I've often thought that moving to the country is one of dumber things you could do in response to peak oil.

My reasoning for this is simple: people in the country have a massive dependence on cars and gasoline. For example, my brother used to live on a ranch in the extreme boondocks of Idaho (the area was only electrified in the 1980s) and he and his wife had to drive about 100 miles to go to the supermarket. That's an extreme case, but the general principle is very true. The country has incredible sprawl, and you have to drive really long distances to take care of your daily business. Urban dwellers like myself, on the other hand, don't have to drive at all. My supermarket is a 3 minute walk from my front door. It seems obvious to me that country people -- at least those who aren't making good money from serious agriculture or some other business -- are the ones who will get it in the neck first from peak oil.

Here's an article from summer 2008 that pretty much says it all:
Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average

Pops and I had a little exchange on this topic in another thread, but I'd like to go into it a little deeper.

Pops:


JD:


Pops


This is similar to smallpox girl who talks about driving from Seattle to Olympia (60 miles) for a farmer's market.

But these long drives totally negate the purpose of local food:


Another study gets the same results:


The same point can be seen another way. Suppose a family buzzes out to Pops' farm and picks 10 pounds of berries. Driving an average US vehicle, they'll burn 4 gallons of gasoline for a round trip of 80 miles. (Incidentally, that gasoline will weigh about 2.5 times more than the berries purchased.) Now, a commercial aircraft gets roughly 70 miles per gallon per passenger, and a passenger would be roughly equivalent to 20 boxes of berries (each containing 10 pounds). So for 4 gallons, you could send a passenger 280 miles, and a passenger is 20 boxes of berries, so you could send a box of berries about 5600 miles by air. In other words, driving 80 miles by car to buy 10 pounds of berries uses the same amount of fuel as shipping them 5600+ miles by air. And it just gets worse the less you buy. With a 5 pound box, you're talking 11,200 miles -- about half the circumference of the earth.

Witty thesis JD.

Except one thing. I believe you are either confusing present exurban development patterns, an unfortunate consequence of built-out suburban sprawl and especially over-priced and desirable city center real estate (created by yuppie trash like yourself);

or certain folks who frequent PO.com and live in the country to prepare for hard times and sacrifice time, transport, and oil to learn dem ole' country ways;

with future post-peak scenarios.

Now, in the present, as long as your Tofu Dogs are rushed refrigerated to your local Whole Foods (or the Tokyo equivalent. What would that be Tofu Tuna? Tofu Whale?) by fast truck and you happen to live in the right yuppie neighborhood (without those nasty crack houses and other urban slum situations) then I guess yes the big city is the way to go. Now. In you pre-peak imagination.

It is today inefficient but not inherently so. Look at developing countries with huge populations still living in rural agricultural communities for hints on where rural american infrastructure is heading; Jeepnies, buses, tricycles, scooters, carts, horses, oxen take care of transportation. Food distribution and markets less consolidated in big box stores far apart and reemergence of small cottage industries more locally distributed. More grease monkey shops repairing things.

More bartering and trading of services. Extended families pooling resources,

Socialization moving toward shared transport, shared work, shared use of heavy equipment like grain harvesters etc.

Need will create this....

Well here is the problem with your analysis. You have the rural people still living the same way post peak as they do pre-peak. In a post peak world daily business will mean staying on the farm and working with a "trip to town" once a week or maybe once a month.

TF

JD has inadvertently highlighted both the American doomers concerns for the future and his failures in the present.

We in the United States are pessimistic because our entire auto-dependent suburban model is a failure, not just the exurban component. We have segregated the human population (culture) from the agriculture and thus both are more heavily dependent on petroleum that otherwise. You can't walk to the farm field, as per Tuscany, Burgundy, Greece, etc.

JD didn't mean to be that interesting of course. It has always been his lame attempt to debunk the idea of peak oil. Not just the timing.I think JD's inadvertent contribution to debate is a simple one. This--at least a few cities have train service and public transportation. Wow. Bright.

