[vtsnowedin]

To add another Data point.
From a bill in hand. Month's electric bill $85.29 ,daily use 11KWH, Daily cost $2.84
Hot water and cook stove are propane, all the other usual appliances including two window AC units which we only needed to run two days that month. Refrigerator is at least twenty years old but I will keep it as long as it runs. After the fridge I think the Cloths dryer and computer are the biggest drain with the possible exception of a wife that can't seem to ever turn off a light as she leaves the room.
That is perhaps a little pricey as it comes 100% from renewable sources but when it goes out in a storm running the backup generator for just lights and computer/TV costs $15 per day in gasoline alone.

[theluckycountry]

Not all suburbs are doomed, it all boils down to economies of scale. I live in a suburb of a rural town and the tap water comes from a dam 7 km away, the sewage is treated 5km away. There is a lot less energy needed to transport these in other words, a lot lot less than from the suburbs of a city. The same with household waste, and if push comes to shove all the food the town needs to eat can be supplied from a 5km radius, including the Beef. The only real issue will be energy, electricity and fuels, but they can be replaced or mitigated with local solutions such as solar and electric powered vehicles.

My town approaches a village in its structure, and over the millennia when failing city-scapes were abandoned, the people who survived, and could, moved into a village lifestyle.

[Newfie]

Lucky,

Please reminde me where you do live.

[AdamB]

Not all suburbs are doomed, it all boils down to economies of scale.

This thread is 16 years old. Suburbs were supposed to be GONE by now, based on the failed peak oil prognostications of the past. If you aren't eating long pork weekly and bicycling everywhere you go at BEST, then we have to start with the basic idea....it certainly WASN'T lack of energy, or specifically liquid fossil fuels, that allowed suburbia to live until now. So while suburbia might die for all sorts of reasons, across all sorts of time frames, it probably won't have much to do with previously hallucinated assumptions of liquid fossil fuel availability, or its future availability to support this peculiar human living style.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Not all suburbs are doomed, it all boils down to economies of scale.

This thread is 16 years old. Suburbs were supposed to be GONE by now, based on the failed peak oil prognostications of the past. If you aren't eating long pork weekly and bicycling everywhere you go at BEST, then we have to start with the basic idea....it certainly WASN'T lack of energy, or specifically liquid fossil fuels, that allowed suburbia to live until now. So while suburbia might die for all sorts of reasons, across all sorts of time frames, it probably won't have much to do with previously hallucinated assumptions of liquid fossil fuel availability, or its future availability to support this peculiar human living style.

Right. Plus there aren't only two endpoints -- re pure BAU and pure suburbia doom.

There are a LOT of endpoints (or, say, checkpoints every decade or two) that are very much in the middle. Like less consumption of consumer goods, but suburbia does just fine. Or less travel (which the internet is already helping make a reality re need to run lots of errands and shopping and entertainment, for example), but no suffering involved. In fact, not needing to get stuck in mall traffic Christmas shopping, etc. etc. is a significant benefit in my book, just for lifestyle quality.

But the usual suspects re instadoom forecasting like to pretend like a little inconvenience or a slight downturn in consumption implies a catastrophe that will kill billions. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

But let's pretend everyone who isn't a fast crash doomer is a "corny", even if they're expecting, say, SLOW collapse, or treading water overall.

[theluckycountry]

Lucky,

Please reminde me where you do live.

Up in the mountains south of Brisbane, AUS.

[theluckycountry]

Not all suburbs are doomed, it all boils down to economies of scale.

This thread is 16 years old. Suburbs were supposed to be GONE by now

These city suburbs will never be 'Gone' as you refer, they will simply become very depopulated as the food supplies and water supply etc disappear. But that is a ways off yet, government would have to collapse like it did in Rome etc for that. They will certainly become a miserable place though, much like the inner city ghettos of north america are miserable places. Think 'Suburbs of Detroit'

Even as the last of the giant oil fields run dry we see the nations that control them, like Saudi Arabia, keeping the price low, within the band that prevents industrialized civilization from collapsing like it began to in 2008 @ 150 a barrel. They keep it low so they can feed their own populaces out of the oil revenues. It's no long term solution though, the decline rate is catching up with them.

As of 2020 Mexico’s Pemex owes $106bn in debt and has seen its production plunge from 3.4 million barrels per day in 2004 to about 1.6 million bpd. The giant Cantarell in the Gulf of Mexico once yielded 2.1 million bpd on its own, one of the world’s most productive fields, but this has now dwindled to some 160 000 bpd.

