Some Peak Oil, some Shiner Bock

Yesterday I attended part of the Peak Oil mini-conference held locally; it featured a screening of The End of Suburbia, which I have seen once previously (and commented on here -- toward the end of that post, but before the update).

I purchased the DVD and plan to show it to everyone who wants to watch it. It is truly one of the most eye-opening films I have seen.

It's difficult to know where to start in providing an overview of something as ominous sounding as "The End of Suburbia". Maybe I should begin with the grand American Dream -- owning a home -- but more specifically how that Dream of a home in the "country", with a green lawn and a few trees and a white picket fence and maybe a puppy as well as formal dining and living rooms and a two-car garage was offered to a post-Industrial Age, post-WWII America hungry for something to live for besides war. And how the auto manufacturers, looking for ways to keep their assembly lines busy in the new postwar economy, happily participated in the sales presentation, which in turned spawned a pop culture phenomenon, the idyll of a man in his car on the open road ("Route 66" being one of the obvious examples). And how this combination of the allure of 'town and country living' coupled with the fascination with the automobile -- along with a very genuine concern to escape the cities' tenements and their proximity to smoke-belching factories -- resulted not only in the evolution of places where people could live comfortably but also buy what they needed (the development of shopping centers and then regional malls). And even how the interstate highway system, originally a Defense Department strategy envisioned from seeing armies and tanks bogged down in Europe, gradually evolved into a marketing tool to encourage Americans to get away on vacation.

All of the suburban lifestyle, of course, is based on consumption. Out of the maturation of the consumer economy came business strategies like planned obsolescence, or what our parents and grandparents meant when they said "they don't build 'em like they used to". Even a basic understanding of economics makes obvious a statistic like new housing starts being a key measurement of the health of our nation's economy, because when people buy a new home they must also buy furniture and furnishings and appliances and so on. Naturally, everybody who's ever bought a new home already knows this.

The suburban lifestyle also assumes fundamentally the premise of extraordinarily inexpensive fuel: cheap gasoline, cheap home heating oil, cheap electricity. Such was most certainly the case at the beginning of the postwar period; the United States in fact was awash in oil, and even had trouble finding uses for it all. Those of us with a few grey hairs can remember gasoline price wars in our towns when we were kids, and gas was .10 or .15 cents a gallon. And even through the price shocks engineered by OPEC in the Seventies, which scared consumers and producers and automakers so bad that it stimulated significant conservation action ('conservative' being a word we oddly don't hear today when it comes to energy consumption), the price of oil and its myriad byproducts only climbed marginally and within the expected rate of currency inflation right through the end of the 20th century. Only recently -- within the past few years -- have we seen an aggressive advance of fuel costs in a pattern of quite rapid escalation.

What's driving that? At this point an understanding of Peak Oil is worthwhile, but I won't delve too deeply here into the conversation that the world's supply of oil is at or nearing peak production, with global consumption still growing, and how that scenario affects petroleum markets and ultimately the price you pay at the pump, short- as well as long-term. Google "Peak Oil" or look at the links in the post I mentioned above. Once one has a grasp of the premise, one can agree or disagree as to whether we're already there, but one cannot reasonably think that it is something that will never happen. It's really only a matter of when. And the only other point that needs to be reinforced is that the war we're currently fighting in Iraq has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with 'freedom'. Indeed, most future military confrontations will be over the control of the commodity which powers the engines of our machines and our economies.

So back to Suburbia: what happens to the Great American Consumer when oil reaches $75 or $100 a barrel, and gasoline reaches $3 or even $5 a gallon? (We could reach these levels perhaps within the next six months, perhaps longer than that, but most surely within the next few years.)

Well, $100 fillups don't leave a lot of disposable income, and when you're too upside down to trade your Suburban in on a Prius, and you can't change jobs for fear of losing your health insurance and you can't move closer to your work because you just took out a home equity loan to put in a pool ...

... and then the housing bubble begins to burst in your subdivision and you discover to your chagrin that you have negative equity in your home, but you also realize that the rising price of fuel has jacked up the price of everything at the supermarket, and there's even less food at the market because all of the fertilizers and pesticides are also made out of petroleum products and even the commercial megafarmers are going broke or getting out of the business of growing and shipping food ...

Farfetched, you think? Alarmist?

Perhaps.

Consider the 3,000-mile Caesar's salad.

There's much more to the movie, including suggestions on how to cope with this inevitable paradigm shift, but I'll leave the rest of that for another day (or to your own research).

==============================

Oh yeah! About the other brown liquid I mentioned in the headline:

Several of us Houston Blogsylvanians met up yesterday afternoon to take the edge off of unsettling matters like Peak Oil at a cute little watering hole near Rice Village. Charles, Lyn, Pete, and John, nice seeing y'all again/meeting you and your families for the first time (as the case may be).

Update (7/11): The host indicates he had a few too many, but I didn't notice.