A point is being made by JD, though, that people who think they are doing the right thing may have blindspots in their energy consumption. There are still a great many people who push the reurbanization agenda as a solution for peak oil, including Kunstler. There is a schism in the doomer community between reurbanization vs. back-to-the-landers that will probably remain until we run this experiment for real.

If you're talking about savvy people who are already making money on serious farm operations, or wealthy farmers who own their farms outright, then yes I would agree with you. Rural areas will tend to operate more the way they did in the past, with people making infrequent trips and really stocking up. Those are the people who belong in the country and will remain there.

However, the vast majority of peak oilers (and farmers/rural residents) don't fall into the above category. They are people who need to work -- to pay the mortgage on the land they are buying; to pay for improvements, stock and equipment for the land; or just simply to pay bills. And if you read the article I cited above, you can see how rural sprawl + high oil prices is absolutely lethal to their finances. These people work on farms, fish processing facilities, slaughterhouses... anything they can get. The pay is crappy; they're competing against illegal immigrants; and they have to drive long distances. They don't have the option of driving to town once a month.

As Todd Getzel, a long-time homesteader with 40+ years of rural experience writes:


Hey also has a jaundiced eye for farmer's markets and so on:


As I noted in the OP, my problem with Farmer's Markets is that they totally defeat the purpose (relocalization) which they are supposed to achieve. They are just as, or even more, fuel intensive than the 3000 mile salad.

Medical care is also an issue. Many rural people have to travel very long distances to their doctors, and that too is not optional.

Heres the conclusion of the NYT article:


In other word, peak oil will drive people away from the country, not to it, because country life is so gasoline intensive.

And agriculture, required to feed all these people who cram into the city, is not?

This is not as black and white as you make it out to be.

I agree that the deep 3rd world is very resilient in terms of fuel prices because they use so little commercial fuel (aside from biomass etc.) The vast majority of people in the world get by fine on cough syrup levels of oil consumption (i.e. tablespoons/day).

On the other hand, that amounts to true peasant living, and those people are some of the poorest people on earth. That's partly why they just keep flowing into cities:


It's hard for me to see a return to peasantry in the US and other developed countries, no matter how poor they get. Because in virtually all of the poorest countries in the world today, like Haiti, they are undergoing rapid urbanization.

JD, for those of us who accept overshoot and the inevitability of a die-off at some scale, reurbanization does little more than buy time. But there will come a day when the cities can no longer import enough food. So in the early stages of collapese, a technofixer's reurbanization plans can seem perfectly rational, but it's only at the latter stages when we see how far down we get pushed in energy descent and ecological collapse that the reurbanization model will be truly tested under fire.

For you to suggest that no matter how bad things get, people will huddle in the city doesn't necessarily mean that it is the wisest thing to do. Haiti is no model for wisdom, considering their poor stewardship of their environment that has led to them eating mud cakes.

Agriculture definitely is fuel-intensive. But the key point here is the relative efficiency. On the one hand, you can grow grains on vast industrial farms, with economies of scale and intensive use of capital and labor, then transport those grains in fully loaded trains to large, dense cities. Within the cities, the grain is transported by fully-loaded trucks to markets, which people access by bicycle or walking. It really can't get any more efficient than that on a pounds delivered per gallon basis.

That approach is certainly far superior to a farmer packing up 10 baskets of food, and driving 20 miles so that people can come from 20-30 miles to buy a sack full of food. Or to a person driving 20 miles to the grocery store. A number of studies have shown that the consumer's trip to the supermarket by car consumes the most fuel per item of any shipment in the distribution chain. As I noted above "In the worst scenario, a UK consumer driving six miles to buy Kenyan green beans emits more carbon per bean than flying them from Kenya to the United Kingdom."

A point is not being made by JD. JD is still justifying his own ancient mistakes. He is still trying to demonize peakers and simplify the issue. He will never clear his name.

As for his point (ha): Yes, we know that public transportation is energy efficient. We also know that public transportation depends on appropriate ridership densities, generally found in town/city centers. Duh.

