to the guillotine.To which I'd like to add: "No really, go ahead. Try to please us."
Sure, Rick Wagoner deserved his fate. He did too little too late to save an iconic American institution
[...]
Yet few disputed [...] that Wagoner was a “sacrificial lamb,” a symbolic concession to public rage ordered by a president who had to look tough after being blindsided by the A.I.G. bonuses. Detroit’s chief executive had to be beheaded so that the masters of the universe at the top of Wall Street’s bailed-out behemoths might survive.
[...]
Those on Wall Street who took the money and ran are beyond the reach of the guillotine. Most of their successors are too new to their jobs to merit beheading
[...]
Change is hard. Change is traumatic. Sending a juicy C.E.O. — or six — to the gallows is at most a crowd-pleasing opening act to the heavy lifting of reform and rebuilding we still await.
The Op-Ed also included this cartoon, further proof of the "pitchforks & torches" zeigeist these plutocratic cockroaches have no idea swirls around them. It could consume not only the Wall Street Masters of the Universe who drove our economy onto the rocks, but their enablers in the Obama Administration and perhaps the Administration itself, if this crowd doesn't get a little retribution:
What Happened To Bill Maher?
I couldn't sleep early this morning so instead of tossing and turning and being annoyed about not sleeping, I dragged my sorry ass into the living room and caught up on the last two episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher. And I have one question: What the fuck happened to Bill Maher?
The show seems old. The comedy seems forced. At first I thought it was perhaps since Maher wasn't kicking Incurious George around on a weekly basis that it lost some pizazz, but as I kept watching I realized that the show and maybe Maher just wasn't hitting the mark. Maybe the formula needs some tweaking. Here's the breakdown of a typical show.
Possible Parody Commercial / Opening Credits
Real Time sometimes starts out with a little parody commercial bit during the first minute or two of the show and it's usually pretty good because they have a week to prepare it. Earlier this season, the combination Snuggie and ShamWow! called "SnugWow!" for the couch potato who occasionally spills his drink and is too lazy to get up for a bathroom break comes to mind.
Monologue
Then after the opening credits roll, Maher does a couple of minutes of monologue with the kind of giggle-under-your-breath delivery that conveys the material is crap and he's hoping for at least one joke to land.
Interview with a Single Guest (sometimes live, sometimes via satellite)
Sometimes Maher has some really informative and credible guests on this segment; Madeleine Albright and Bill Bradley come to mind just this season alone. But on the April 3rd, 2008 episode, Maher brought on Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher. Seriously? Joe the Plumber? And he's peddling Joe's book? Here's the list of guests he's had on this segment this season: Ron Paul, George Stephanopoulos, T. Boone Pickens, Steven Pearlstein, Madeleine Albright, Bill Bradley and .... Joe the Fucking Plumber?! [*More on this interview later.]
Panel Discussion
Depending on the panel, this segment can be highly entertaining and informative, as in the case with panelists Salman Rushdie and Mos Def, or incredibly infuriating as in the case with Andrew Breitbart being a complete douche in sparring with, and losing to, Eric Michael Dyson.
Comedy Bit
This little routine is designed to break up the seriousness and take a breather with a little levity. This segment more often than not falls flat on its face, as you can witness by Maher's this-is-so-funny-I'm-laughing-through-the punchline fake giggles. Get rid of this segment, it's the weakest part of the show. It only serves to disrupt what is usually an engaging discussion.
Adds a Member to the Panel Discussion
Out from stage left walks someone peddling a new book or article. If it contributes to the conversation already taking place, it flows nicely as is usual in the cases of a Mike Taibbi or a Dan Savage or even a Christopher Hitchens. When it's a comedy writer like Carol Leifer bringing nothing to the table but a book on dealing with a mid-life crisis? Not so much.
New Rules
Always the best part of the show. It's carefully thought out and Maher hits it out of the park almost every time. Part of the reason is the delivery. Maher knows it's good. He knows it's funny, edgy, witty and he has the advantage of believing he's on right side of the issue. Not the liberal or conservative side, but the correct side. And he sells it.
The bottom line in all of this is that in my opinion, I don't know if Maher has gotten a busier schedule with his road act, or maybe he thinks every debate is going to be like punching Ann Coulter in the uterus, or he's a little behind the 8-ball after doing a documentary, but it seems like he's has gotten slightly intellectually lazy and is having a harder time trying to counterpoint his higher caliber guests. I may not like opinions from guests like David Frum and disagree with his viewpoints, but he's attempting to communicate his ideology and I feel he truly believes his stance and not just spout talking points, and where Maher used to be up on his game with data and politics, it seems that lately he has nothing to add to the debate unless it's about religion (sometimes forcing the debate towards that topic.) Enough already, we get it.
When you don't know what you're going to get from week to week, it can make for reduced viewership. I don't know if this will make a difference for HBO, but Bill Maher is losing his edge and he needs to get it back.
When you don't know what you're going to get from week to week, it can make for reduced viewership. I don't know if this will make a difference for HBO, but Bill Maher is losing his edge and he needs to get it back.
********************************
*Regarding the Wurzelbacher interview, since Joe the non-licensed non-plumber came onto the political scene, he has shown himself to be an opportunistic, know-nothing boob with absolutely no factual basis on which to spout his ridiculous opinions, and Maher has been having his fun in not such a nice way at Joe's expense. But when he had Joe in his sights, on his set and had the opportunity to take Wurzelbacher's asinine comments and political stances to task, my stomach turned at the Mickey Mouse sized kid gloves that Maher used on Mr. Common Man.
This could have been Mr. The Plumber's final minute of fame never to be heard from again, but Maher peddled his book, tried to make nice with him with a "Things We Have In Common" list and didn't bother to question Joe on his disagreement with Hillary Clinton's assertion that 90% of the arms being used in the Mexican Drug War are coming from the U.S.
An older version of Maher would have known the answer to that assertion. Maher 2.0 let it slide without a whimper. I didn't think it was possible, but he made Joe the Plumber look good in an interview. If Bill Maher were Katie Couric, we could be looking at Vice President Palin right about now. Don't get me wrong Bill, I'm usually on your side, but you blew that Wurzelbacher interview big time.
This could have been Mr. The Plumber's final minute of fame never to be heard from again, but Maher peddled his book, tried to make nice with him with a "Things We Have In Common" list and didn't bother to question Joe on his disagreement with Hillary Clinton's assertion that 90% of the arms being used in the Mexican Drug War are coming from the U.S.
An older version of Maher would have known the answer to that assertion. Maher 2.0 let it slide without a whimper. I didn't think it was possible, but he made Joe the Plumber look good in an interview. If Bill Maher were Katie Couric, we could be looking at Vice President Palin right about now. Don't get me wrong Bill, I'm usually on your side, but you blew that Wurzelbacher interview big time.
Reason #735 Why the Mets are Better Than the Yankees
by Armadillo Joe
Hey Blog-O-Maniacs, let's play some baseball! But first, we must clear a couple of things up, OK?
Yankees fan:
Mets fan:
[*Note by Broadway Carl: I have nothing to add except, "PLAY BALL, MOTHERFUCKERS!"]