Our entire modern way of life, from pharmaceuticals and weed sprays to the manufacture of our cars and roads will have to all but go when the oil goes.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/busines ... -1.1095305

[AdamB]

Not all suburbs are doomed, it all boils down to economies of scale.

This thread is 16 years old. Suburbs were supposed to be GONE by now

These city suburbs will never be 'Gone' as you refer, they will simply become very depopulated as the food supplies and water supply etc disappear.

That didn't happen either. But we're all still around talking about it as though the same mechanisms that didn't work last time, will next time.

Our entire modern way of life, from pharmaceuticals and weed sprays to the manufacture of our cars and roads will have to all but go when the oil goes.

Good thing that won't be an issue before the seas rise a couple meters, crop yields start being problematic, and all sorts of more pressing issues present themselves.

As far as Pemex, Mexico was claimed by experts of the old peak oil vintage to basically not be capable of producing ANY oil by now. It is usually best not to bring any old peak oil arguments into modern Happy McDoomster porn without at least IMPLYING that you understand why the same angles failed so miserably last time.

[theluckycountry]

Our entire modern way of life, from pharmaceuticals and weed sprays to the manufacture of our cars and roads will have to all but go when the oil goes.

Good thing that won't be an issue before the seas rise a couple meters, crop yields start being problematic, and all sorts of more pressing issues present themselves.

Those processes take decades to hundreds of years, the oil depletion crises is playing out now Adam. You have a very poor grasp of all this I am afraid. Have you lost your job yet? Are you semi-retired on the government handouts? What is it, $300 a week to sit on your bum? What will you you do when the stimulus money goes and there is no job for you? That's where this is heading, Massive Job Losses.

[Newfie]

Lucky,

Please reminde me where you do live.

Up in the mountains south of Brisbane, AUS.

OK and thanks.

[theluckycountry]

Lucky,

Please reminde me where you do live.

Up in the mountains south of Brisbane, AUS.

OK and thanks.

IP wise I'm usually in Canada or Panama, but I can be anywhere if you like
Gotta love the VPN's

[vtsnowedin]

I see the suburbs having a new lease on life courtesy of Covid -19. People are abandoning city apartments and moving to the suburbs to work from home and the trend appears to be long lasting. Instead of declining in a low energy environment I see future suburban roof tops covered in solar panels with solar charged electric cars doing the remaining commuter runs.
Many of the oldest suburbs closer to the cities that produced them need to have utility lines replaced and upgraded but that already needed to be done and now the residents will have the income to pay for the work.
Some changes need to be made like allowing retail stores within walking distance of houses instead of square miles of residential only zoning that made daily trips by automobile a necessity but that is just a change in regulation.
In short the demise of suburbia is far from assured.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Those processes take decades to hundreds of years, the oil depletion crises is playing out now Adam. You have a very poor grasp of all this I am afraid. Have you lost your job yet? Are you semi-retired on the government handouts? What is it, $300 a week to sit on your bum? What will you you do when the stimulus money goes and there is no job for you? That's where this is heading, Massive Job Losses.

Always the insta-doom. If oil really DOES become scarce in the next few decades as a big trend (which is FAR from assured), then the price will rise a lot. If the price rises a lot, people WILL change their priorities and habits, whether they like it or not and whether they whine about it or not.

People CAN drive far less (including living far closer to work on average, or telecommuting for more and more jobs or (gasp) walking, biking, taking the bus, which may well be electric). People CAN stop flying. People CAN buy less consumer crap -- far less for most. People CAN have less kids. People CAN live in smaller, more efficient houses. Just to name several, off the top of my head.

The oil isn't all suddenly going away (or even close), regardless.

Meanwhile, as green electrification expands, more and more driving miles will be electric. I'd sure rather see humanity use the remaining hydrocarbons for centuries producing things like the petrochemicals we actually need, vs. burning those hydrocarbons.

You give NO facts to merit your idea that Adam has a "very poor grasp" I notice. With the fast crash doomers' track record for MANY decades, claims like rapidly running out of oil should be backed by some very CONVINCING facts if we're going to take them at all seriously -- including how we ALSO rapidly run out of hydrocarbons we can substitute, like natural gas.

Also, the "economic doom is right around the corner" has been an insta-doomer trope for many decades as well. Recessions aren't doom. Doing without some things isn't doom. Recessions end, even with things like Covid-19. (And I've wanted a pay-as-we-go system since I was working, where we only ran federal deficits in true emergencies, and ran a small surplus the rest of the time. Unfortunately, voters want "more stuff" from government, so long term there's less economic growth. That's stupid, but it's not doom).

