Oil takes a long time to make, so we should start making more now. When we strip mine for coal, we will eventually want to fill those holes back in. We should fill them in with plant waste and cover with rocks. Besides starting the oil-making process, this will help sequester carbon. Later generations will thank us. (Actually I have no idea whether this would actually start making oil, but there may be something along these lines which would.)
There are replacements for oil for use in cars, such as biofuels, or electricity generated by solar, wind, or nuclear power. However, these alternatives are currently more expensive. It seems to me that the only one which is likely to become cheaper is solar power, but the average home can’t collect enough solar power to drive a car a significant distance. Oil is millions of years of solar power compressed into a fluid. Nothing we know of today can equal that in terms of massive energy output for low energy input, because nothing we know of today has that initial energy investment already built in.
U.S. suburbs and exurbs were designed for cheap personal transportation. What is going to happen to them, assuming I’m right that transportation will become inexorably more expensive? Few people are going to want to move a place where transportation becomes a big part of their budget. Inevitably housing prices in the suburbs will fall. People will move to the cities, or at least to places with high-efficiency rail connections to the cities. In other words, the U.S. will start to look more like Europe.
Housing prices are falling right now in the U.S., just as gasoline prices are rising. It is possible that housing prices in the suburbs will never recover. We’ve seen that before in some cities, like Detroit. I expect that we’ll start to see blighted suburban neighborhoods–blighted in the sense of houses being abandoned as the owners can not find a buyer. It’s not all bad–at least it should increase forest cover over time, which will help somewhat with our carbon dioxide problem.
This is long-term. In the short term people will move to more fuel-efficient cars. In the long term, though, gasoline prices are going steadily upward, and while I see replacements on the horizon I don’t see them at the same price.
I just completed my eighth move in nine years, which is why the blog has been neglected. We still have lots of book boxes to unpack, so it may take me a few days to become dependable again.
When possible, I prefer to move much of the stuff myself, to have time to put things in the right place rather than have everything dumped by a moving company. Also, moving fragile items myself is a lot easier, as they don’t have to be packed nearly as securely when I’m the only one who will be carrying the boxes. I was able to do that for this move, as we were moving cross-town after completing a major renovation on our house.
For me this approach to moving, and the numbers of times I’ve done it, makes it an interesting personal case study in the aging process. I’m 44 now. My lifestyle is fairly sedentary, but I do bike to work and I do weights and cardio in the gym three times a week (in my twenties I scoffed at people who worked out in the gym, but that’s just what time does to you). I was in better general shape when I practiced Tae Kwon Do regularly, but I think I’m still as strong now as I ever was, in the sense of what I am able to lift and carry.
The change I really notice in myself is physical recovery time. When I was younger a day spent lifting and carrying meant some muscle soreness in the evening. The next couple of days I would notice it but it wouldn’t affect me. Now a day of moving leaves my whole body stiff, such that it takes a physical effort to stand up straight. This is a strange phenomenon that never happened when I was younger. The stiffness persists for days—I still feel it—quite apart from the soreness which is fairly similar to what I remember.
Injuries also take much longer to heal. Over three weeks ago I somehow strained a muscle in my left forearm, the one used to tighten the fist. This is still troubling me, and making it difficult to pick up heavy objects with my left hand–it’s painful to get a firm grip. I strained plenty of muscles in my youth, but recover never took more than a few days. Muscle pain lasting several weeks is a new experience for me.
We do not merely inhabit our bodies; despite the dichotomy of the language, we are our bodies, and our bodies are us. Aging is just evolution’s way of clearing the deck for the next generation, and animals that I’ve known seem to take it in stride. It’s only our human habits of foreknowledge and recollection that make it strange. And yet to be living it myself is, inevitably, strange.
In schoolbook accounts of the fall of Rome, one thing that was always mentioned was that the empire started hiring mercenaries to defend its borders, rather than the volunteer army. Those mercenaries were professional soldiers with no strong allegiance to the empire, and they often became a force in the struggles over who would be the next emperor.
The U.S. is now hiring large numbers of mercenaries in Iraq, although they are given the euphemistic name of military contractors. I’ve seem some statements that the U.S. has more contractors in Iraq than it does soldiers, although I believe that includes all contractors, not just mercenaries. Many of the mercenaries are in fact former members of the U.S. military, who change jobs in order to get the much higher pay available in the private sector.
This doesn’t have to be a problem. Mercenaries are still a fraction of the overall size of the U.S. military. The U.S. will leave Iraq, hopefully sooner rather than later, and demands for military manpower will drop significantly. In a few years it seems likely that the number of mercenaries will be much smaller.
Still, it’s a worrying trend. Regardless of your feelings about privatization, privatizing your military forces is an extremely bad idea. Ultimately the power of the state relies on its control of military force. Regular soldiers, especially volunteers as is true of the U.S. military services, support the state, and that inclination is strengthened by military training and indoctrination. Mercenaries are in it for the money, and it’s much easier to shift their allegiance. The more mercenaries the state hires, the closer it comes to losing its monopoly on military force. Fortunately, the U.S. isn’t close to that, and it still has plenty of time to pull back.
I grew up in Massachusetts, where the weather is unpredictable and changes regularly. I recall one March several years ago where one day I was walking around in shorts and two days later we had a huge snowfall. I’ve been conditioned to expect that sort of weather.
Now I live in California, where the weather is almost always the same from day to day. It does change across the seasons: it is somewhat rainy in the winter, and it never rains in the summer. But on average each day is just like the next one.
This puts me increasingly on edge all summer long. I keep subconsciously waiting for something to change. When nothing does, I feel like my brain is flattening out, like listening to muzak all the time.
I don’t know why more people don’t mention this as a drawback of California.