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Sarah Palin's sister-in-law arrested for burglary
Police say Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's sister-in-law is accused of breaking into the same home twice to steal money.This is really something else. Can a week go by without something happening in Palin World that doesn't show how close we came to dodging that bullet?
Deputy Wasilla Police Chief Greg Wood says 35-year-old Diana Palin was arrested Thursday after she was confronted by the homeowner in the governor's hometown of Wasilla. She faces two counts of felony burglary and misdemeanor counts of criminal trespass and theft.
You can take the girl out of the trailer park...
April Four
This song has meant a great many things to a great many people over the years, but somehow this year it all seems to resonate so much more.
Rock on.
Must Reads
David Michael Green: Regressive Hypocrisy (Yawn…) AgainChristopher Brauchli: Witches, Condoms and the Pope
The Rude Pundit: Glenn Beck Put Barack Obama in a Nazi Uniform in His Magazine
Susie Madrak: Was Frontline Documentary Edited to Reflect Health Insurance Industry Interests?
Armadillo Joe recommends...
driftglass: Punish The Monkey
President Obama's Weekly Address - April 4, 2009
The Challenges of Our Time
...on Air Force One. How cool is that?
Obama ♥'s SUPERTRAINS!
by Armadillo Joe
Saw this on Olbermann last night, but can't find the video. From the White House transcript of Obama's town hall in the Rhenus Sports Arena in Strasbourg, France:
as an American who is proud as anybody of my country, I am always jealous about European trains. And I said to myself, why can't we have -- (applause) -- why can't we have high-speech rail?I ask myself that every single day, Mr. President.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Vive La Trains!
by Armadillo Joe
"Institutional Memory" -- my response to B'way Carl's response to my other post "Protected Class" about the unfairness of the treatment of the UAW workers with regards to their contract when compared to the Obama Administration's response to the AIG contracts -- wound up being as much about those contracts as the larger economic picture for the United States, the planet and the manufacturing sector in a world where energy is getting expensive and the climate is changing.
So, when The Big Guy (that'd be Mr. The Broadway Carl, the proprietor of this'n here establishment) responded to "Institutional Memory" with a lengthy comment addressing the two prongs of my original post, I decided that my response to his response to my response to his response to my original post should also break into two parts.
Therefore, I give you, dear Blog-O-Mania reader...
First, some charts & some history.
In 1949, Dr. M. King Hubbert -- a noted geophysicist of the day -- published an academic paper entitled "Energy from Fossil Fuels, Science" in which he predicted that the era of fossil fuels would be very short-lived, which in the car-happy at the dawn of the 1950's was largely ignored outside of university circles. Then, in March of 1956 -- at the Plaza Hotel in San Antonio, Texas -- Dr. Hubbert, now in the employ of the Shell Oil Company, presented the same idea to the petroleum bigwigs of the American Petroleum Institute, with the added doom and gloom that U.S. petroleum production (i.e. - Texas oil production) would peak in 1970 and thereafter decline. Later in life, he predicted that global oil production would peak sometime between 1995 & 2000 and had consumption not declined due to increased efficiencies driven by the energy crises of the 1970's, we might have reached global peak right on Hubbert's schedule. As it is, Hubbert began to be proven right as Texas began capping wells in 1972. A gathering consensus in the scientific community (outside the manipulative employ of the petroleum industry) firmly believes that we have already reached Global Peak Oil in either 2005 or 2006.
The oil shocks of the early 1970's, caused as they were by OPEC manipulating the market, were one result of that loss of control over our own energy policy. If the reserves of the vast North Sea oil fields off the coast of Scotland hadn't come online between 1970 & 1975, and then the Alaskan North Slope done the same in 1977, it wouldn't have been so easy for the political right to belittle the Carter Administration's attempts at a more prudent energy policy as a response to the OPEC shocks and we may not have seen the rise of Reagan here and Thatcher in the UK. Needless to say, our collective history and that of Europe over the last 35-40 years would be very, very different had Scottish & Alaskan petroleum not come available just in the nick of time and enabled the magical thinking on a global, civilization-wide scale we've seen since 1980.
We won't be so lucky again.
The civilization-saving discoveries in Alaska and the North Sea were the last of their kind, a sort of Eureka! moment for those involved, I'm sure, that has not been repeated since. No new large-scale petroleum reserves have come online since North Slope in 1977. Yes, some super-giant fields have been discovered (including Bakken, right underneath our very own Dakotas, and several off the coast of Brazil) but discovering them and bringing them online are two different matters altogether. Yes, Bakken is gi-normous, as are the Brazilian fields, and the Peak Oil deniers point to them as proof that we can keep driving our cars indefinitely, except that for very complicated reasons which amount to the physics of geologic formations (in the case of Bakken) or location, location, location (in the case of the Brazilian fields -- which are in the deep, blue water off the continental shelf), knowing that oil is there does not automatically lead to simply being able to effectively extract it for processing. The vast majority of oil wells aren't "gushers." While such things were once real and somewhat common, and also make for dramatic scenes in movies, they bear as much resemblance to the real world as a Hollywood gun fight. Most of the oil in Bakken is locked up in sedimentary rock or that siren call "oil shale." 
Until someone invents an undersea oil drilling platform, we don't have the technology to get to the Brazilian oil either. However people may imagine it to take place, actual oil-extraction is not like turning on the spigot in your bathroom: just punch a hole in the ground and let the "Texas Tea" flow forth and then maybe some newfangled contraption can just slurp the rest of it out of that huge, oil-filled cavern in the earth's crust like a milkshake and drink it up. Sorry folks, but that type of oil ran out decades ago. The petroleum left in the ground now is more akin to blood from a stone than from an artery.
What does all this oil mumbo-jumbo really mean? Well, it doesn't mean that the gas pumps will run dry tomorrow forcing us to live with Mad Max beyond The Thunderdome in a Road Warrior existence of a war of all against all -- by this time next year. Not initially, at least.
What we are talking about is Peak Oil.
Simply put, Peak Oil is a general term for the complicated array of ideas surrounding the general principle that global petroleum production is limited by the naturally recoverable supply available in the ground and that, at some point, half of that recoverable oil (the easy-to-get half and not just the available oil) will have been withdrawn, leaving behind it the degraded, hard to extract residue which will be increasingly economically unviable as the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Investment -- ERoEI or EROI) ratio shrinks to the same levels as ethanol, biofuels and solar. Extracting oil from the Bakken Formation, as oil rich as it is, is so complicated that many knowledgeable people think it will never really come online as a reliable source of domestic crude oil production. Eventually, oil companies won't be able to turn any kind of profit trying to extract shale oil or clean coal or some other pie-in-the-sky cockamamie chunk of magical thinking technology about how to maintain our grossly inefficient, fossil fuel existence. When that happens, one hopes we'll have something in the pipe (so to speak) to replace it as an energy source.
However, don't hold your breath on that, because these guys in lab coats we imagine to be diligently working day and night to figure out how to turn corn sugar into an unlimited energy source aren't actually out there, mixing beakers of brightly-colored liquids together to create some magical oil substitute from corn ethanol or magic sparkle pony dust. 
We are running smack dab into the limits of basic physics here, the first law of thermodynamics and, even more specifically, the law of conservation of energy, which states that...