[Tanada]

I see the suburbs having a new lease on life courtesy of Covid -19. People are abandoning city apartments and moving to the suburbs to work from home and the trend appears to be long lasting. Instead of declining in a low energy environment I see future suburban roof tops covered in solar panels with solar charged electric cars doing the remaining commuter runs.
Many of the oldest suburbs closer to the cities that produced them need to have utility lines replaced and upgraded but that already needed to be done and now the residents will have the income to pay for the work.
Some changes need to be made like allowing retail stores within walking distance of houses instead of square miles of residential only zoning that made daily trips by automobile a necessity but that is just a change in regulation.
In short the demise of suburbia is far from assured.

Personally I was never a believer in the "death of Suburbia, everyone moves to the Big Urbanity" model of the future. Just look at human history, we have been building cities for thousands of years. During most of that period a "big city" meant you had 10,000+ residents, not the orders of magnitude larger conglomerations cheap energy has made possible today. During all that history even through the 19th century and counting places like India and China where a LOT of people lived even in the past, most people lived in small villages and towns.

If anything is an artifact of cheap energy I would say it is the big city life where "the City never sleeps". Without cheap energy operating modern waste systems to handle both sewage and solid waste cities are the nexus of illness. Every city ever occupied before 1921 was a net population sink, more people got sick and died from living in cities than grew up there healthy. In fact the birth rate could not keep up with the death rate and every city required a constant influx of people from rural villages and towns to make up for the terrible health conditions. This was as true of Chicago and NYC as it was of Paris and Vienna or Dehli and Beijing.

Take away cheap energy and what happens? Sewage treatment systems degrade over time and cost lots of money to properly function. Solid waste has to be collected and dealt with in some fashion whether that be a waste to energy incinerator or a land fill. I remember seeing a Japanese pilot project a couple decades ago, they were compacting municipal waste into very tight masses, wrapping them in wire to keep them from coming apart and then dipping the whole 2 ton mass in liquid asphalt to form a semi permanent shell before dropping them in the deep ocean. Well every single step of that process takes a lot of energy and resources, what can you do when your energy is all low power diffuse renewables? What you do in a declining civilization is your reuse every bit of trash you possibly can because you can not afford to waste it. The rest you push off into the corners where over time it accumulates.
This is why ancient cities like Troy in Asia Minor turn out to be built in layers where every time the city went through a bust cycle the survivors rebuilt on top of the ruins.

Heck you can travel to London, UK today and tour the Roman city ruins deep below the modern city streets.Roman London Rediscovered

This is what a low energy civilization looks like. It isn't covered in high tech solar panels and there massive expensive batteries, it is muscle powered and people lack the energy to clean up a huge mass of humans. If they are very lucky and control vast wealth they can pull in clean water from nearby mountains and flush their sewage out to sea like Ancient Rome did, but even with the clean water they still needed tens of thousands of slaves who had to be housed and fed and doctored to get the solid refuse out of the city. If you travel to Rome today you can visit the mounds outside the ancient city limits where for generations the slave trash collectors would gather up the broken shards of ceramics and carry them outside the city walls. They recycled just about everything they could but the only use they had for broken pottery was in building road beds and making a kind of cement by grinding it into powder and mixing it with sand and quick lime. The huge city of Rome produced vastly more broken pottery than those few uses could consume and so they were left with
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... taccio.jpg



An artificial hill at the edge of the city that is dated to have been there since at least the time of Julius Caesar. It grew for at least 500 years before the fall of Ancient Rome and has mostly just sat there quietly for the last 1600 years while the city shrank and then regrew in modern times.

[vtsnowedin]

Actually I don't consider solar panels all that high tech. There are no moving parts or computer chip in each panel and they use the same technology used to power satellites back in the 1950s and 60s. They consist of a gang of solar cells wired together and feeding a DC voltage regulator no more complicated then that in a 1929 Ford model A. then feeding a battery which can be a simple lead acid battery also found in early automobiles.
The amount of roof space in a suburb is considerable and it is conceivable that the whole community including water and waste water pumping and processing, lighting heating or cooling could all be provided by those roof tops or panel covered parking lots. Even the garbage trucks could be solar charged along with the compactor (loader at the landfill.
Now if I were a planner in New Orleans I'd take mile square sections beside the Mississippi and move the houses off (paying the occupants appropriately) and add thirty feet of fill from river dredgings and municipal waste etc. and once allowed to settle sufficiently cap it and replace the houses and other infrastructure building a new suburb well above sea and flood level. Then move on to the next mile block upstream or down.