We know that the suburbs and the country are more dependent on fuel and ICE because living arrangements are too dispersed for public transport. Duh.

There is no schism. That is BS. Smart people like yourself are grasping for solutions in the face of general public and government apathy and aggressive disinformation programs promulgated by the likes of JD.

Yes quite right JD.

Yes JD. Suburbs suck. Bright of you.

But in intact agrarian systems where the people live concentrated in small towns and sustainable cities () dispersed throughout the growing regions the many advantages of the humanculture/agriculture interface accrue.

But you knew that right?

JD makes a good point regarding exurbanites driving to town and urbanites driving to the country, most people living away from town including farmers are just extra-long-distance-commuters.

I used to think suburbia was bound to dry up and blow away but it turns out that since the '70s more and more businesses are locating near suburbia so their commute is much shorter than when people drove to the city center. Add to that the fact suburbia is mostly veneer, by that I mean there is no component so huge it can't be changed - heck it's mostly asphalt as it is!

There are lots of older cities and towns designed and grown before oil which are walkable, newer cities like Dallas, LA or wherever not so much. Their big problem is they DO have lots of money sunk into driving.

Anyway, as to Pops' berries. They will have more embodied fossil energy than berries flown in from the Pacific Northwest and more than berries from Peru in December. As well, home cooking and preserving them (and most everything else) uses more energy than industrial processing – small farming in general is less efficient that large scale enterprises as things stand today.

I'll readily concede that local food is more energy intensive than industrial production what with small ICEs, probably lots more chemicals/packaging/transportation/processing per amount produced.

So there is no justification from the standpoint of conservation. But to quote one of my heros "We can't simply conserve or ration our way out of this energy crisis". Dick isn't really my hero but I agree with the point. The best use of cheap energy is to try to design a better world – not sit on our hands using up what's left and thinking we're doing the world a favor by burning 'less than the other guy'.

It's like the guy in the sinking lifeboat doing nothing but convinced he's making a contribution because he's not pissing on the guy bailing.

It could be that January tomatoes (or August for those down under) will be with us forever because the Energy Fairy pulls a miracle out of her ear – if it does I will have a nice little country experience for those city folks and outfits like this will keep on flying.

But I don't think they will. I think energy will become more and more expensive and basic calorie crops like wheat, corn, beans and staples like sugar, salt & coffee will occupy a larger and larger portion of the food budget because the way to grow them most efficiently will continue to be large scale and people will be forced to pay the price.

But as bulk transport becomes prohibitively expensive the only way the average family will have fresh fruits and vegetables will be either to raise it themselves or buy it from the local guy who can grow it by hand and transport it by foot.


http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mivhs ... arvest.htm
http://www.communitysolution.org/talks/ ... Megan.html
http://www.mindfully.org/Air/Lawn-Mower-Pollution.htm

Understand, my reason for driving to Olympia has nothing to do with local buying or trying to minimize carbon footprints. It's much simpler. If I'm buying 100 pounds of apples, then I can save $100 by driving to Olympia and only spend $10 in gas doing it. It's not like the apples grow in Olympia. They're trucked in from Yakima anyway. I like the Oly farmers market because I can buy in bulk and get bulk prices, not because it's locally grown or something.

I totally agree with you though about the degree to which rural America is dependent on petroleum. People in Montana think nothing of a 100 mile round trip commute or of driving 8 hours round trip to go to the mall. It always impressed me how independent the people where I lived were WRT snow cleanup. It could dump a foot and the next morning everybody would be out with a loader or a snow plow cleaning it all up. In one sense they're very self sufficient, but all that equipment runs off petroleum. Take away the gasoline, and that area would be totally uninhabitable in the winter. To a large extent it's this sort of fake independence. They're more self sufficient in terms of being able to use different technologies and manufactured materials without the aid of a specialist, but they're just as dependent if not more so on the extractive and manufacturing industries in far away places keeping them supplied.