What we will need instead is an infrastructure that can effectively use the renewable energy sources that don't destroy the environment and will effectively and efficiently move people and goods around our enormous landscape. And that infrastructure is (say it with me now) SUPERTRAINS!
Either way it goes (easy or hard) the internal combustion engine driving rubber wheels on concrete or blacktop roads to transport humans or goods with maximum convenience directly door-to-door between broadly scattered points on the map is an unsustainable and ultimately failed model for organizing the transportation of a nation's resources. Just because people like the convenience of door-to-door travel won't make it any less environmentally destructive or prohibitively expensive once oil become so expensive to extract, transport, process and distribute that only the very, very wealthy and powerful can own cars or fly in airplanes. Even the rich and powerful keeping fossil-fuel vehicles remains a questionable prospect since the whole petroleum-processing enterprise requires enormous economies of scale to remain viable. Who else could afford to maintain such a vast and expensive oil-processing infrastructure but governments, specifically militaries?
Which is why I believe that, over the next few decades as the last of the oil runs out, the rest of the planet's oil will increasingly be used up by the world's War Machine. This is why the U.S. Army & Marine Corps is in Iraq, folks: because there's no such thing as a solar-powered tank and you can't run a fighter jet on bio-diesel. Our military is there to conduct Blood for Oil, but the oil ain't for you and me to get a cheap flight to Orlando to visit Grampa. The Pentagon is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the United States, which is itself the largest consumer of petroleum in the world, and a juggernaut that rapacious will not easily surrender its stranglehold. In 2004 alone, the United States military, all by itself, used 144 million barrels of oil, more than the entire country of Greece in the same period. Exact numbers are hard to come by, though, because (like the Pentagon budget under George W. Bush) the DESC (the Defense Energy Support Center), the organization tasked with keeping all those tanks and Humvees and jet planes and ships fully gassed-up, keeps its exact consumption numbers classified, presumably for national security reasons. Like a junkie in the last throes of addiction, the gaping maw that is the War Machine of the United States will only release it's deathgrip on the world's oil supply when someone else pries its cold, dead fingers from the spigot. The last drops of fossil fuel on God's green earth aren't going into the car of any civilian, no matter how wealthy. The very last teaspoons of oil used in an internal-combustion engine on planet earth will be burned by a war machine, probably a tank driven into a village somewhere in the American Midwest at the request of the local warlord to suppress a food riot.
Quite an ugly picture, eh? If we don't take steps now to address the broader needs of the next century, then we could be going into this looming mess in just such an ugly way. We have the means with fossil fuel-burning trucks and bulldozers and such to build our rail infrastructure now, right now, and can thus still have a way to move people and materials around this country after the bottom falls out of petroleum as our principle energy source. If we balk at this opportunity now and just build more roads and car-centric infrastructure, those roads will be of absolutely of no use to anyone except the highway robbers raiding caravans of pilgrims journeying between isolated camps of shivering and frightened humans scraping out a meagre existence amid the dead and the dying in the decaying former metropolis' of a post-oil-America that will look a great deal like modern-day Detroit.
To be clear, though, instead of an overnight "Road Warrior" nightmare, I predict we'll probably see over the next decade or couple of decades a slow winding down of the industrialized fossil-fuel capitalism that has dominated the globe for over a century, particularly the rapacious American-style industrialized fossil-fuel capitalism that has dominated Life on Earth since the end of World War 2. Gradually, consumer goods manufactured abroad or even domestically but in a different time zone will get gradually more expensive and eventually vanish from store shelves altogther, people will travel less and lead more localized lives, economies will get more regionalized and localized by necessity as the constant human need for food and clothing won't abate, a need someone will have to address locally, as well as making and selling other basic consumer goods, since the oil-burning container ships from China won't be able to deliver cheap socks to the Wal-Marts anymore, and people everywhere will wind up living slower, quieter, more intimate and local lives.
Put another way, the world of happily motoring with yourself and one other person across hundred of miles just because it is fast and personally
convenient for you will someday be a fantastic tale we'll tell our grandchildren, about that magical time when all those rusting hulks in fields everywhere called "cars" were shiny and new and went Zoom! Zoom! while metal tubes full of people soared through the air, transporting people to far away places, even across oceans! Because, and this statement is a result of my passion for the hope of rail transportation, a happy medium between more trains and fewer cars just so the remaining car owners can enjoy better traffic conditions for themselves is a losing proposition.
Mr. The Broadway Carl says in his comment that:
We have a narrow and rapidly closing window now, right now, where we have the petroleum technology of trucks and bulldozers to build a large and (hopefully) less petroleum-intensive transportation network before it becomes too expensive and environmentally destructive to do even that much. Many people will complain that the trains don't serve very well where they live or want to travel, something that makes the Point-A to Point-B abilities of cars unmatched by any other transportation technology and which makes hybrids seem to car-centric thinkers as the solution to our current dilemma of how to maintain the door-to-door convenience of a happy motoring lifestyle. Hybrid cars are manifestly not such a solution because they answer the wrong questions, though the reasons why are numerous enough to merit addressing at another time in another blog post, but the shape of my eventual answer should be obvious from everything else I've written here, today and earlier.
Once again, re-phrased, the inability of trains to be convenient for everyone everywhere in every far-flung place they choose live or visit is not a failure of trains as a technology, but a failure of land-use policies in the United States and a failure of the way we've organized our cities and towns. Even here in New York City, with the best public transportation network in America, so many areas of the five boroughs are choked with cars because the subways aren't close enough to where some people choose to live and the buses are slow and stop too much -- because they are stuck in happy motoring traffic. Sadly for our automobile-drivers (confession: I keep a car even though I live in Manhattan), cities are crowded by definition and something like an automobile is destructive to the fabric of a healthy urban environment for a great many reasons, also to be enumerated later in another blog post. Historically, without the availability of cars when those areas of the five boroughs were laid out, areas away from transportation nodes wouldn't have built up in the way that they did, if ever at all. Of the five boroughs, mostly Staten Island and swaths of Queens are victims of this sort of development, settled and built up as they were in the car-loving decades following World War 2, when
Robert Moses -- who, in a twist of historical irony, never had a driver's license -- thought the automobile and an infrastructure to support its widespread use could and would solve all our "problems" (which for him meant poor, dark-skinned people).
But, despite hating-on-cities-and-the-poor-people-who-live-in-them visionaries like Robert Moses, if the options for the citizenry were 1.) walk a long way to the train station to get to work or 2.) walk a short way to the train station to get to work or 3.) walk to work or 4.) ride a bicycle or, um, that's it (period. not negotiable), people would live closer to the train station or walking- or cycling-distance from work. Sure, due to he law of supply & demand, apartments will be smaller and inside taller buildings and the areas around the stations will be more densely-packed, but that's the whole idea. Not everyone gets a 3000 sq/ft house on 1.4 acres, I don't care how much people may or may not like it. The time is coming when they, we, all of us won't have a choice about that because the technology that makes such resource-intensive, short-sighted land-use on a large scale even conceivable is called an automobile and the energy source that makes that technology possible is running out.
Hence my constant carping about cities being walkable and human-scaled. It is much easier to simply build a city this way in the first place, let's face it. Retro-fitting the spread-out sprawl of a place like Phoenix or Dallas or Atlanta to be dense and walkable and less car-dependent is more likely to result in the whole place being abandoned for easier pickins by those who can get out and broken up into small, discreet and economically impoverished townships by those left behind.
Rising petroleum costs will eventually make cars and trucks a thing of the past. We can either, as I said in my previous post, go easy into this post-petroleum world by building a robust train network, reducing sprawl everywhere (not being afraid to just write-off altogether places like the one on the right) and making every attempt to re-localize whole vast sectors of our economy.
Or we can go hard into this post-petroleum world by building more car-friendly roads and freeways and automobile bridges and parking garages with our diminishing natural resources, resigning ourselves to sprawl and thinking of it as natural just because people like it and that's the way we've always done it and never forcing the international corporations that control our economy to re-localize and thus leaving whole regions without sufficient means of food production, clothing and essential consumer goods manufacturing once the easy profit of a petroleum economy evaporates.
Which brings me back around to the whole question of what to do with GM and Chrysler. They are large entities with a vast store of knowledge about how to build machines. Yes, those machines are environmentally destructive exercises in rampant egotism, but nevertheless they are machines.
As I said in my previous posts, the large-scale machine-building know-how within GM & Chrysler are what must be preserved to make the machines we'll need to still have a functioning economy in the approaching post-petroleum world.
So, with all of the above in mind, I'd like to address the Peak Oil-related portions of Broadway Carl's comment point by point:
It's the 21st Century, dude, where's my flying car? Naturally, a sane person would reply that the fuel consumption and threat to public safety presented by general helicopter (or flying car!) usage rightfully keeps the spread of such transportation technology in check. When considered against the backdrop of a global oil shortage, I must put cars in the same category. Thus, what I'm concerned about here specifically is the future -- not the past.
Over the last 50-60 years -- as America doubled-down on a car-centric, Happy Motoring lifestyle made possible by wide-open spaces and cheap, cheap, cheap oil -- Europe was largely forced by its compact size and already existing urban density to find other, better ways to move people and goods. Today, as our petroleum economy enters its end game, Europe's happy accident of forced rail infrastructure is going to pay dividends. Yes, Europe has still had cars all this time (and some nice ones), but The Continent's economy functioned rather well prior to the oil economy, which gives it an infrastructure that will be relatively adaptable afterwards.
I understand that a world without cars in it is hard to imagine, but imagine we must. Believe me, changing my thinking was extremely difficult for me because I grew up in the wide open spaces and horrifically space-inefficient land-use of North Texas and Dallas. Oil is only going to get more and more scarce in the approaching decades and while I agree with you that internal combustion engines driving rubber wheels will never disappear completely as method of transport, their viability as the c
hief means for moving people and goods in America will be forced to end because continuing on the enormous, continental scale we currently do will simply become cost-prohibitive, both economically and ecologically. We can wean ourselves from Happy Motoring willingly with a better rail network and better land-use policies or we can be forced out of our cars when the oil runs out, which is not in the "so distant its practically sci-fi" future, but in the forseeable lifetimes of just about every living human on the planet.
I have argued in previous posts that the auto industry will not survive as a car-making enterprise, even if they make cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars, we're still in the position of using our rapidly vanishing resources to fetch milk and bread from the 7-11. The auto-makers need to become train-makers to have a future in a post-petroleum world. Their forced re-structuring, happening right now, is an opportunityto make those difficult changes while we still have a window of opportunity. Furthermore, the point of a rail system is not to make life for people who choose to still drive cars easier by alleviating the traffic congestion around them. The point is to move people and goods as efficiently as possible to reduce pollution and carbon footprints and conserve precious energy, wherever we may get it: fossil fuel, solar, hydro-electric, nuclear, etc... In general, for the sake of the planet and the human life on it, people must be forced out of their cars.
"Institutional Memory" -- my response to B'way Carl's response to my other post "Protected Class" about the unfairness of the treatment of the UAW workers with regards to their contract when compared to the Obama Administration's response to the AIG contracts -- wound up being as much about those contracts as the larger economic picture for the United States, the planet and the manufacturing sector in a world where energy is getting expensive and the climate is changing.
So, when The Big Guy (that'd be Mr. The Broadway Carl, the proprietor of this'n here establishment) responded to "Institutional Memory" with a lengthy comment addressing the two prongs of my original post, I decided that my response to his response to my response to his response to my original post should also break into two parts.
Therefore, I give you, dear Blog-O-Mania reader...
"Public Transportation and You: Our Future Without Cars -- Part One, about that road trip you mentioned..."FAIR WARNING: this blog post is long and has many charts and pictures and links. It will probably make your eyes glaze over.
(Part Two, about unions and contracts and social justice in a post-Dubya America, will appear later)
First, some charts & some history.In 1949, Dr. M. King Hubbert -- a noted geophysicist of the day -- published an academic paper entitled "Energy from Fossil Fuels, Science" in which he predicted that the era of fossil fuels would be very short-lived, which in the car-happy at the dawn of the 1950's was largely ignored outside of university circles. Then, in March of 1956 -- at the Plaza Hotel in San Antonio, Texas -- Dr. Hubbert, now in the employ of the Shell Oil Company, presented the same idea to the petroleum bigwigs of the American Petroleum Institute, with the added doom and gloom that U.S. petroleum production (i.e. - Texas oil production) would peak in 1970 and thereafter decline. Later in life, he predicted that global oil production would peak sometime between 1995 & 2000 and had consumption not declined due to increased efficiencies driven by the energy crises of the 1970's, we might have reached global peak right on Hubbert's schedule. As it is, Hubbert began to be proven right as Texas began capping wells in 1972. A gathering consensus in the scientific community (outside the manipulative employ of the petroleum industry) firmly believes that we have already reached Global Peak Oil in either 2005 or 2006.
The oil shocks of the early 1970's, caused as they were by OPEC manipulating the market, were one result of that loss of control over our own energy policy. If the reserves of the vast North Sea oil fields off the coast of Scotland hadn't come online between 1970 & 1975, and then the Alaskan North Slope done the same in 1977, it wouldn't have been so easy for the political right to belittle the Carter Administration's attempts at a more prudent energy policy as a response to the OPEC shocks and we may not have seen the rise of Reagan here and Thatcher in the UK. Needless to say, our collective history and that of Europe over the last 35-40 years would be very, very different had Scottish & Alaskan petroleum not come available just in the nick of time and enabled the magical thinking on a global, civilization-wide scale we've seen since 1980.
We won't be so lucky again.
The civilization-saving discoveries in Alaska and the North Sea were the last of their kind, a sort of Eureka! moment for those involved, I'm sure, that has not been repeated since. No new large-scale petroleum reserves have come online since North Slope in 1977. Yes, some super-giant fields have been discovered (including Bakken, right underneath our very own Dakotas, and several off the coast of Brazil) but discovering them and bringing them online are two different matters altogether. Yes, Bakken is gi-normous, as are the Brazilian fields, and the Peak Oil deniers point to them as proof that we can keep driving our cars indefinitely, except that for very complicated reasons which amount to the physics of geologic formations (in the case of Bakken) or location, location, location (in the case of the Brazilian fields -- which are in the deep, blue water off the continental shelf), knowing that oil is there does not automatically lead to simply being able to effectively extract it for processing. The vast majority of oil wells aren't "gushers." While such things were once real and somewhat common, and also make for dramatic scenes in movies, they bear as much resemblance to the real world as a Hollywood gun fight. Most of the oil in Bakken is locked up in sedimentary rock or that siren call "oil shale." 
Until someone invents an undersea oil drilling platform, we don't have the technology to get to the Brazilian oil either. However people may imagine it to take place, actual oil-extraction is not like turning on the spigot in your bathroom: just punch a hole in the ground and let the "Texas Tea" flow forth and then maybe some newfangled contraption can just slurp the rest of it out of that huge, oil-filled cavern in the earth's crust like a milkshake and drink it up. Sorry folks, but that type of oil ran out decades ago. The petroleum left in the ground now is more akin to blood from a stone than from an artery.What does all this oil mumbo-jumbo really mean? Well, it doesn't mean that the gas pumps will run dry tomorrow forcing us to live with Mad Max beyond The Thunderdome in a Road Warrior existence of a war of all against all -- by this time next year. Not initially, at least.
What we are talking about is Peak Oil.
Simply put, Peak Oil is a general term for the complicated array of ideas surrounding the general principle that global petroleum production is limited by the naturally recoverable supply available in the ground and that, at some point, half of that recoverable oil (the easy-to-get half and not just the available oil) will have been withdrawn, leaving behind it the degraded, hard to extract residue which will be increasingly economically unviable as the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Investment -- ERoEI or EROI) ratio shrinks to the same levels as ethanol, biofuels and solar. Extracting oil from the Bakken Formation, as oil rich as it is, is so complicated that many knowledgeable people think it will never really come online as a reliable source of domestic crude oil production. Eventually, oil companies won't be able to turn any kind of profit trying to extract shale oil or clean coal or some other pie-in-the-sky cockamamie chunk of magical thinking technology about how to maintain our grossly inefficient, fossil fuel existence. When that happens, one hopes we'll have something in the pipe (so to speak) to replace it as an energy source.
However, don't hold your breath on that, because these guys in lab coats we imagine to be diligently working day and night to figure out how to turn corn sugar into an unlimited energy source aren't actually out there, mixing beakers of brightly-colored liquids together to create some magical oil substitute from corn ethanol or magic sparkle pony dust. 
We are running smack dab into the limits of basic physics here, the first law of thermodynamics and, even more specifically, the law of conservation of energy, which states that......the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant. A consequence of this law is that energy cannot be created or destroyed.The sun has been pouring energy onto the earth's surface for billions and billions of years and a great deal of that energy has been absorbed by plants or absorbed by animals upon eating those plants, all of whom subsequently died and slowly changed over millions of years into the magical black goo we call "oil." Locked up inside the molecular carbon bonds of this magical black goo is all that accumulated solar energy, which we release when we burn it in an oil furnace or an internal combustion engine. Thus, voilà ! An isolated system wherein our energy remains constant, converting from potential energy stored in a molecular and chemical bond to heat energy in an explosion inside an internal combustion engine which converts to kinetic energy through whirling & spinning metal parts into rubber wheels carrying an automobile on a road. The vast geologic timescale and sheer amount of energy input at the front end of this whole process -- the millions of years of sunlight converting via plants and animals into petroleum, etc... -- is what makes petroleum the poster child for non-renewable resources. Once it is gone, it is gone forever, at least as far as we frail little humans are concerned.
What we will need instead is an infrastructure that can effectively use the renewable energy sources that don't destroy the environment and will effectively and efficiently move people and goods around our enormous landscape. And that infrastructure is (say it with me now) SUPERTRAINS!
Either way it goes (easy or hard) the internal combustion engine driving rubber wheels on concrete or blacktop roads to transport humans or goods with maximum convenience directly door-to-door between broadly scattered points on the map is an unsustainable and ultimately failed model for organizing the transportation of a nation's resources. Just because people like the convenience of door-to-door travel won't make it any less environmentally destructive or prohibitively expensive once oil become so expensive to extract, transport, process and distribute that only the very, very wealthy and powerful can own cars or fly in airplanes. Even the rich and powerful keeping fossil-fuel vehicles remains a questionable prospect since the whole petroleum-processing enterprise requires enormous economies of scale to remain viable. Who else could afford to maintain such a vast and expensive oil-processing infrastructure but governments, specifically militaries?
Which is why I believe that, over the next few decades as the last of the oil runs out, the rest of the planet's oil will increasingly be used up by the world's War Machine. This is why the U.S. Army & Marine Corps is in Iraq, folks: because there's no such thing as a solar-powered tank and you can't run a fighter jet on bio-diesel. Our military is there to conduct Blood for Oil, but the oil ain't for you and me to get a cheap flight to Orlando to visit Grampa. The Pentagon is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the United States, which is itself the largest consumer of petroleum in the world, and a juggernaut that rapacious will not easily surrender its stranglehold. In 2004 alone, the United States military, all by itself, used 144 million barrels of oil, more than the entire country of Greece in the same period. Exact numbers are hard to come by, though, because (like the Pentagon budget under George W. Bush) the DESC (the Defense Energy Support Center), the organization tasked with keeping all those tanks and Humvees and jet planes and ships fully gassed-up, keeps its exact consumption numbers classified, presumably for national security reasons. Like a junkie in the last throes of addiction, the gaping maw that is the War Machine of the United States will only release it's deathgrip on the world's oil supply when someone else pries its cold, dead fingers from the spigot. The last drops of fossil fuel on God's green earth aren't going into the car of any civilian, no matter how wealthy. The very last teaspoons of oil used in an internal-combustion engine on planet earth will be burned by a war machine, probably a tank driven into a village somewhere in the American Midwest at the request of the local warlord to suppress a food riot.
Quite an ugly picture, eh? If we don't take steps now to address the broader needs of the next century, then we could be going into this looming mess in just such an ugly way. We have the means with fossil fuel-burning trucks and bulldozers and such to build our rail infrastructure now, right now, and can thus still have a way to move people and materials around this country after the bottom falls out of petroleum as our principle energy source. If we balk at this opportunity now and just build more roads and car-centric infrastructure, those roads will be of absolutely of no use to anyone except the highway robbers raiding caravans of pilgrims journeying between isolated camps of shivering and frightened humans scraping out a meagre existence amid the dead and the dying in the decaying former metropolis' of a post-oil-America that will look a great deal like modern-day Detroit."The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed."
To be clear, though, instead of an overnight "Road Warrior" nightmare, I predict we'll probably see over the next decade or couple of decades a slow winding down of the industrialized fossil-fuel capitalism that has dominated the globe for over a century, particularly the rapacious American-style industrialized fossil-fuel capitalism that has dominated Life on Earth since the end of World War 2. Gradually, consumer goods manufactured abroad or even domestically but in a different time zone will get gradually more expensive and eventually vanish from store shelves altogther, people will travel less and lead more localized lives, economies will get more regionalized and localized by necessity as the constant human need for food and clothing won't abate, a need someone will have to address locally, as well as making and selling other basic consumer goods, since the oil-burning container ships from China won't be able to deliver cheap socks to the Wal-Marts anymore, and people everywhere will wind up living slower, quieter, more intimate and local lives.Put another way, the world of happily motoring with yourself and one other person across hundred of miles just because it is fast and personally
convenient for you will someday be a fantastic tale we'll tell our grandchildren, about that magical time when all those rusting hulks in fields everywhere called "cars" were shiny and new and went Zoom! Zoom! while metal tubes full of people soared through the air, transporting people to far away places, even across oceans! Because, and this statement is a result of my passion for the hope of rail transportation, a happy medium between more trains and fewer cars just so the remaining car owners can enjoy better traffic conditions for themselves is a losing proposition.Mr. The Broadway Carl says in his comment that:
There will always be a need for automobiles and hopefully in the future less dependence on them, but they will never become obsolete even with the best railway system.My response is, well, yes there will always be a need for automobiles but that need doesn't logically translate into a guarantee of their continued usefulness. In a world of $40/gal gas, or $50 or $60, who would drive even to the store to get milk and bread? Who would have been able to afford to deliver that bread and milk to the store in the first place, at least with our current transportation infrastructure? A rail alternative could perhaps make a cheaper option, even if it is less convenient with stop-overs and circuitous routes, should such a network even exist in the first place. Rail will not be the curious boutique travel option for people with a fetish for European-style living that its detractors accuse it of being, but rather it will be, wherever it exists, an essential transportation option as gas prices shoot off the charts.
We have a narrow and rapidly closing window now, right now, where we have the petroleum technology of trucks and bulldozers to build a large and (hopefully) less petroleum-intensive transportation network before it becomes too expensive and environmentally destructive to do even that much. Many people will complain that the trains don't serve very well where they live or want to travel, something that makes the Point-A to Point-B abilities of cars unmatched by any other transportation technology and which makes hybrids seem to car-centric thinkers as the solution to our current dilemma of how to maintain the door-to-door convenience of a happy motoring lifestyle. Hybrid cars are manifestly not such a solution because they answer the wrong questions, though the reasons why are numerous enough to merit addressing at another time in another blog post, but the shape of my eventual answer should be obvious from everything else I've written here, today and earlier.
Once again, re-phrased, the inability of trains to be convenient for everyone everywhere in every far-flung place they choose live or visit is not a failure of trains as a technology, but a failure of land-use policies in the United States and a failure of the way we've organized our cities and towns. Even here in New York City, with the best public transportation network in America, so many areas of the five boroughs are choked with cars because the subways aren't close enough to where some people choose to live and the buses are slow and stop too much -- because they are stuck in happy motoring traffic. Sadly for our automobile-drivers (confession: I keep a car even though I live in Manhattan), cities are crowded by definition and something like an automobile is destructive to the fabric of a healthy urban environment for a great many reasons, also to be enumerated later in another blog post. Historically, without the availability of cars when those areas of the five boroughs were laid out, areas away from transportation nodes wouldn't have built up in the way that they did, if ever at all. Of the five boroughs, mostly Staten Island and swaths of Queens are victims of this sort of development, settled and built up as they were in the car-loving decades following World War 2, when
Robert Moses -- who, in a twist of historical irony, never had a driver's license -- thought the automobile and an infrastructure to support its widespread use could and would solve all our "problems" (which for him meant poor, dark-skinned people).But, despite hating-on-cities-and-the-poor-people-who-live-in-them visionaries like Robert Moses, if the options for the citizenry were 1.) walk a long way to the train station to get to work or 2.) walk a short way to the train station to get to work or 3.) walk to work or 4.) ride a bicycle or, um, that's it (period. not negotiable), people would live closer to the train station or walking- or cycling-distance from work. Sure, due to he law of supply & demand, apartments will be smaller and inside taller buildings and the areas around the stations will be more densely-packed, but that's the whole idea. Not everyone gets a 3000 sq/ft house on 1.4 acres, I don't care how much people may or may not like it. The time is coming when they, we, all of us won't have a choice about that because the technology that makes such resource-intensive, short-sighted land-use on a large scale even conceivable is called an automobile and the energy source that makes that technology possible is running out.
Hence my constant carping about cities being walkable and human-scaled. It is much easier to simply build a city this way in the first place, let's face it. Retro-fitting the spread-out sprawl of a place like Phoenix or Dallas or Atlanta to be dense and walkable and less car-dependent is more likely to result in the whole place being abandoned for easier pickins by those who can get out and broken up into small, discreet and economically impoverished townships by those left behind.
Rising petroleum costs will eventually make cars and trucks a thing of the past. We can either, as I said in my previous post, go easy into this post-petroleum world by building a robust train network, reducing sprawl everywhere (not being afraid to just write-off altogether places like the one on the right) and making every attempt to re-localize whole vast sectors of our economy.Or we can go hard into this post-petroleum world by building more car-friendly roads and freeways and automobile bridges and parking garages with our diminishing natural resources, resigning ourselves to sprawl and thinking of it as natural just because people like it and that's the way we've always done it and never forcing the international corporations that control our economy to re-localize and thus leaving whole regions without sufficient means of food production, clothing and essential consumer goods manufacturing once the easy profit of a petroleum economy evaporates.
Which brings me back around to the whole question of what to do with GM and Chrysler. They are large entities with a vast store of knowledge about how to build machines. Yes, those machines are environmentally destructive exercises in rampant egotism, but nevertheless they are machines.
As I said in my previous posts, the large-scale machine-building know-how within GM & Chrysler are what must be preserved to make the machines we'll need to still have a functioning economy in the approaching post-petroleum world.
So, with all of the above in mind, I'd like to address the Peak Oil-related portions of Broadway Carl's comment point by point:
[...]
I know that you're big on having an amazing railway system and I'm with you on that. But I can't get from point A to point B without auto manufacturing in the picture. And frankly, neither can Europe. Just because they have an awesome railway system doesn't mean they stopped manufactuing cars.I agree. Cars are nice. The convenience of door-to-door travel is certainly preferable to waiting on a train platform in the rain, but if convenience is the sole criterion for evaluating the value of a transportation method, why not helicopters?
It's the 21st Century, dude, where's my flying car? Naturally, a sane person would reply that the fuel consumption and threat to public safety presented by general helicopter (or flying car!) usage rightfully keeps the spread of such transportation technology in check. When considered against the backdrop of a global oil shortage, I must put cars in the same category. Thus, what I'm concerned about here specifically is the future -- not the past.Over the last 50-60 years -- as America doubled-down on a car-centric, Happy Motoring lifestyle made possible by wide-open spaces and cheap, cheap, cheap oil -- Europe was largely forced by its compact size and already existing urban density to find other, better ways to move people and goods. Today, as our petroleum economy enters its end game, Europe's happy accident of forced rail infrastructure is going to pay dividends. Yes, Europe has still had cars all this time (and some nice ones), but The Continent's economy functioned rather well prior to the oil economy, which gives it an infrastructure that will be relatively adaptable afterwards.
[...]I'm not dismissing Obama and the Democrat's nod to the need for railway spending in the 2010 Budget and the stimulus packages. I know that money is there, but I'm arguing that it is not nearly enough to solve our current crisis, to say nothing of countering the looming calamity of Peak Oil. It isn't just what is currently being spent -- and believe me, any money is better than no money -- but correcting our decades-long mis-spending on infrastructure will take a herculean effort. Estimates are that we spend about 97% of our transportation infrastructure dollars on roads and car-supporting technologies. 97%. The current spending plan is even worse, actually. Some estimates are that about $100 billion is set aside for transportation infrastructure, but the stimulus package only sets aside about $1 billion for rail. That 100:1 ratio has got to change.
I think you're also dismissing the fact that the new Obama budget is proposing 21st Century rail transportation as part of the stimulus package. Still, new rail isn't going to happen overnight, and in my estimation, even if we got everything we wanted, I still can't see a world without autos in it. There will never be door to door service by rail across the US. It's feasibly impossible.
I understand that a world without cars in it is hard to imagine, but imagine we must. Believe me, changing my thinking was extremely difficult for me because I grew up in the wide open spaces and horrifically space-inefficient land-use of North Texas and Dallas. Oil is only going to get more and more scarce in the approaching decades and while I agree with you that internal combustion engines driving rubber wheels will never disappear completely as method of transport, their viability as the c
hief means for moving people and goods in America will be forced to end because continuing on the enormous, continental scale we currently do will simply become cost-prohibitive, both economically and ecologically. We can wean ourselves from Happy Motoring willingly with a better rail network and better land-use policies or we can be forced out of our cars when the oil runs out, which is not in the "so distant its practically sci-fi" future, but in the forseeable lifetimes of just about every living human on the planet.So why can't we have both? The only way a sustainable auto industry will survive is by making cleaner, fuel efficient cars (that's the retooling that needs to happen). Along with that, more job creation can happen on the rail front by making a concerted effort to upgrade and install a new rail system that can alleviate traffic, make daily traveling faster and more affordable and give people a choice of transportation. This can happen in major cities and traveling from city to city, but it'll only get you so far.The ugly realities of Climate Change and Peak Oil will dictate to us that we can't have both, at least not long term. During the approaching decades, which will be viewed as the era of the post-petroleum transition by future historians, a mixed approach will be the only option.
I have argued in previous posts that the auto industry will not survive as a car-making enterprise, even if they make cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars, we're still in the position of using our rapidly vanishing resources to fetch milk and bread from the 7-11. The auto-makers need to become train-makers to have a future in a post-petroleum world. Their forced re-structuring, happening right now, is an opportunityto make those difficult changes while we still have a window of opportunity. Furthermore, the point of a rail system is not to make life for people who choose to still drive cars easier by alleviating the traffic congestion around them. The point is to move people and goods as efficiently as possible to reduce pollution and carbon footprints and conserve precious energy, wherever we may get it: fossil fuel, solar, hydro-electric, nuclear, etc... In general, for the sake of the planet and the human life on it, people must be forced out of their cars.
Here's an example. Yesterday I drove from Gettysburg, PA to Cincinnati, OH. It took me 8 hours including a stop for dinner. Gettysburg will never have an upgraded fast rail service. Never. But maybe Harrisburg will. Will that connect me to Pittsburgh and then to Columbus, OH and then to Cincy? Can it do it in 8 hours? There will always be a need for automobiles and hopefully in the future less dependence on them, but they will never become obsolete even with the best railway system.
[...]
As someone who grew up driving everywhere to do everything all the time, I understand the seductive convenience of the Happy Motoring lifestyle. It is convenient, very convenient, to be able to drive (at a time of your choosing) from a door in Gettysburg, PA to a door in Cincinnati, OH with only yourself and one passenger -- a feat rail could never hope to replicate -- but that convenience multiplied across the whole of the U.S. economy in a nation of 300+ million people sprawling over an entire continent is unsustainable and utterly destructive to the environment.In the train-oriented future I imagine, that same trip would involve a complex, over-lapping network of jitney cabs, local street-level rail, passenger regional rail and heavier inter-regional rail. Chances are that a high-speed link would never be built between Gettysburg and
Cincy, I admit. But, a bullet train running from New York to Seattle with stops in Pittsburgh and Chicago would connect you to regional networks that would provide a further link to Cincy. Much like our airline industry, but on steel rails and without burning so much fossil fuel. Yes, that kind of travel is less convenient with so many changes and stop-overs, but as a diminishing fossil fuel supply drives gas prices up into the double digits, door-to-door travel will simply be too expensive to continue supporting with our precious infrastructure dollars.Thursday, April 2, 2009
The 1031 Project
I lost my shit when I caught this awesome Glenn Beck smackdown by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central.
Closing Thoughts
by Armadillo Joe
So, I'll be handing the reigns back over the Mr. The Broadway Carl today, but I hope that I have done a fair job of maintaining yawl's interest and maybe highlighting a thing or two which helped someone to see something in a new way.
I know that the bulk of what I wrote about centered around trains and public transportation, but I want to leave you with a somewhat larger sense of how I see things.
Some time ago, I got in an friendly disagreement with a buddy of mine who had admonished me for having such a bleak image for mankind's near future. I had been describing to him what I thought to be the true measure of the converging disasters of Climate Change and Peak Oil and how that was going to bring the civilized world as we know it to a crashing halt. I had said that we can go easy or we can go hard and it seemed to me we were doing a fair job of collectively choosing to go hard into this looming, pervasive and ongoing global calamity.
He accused me of being pessimistic.
I naturally took exception and reminded him that the way in which we currently relate to the planet we live on and the other lifeforms on it is simply not a long-term solution in any sense of the word. What are we to do instead, I asked him, simply keep going ever onward, just doing what we're doing now until the planet is one enormous, trash-covered, used-up, overheated husk -- a burned-out cinder drifting lifeless and polluted through space? At some point, we have to choose to stop or we will be made to stop by forces beyond our control. I told him that I didn't think my vision was pessimistic at all, but rather the end of our current system of production and distribution and consumption would be a good thing for human life and the health of the planet. Sure, it would be enormously unpleasant for a great many people for perhaps a long time, but we have to pay the metaphorical piper at some point and to do it now when some hope of continued life is possible is much better than having some other, greater life-destroying disaster overtakes the whole of life on this planet.
But then I'm just a Dirty Fucking Hippie.
So, then, what is right? What ought we do?
Well, as many of you have guessed, trains are part of the solution. The energy-used/freight-moved ratio is better for rail than for any other means of transport -- by orders of magnitude -- but to take advantage of rail we must re-arrange how and where we construct our houses, change how we furnish them, re-consider the way we stock them with food. We've a great deal of work to do.
In the meantime, the problem of the current hegemony remains in place. Powerful people have become rich off of this system of ours and they have a vested interest in maintaining it, pollution, violence and injustice fully intact. But an ever-expanding economy is an illusion, the "money" we've made in the last 10, 20, 30 years or more is largely a mirage created by moving other money around. Measuring economic health by rate-of-growth is a formula for failure but is sadly the principle means for evaluating success in our current form of capitalism. We must invent and learn new ways to measure economic health as a function of sustainability. Sustainability is the watch-word of the emerging world.
To quote Maggie Jochild over at the Group News Blog (the re-constituted assembly of the great and sorely missed Steve Gilliard's old blog pals):
So, I'll be handing the reigns back over the Mr. The Broadway Carl today, but I hope that I have done a fair job of maintaining yawl's interest and maybe highlighting a thing or two which helped someone to see something in a new way.
I know that the bulk of what I wrote about centered around trains and public transportation, but I want to leave you with a somewhat larger sense of how I see things.
Some time ago, I got in an friendly disagreement with a buddy of mine who had admonished me for having such a bleak image for mankind's near future. I had been describing to him what I thought to be the true measure of the converging disasters of Climate Change and Peak Oil and how that was going to bring the civilized world as we know it to a crashing halt. I had said that we can go easy or we can go hard and it seemed to me we were doing a fair job of collectively choosing to go hard into this looming, pervasive and ongoing global calamity.
He accused me of being pessimistic.
I naturally took exception and reminded him that the way in which we currently relate to the planet we live on and the other lifeforms on it is simply not a long-term solution in any sense of the word. What are we to do instead, I asked him, simply keep going ever onward, just doing what we're doing now until the planet is one enormous, trash-covered, used-up, overheated husk -- a burned-out cinder drifting lifeless and polluted through space? At some point, we have to choose to stop or we will be made to stop by forces beyond our control. I told him that I didn't think my vision was pessimistic at all, but rather the end of our current system of production and distribution and consumption would be a good thing for human life and the health of the planet. Sure, it would be enormously unpleasant for a great many people for perhaps a long time, but we have to pay the metaphorical piper at some point and to do it now when some hope of continued life is possible is much better than having some other, greater life-destroying disaster overtakes the whole of life on this planet.
But then I'm just a Dirty Fucking Hippie.
So, then, what is right? What ought we do?
Well, as many of you have guessed, trains are part of the solution. The energy-used/freight-moved ratio is better for rail than for any other means of transport -- by orders of magnitude -- but to take advantage of rail we must re-arrange how and where we construct our houses, change how we furnish them, re-consider the way we stock them with food. We've a great deal of work to do.
In the meantime, the problem of the current hegemony remains in place. Powerful people have become rich off of this system of ours and they have a vested interest in maintaining it, pollution, violence and injustice fully intact. But an ever-expanding economy is an illusion, the "money" we've made in the last 10, 20, 30 years or more is largely a mirage created by moving other money around. Measuring economic health by rate-of-growth is a formula for failure but is sadly the principle means for evaluating success in our current form of capitalism. We must invent and learn new ways to measure economic health as a function of sustainability. Sustainability is the watch-word of the emerging world.
To quote Maggie Jochild over at the Group News Blog (the re-constituted assembly of the great and sorely missed Steve Gilliard's old blog pals):
I'm sick to death of reading progressive blogs reporting on the drek coming from the liars and manipulators whom they damned well know are such -- it's not enough to know, you also need to stop giving them any attention whatsoever. No reinforcement at all.
What I already understand is enough to help me chart a new course:
Obama is not FDR. He's doing some things well, others less well, and comparing him to Dubya is pointless because I have a used tampon which could do a better job than Dubya did. Obama and the folks he's choosing as administrators of his vision are not going to come up with a new way of doing things. He was crystal clear about that all along. He will find practical ways to keep things as they are, more functional but essentially unrevised. The good part of his methodology is that it will keep folks from starving and dying, a trend the Bush administration absolutely was not going to ever intervene to stop. This will buy some time for real visionaries to create and implement change. That's us, the Peanut Gallery. So don't get caught up in the minutiae of this period -- stoke your coals for the long haul and the big dreams.
- The system of growth at all costs has failed. Sustainability is now upon us.
- There was never as much money as they pretended there was in order to keep making profits from manipulating money. It ain't coming back.
- If we stop being the world's consumers, we have to come up with another reason why we are valuable. I vote for integrity, pluralism, and human liberation, how's that sound?
- If we give up the addictions of consumption and overstimulated attention spans, we have to choose recovery and work it instead of the Dubya method.
Better than I could have said it.
Keep up the good fight, yaw'l. I'll be around, still, though. Thanks for reading this week.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Joyeux anniversaire, tour d'Eiffel
by Armadillo JoeSorry I missed this one yesterday, caught up as I was in all that Detroit versus Wall Street stuff, but yesterday, March 31st, was the 120th Anniversary of the opening of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
Some years back, the observation deck way up at the tippy-top was the place I asked Mrs. Joe to become, well, Mrs. Joe and I did it way before Tom Cruise did. As a result, it is more than just a convenient symbol for the city of Paris to the two of us. It is the magical place where I asked and she said yes.
I also spent a couple of months in France a few years ago for work. I took the picture at the left on my last day in Paris as I zoomed around the city trying to take in all the things I had missed in the previous weeks due to, well, working the whole time.
I snapped this picture on a blind whim as the Metro train I was riding raced across the Seine. In all I had about 30 seconds from her first appearance outside my window until she vanished behind a building - and I still had to unpack and turn on the camera! It turned out to be one of the best out of the hundreds I snapped while I was there. Note the silver orb in the middle section: the Rugby World Cup was in full swing while I was there (France got her ass kicked in the first round) and it was there as a promotional stunt.
I love this picture. It is completely spontaneous, not framed or planned at all and once you know it was taken from a moving train, you get the sense of motion in the picture, too. As well, I think this photo is just so evocative and haunting as the Iron Lady basks in that beautiful light of a late September afternoon, the sunset of my final day quickly gathering behind me. I always thought that would make a great title for a novel: "My Last Day in Paris".
Some of my favorite factoids about The Eiffel Tower:
- She was built as the winning entry in a contest for the 1889 World's Fair -- the Paris Exposition -- also a celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the French Revolution.
- She became the tallest building in the world -- a title taken from the Washington Monument -- from 1889 until the Chrysler Building opened in New York City in 1930.
- She was openly despised by the Parisian glitterati of the day. Novelist Guy de Maupassant hated it so much that he ate at the onsite restaurant every single day because it was the only place in Paris where he wouldn't have to look at it.
- Originally slated to be torn down after 20 years, she was by then in use as a platform for a radio transmission tower and thus preserved for commercial purposes.
- The French Resistance cut the elevator cables before the Nazis took Paris. Due to war time shortages, they were not replaced until after the war and Adolph Hitler never visited the observation deck. He ordered her demolished as the Nazis evacuated Paris, an order that was mercifully ignored by General Dietrich von Choltitz, the Nazi military governor.
- The Eiffel Tower has been painted "Eiffel Tower Brown" since 1968. Prior to that, she was painted -- from bottom to top -- red, orange & yellow to enhance the sense of height. Eiffel Tower Brown is actually three shades of the same brown that do the same thing.
She's a mighty beautiful sight, La Dame de fer, and the slide show from Slate.com at this link pays tribute.
America, 2009
Posted by Fraulein
Some astonishing reporting this week by the always-excellent McClatchy news service on a town in California with a 41 percent unemployment rate. This is a must-read:"It's reminiscent of the Depression," said Silva, Mendota's mayor. "In those days you had soup lines, now you have food lines. This is a disaster area."
Signs of poverty and desperation are everywhere.
Many people in Mendota are turning to alcohol to battle depression, said Amador, the council member. And some single-family homes are occupied by two or three families, in what Amador described as "basically labor camps."
"It's a violation of city code, but you don't want to put these families out on the streets," he said.
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