[Tanada]

Now if I were a planner in New Orleans I'd take mile square sections beside the Mississippi and move the houses off (paying the occupants appropriately) and add thirty feet of fill from river dredgings and municipal waste etc. and once allowed to settle sufficiently cap it and replace the houses and other infrastructure building a new suburb well above sea and flood level. Then move on to the next mile block upstream or down.

Sorry but ultimately futile as most of New Orleans is built on compacted silt already. The problem is outside of the French Quarter which is actually built on an ancient chuck of bedrock the surrounding area is all loose fill washed down the Mississippi since the end of the last major glaciation. Maximum elevation in the whole city is just 20 feet above sea level and most of the surrounding land is 2 feet (600 mm) above high tide. Sea level rise is not stopping any time soon. Even if your plan was a 100% success the artificially elevated city would soon be an island surrounded by the GOM. Current sea level rise is around 2.5mm per year and though it would take about 200 years to make your elevated city an island that presumes the rate of rise doesn't change. In reality the rate of sea level rise has more than doubled since 1970 and I see no evidence it is going to slow down any time soon. If it keeps doubling every 50 years that cuts your 200 years to less than 100, and all this presumes our civilization remains advanced technologically the whole time.

[Newfie]

FWIW
I keep hearing how folks are leaving the cities. And maybe it is generally true.

However in my specific city neighborhood it is NOT true. They are building like crazy and building values are rising.

Why there is this anomaly I do not know. I suspect it may have something to do with the U of Penn/Children’s Hospital complex which seems to grow without end.

[vtsnowedin]

Now if I were a planner in New Orleans I'd take mile square sections beside the Mississippi and move the houses off (paying the occupants appropriately) and add thirty feet of fill from river dredgings and municipal waste etc. and once allowed to settle sufficiently cap it and replace the houses and other infrastructure building a new suburb well above sea and flood level. Then move on to the next mile block upstream or down.

Sorry but ultimately futile as most of New Orleans is built on compacted silt already. The problem is outside of the French Quarter which is actually built on an ancient chuck of bedrock the surrounding area is all loose fill washed down the Mississippi since the end of the last major glaciation. Maximum elevation in the whole city is just 20 feet above sea level and most of the surrounding land is 2 feet (600 mm) above high tide. Sea level rise is not stopping any time soon. Even if your plan was a 100% success the artificially elevated city would soon be an island surrounded by the GOM. Current sea level rise is around 2.5mm per year and though it would take about 200 years to make your elevated city an island that presumes the rate of rise doesn't change. In reality the rate of sea level rise has more than doubled since 1970 and I see no evidence it is going to slow down any time soon. If it keeps doubling every 50 years that cuts your 200 years to less than 100, and all this presumes our civilization remains advanced technologically the whole time.

As a civil technician I will take a 100 year lifespan of an infrastructure project any time. So maybe add forty feet not thirty to extend the life of the new island of Mardi gras which would be as viable as many an island nation.
Back in Jr. High (1967) an earth science book explained the siltation and rise of the river bed Vs. the subsidence of the land surrounding deprived of periodic flooding by the levees. It predicted that at some future point (long past now) that the Mississippi would break out of it's levees during a flood event and carve a new course to the GOM and they even showed a picture of the small town likely to be plowed away by the flood waters.
Apparently the constant dredging of the Mississippi over the last 54 years has done a better job of averting that disaster then was predicted then.

[vtsnowedin]

FWIW
I keel hearing how folks are leaving the cities. And maybe it is generally true.

However in my specific city neighborhood it is NOT true. They are building like crazy and building values are rising.

Why there is this anomaly I do not know. I suspect it may have something to do with the U of Penn/Children’s Hospital complex which seems to grow without end.

I think your hospital observation is correct. The Dartmouth hospital and the ivy league college adjacent has become the hub of commerce and growth near me and property values decline as the distance from that hub increases. Of course my property is about as far into the woods as you can get before you start to come out the other side.

[theluckycountry]

Personally I was never a believer in the "death of Suburbia, everyone moves to the Big Urbanity" model of the future. Just look at human history, we have been building cities for thousands of years.

If you travel to Rome today you can visit the mounds outside the ancient city limits where for generations the slave trash collectors would gather up the broken shards of ceramics and carry them outside the city walls.

Don't confuse the City with Suburbia? Suburbs are a 100 year old experiment beginning in the US with the railroad suburbs just outside the dense city core. Rome was just a big CBD, all stone and as many tenements as independent houses, the houses being typically wall to wall. Outside the city walls it was all countryside and farming not far away yet even Rome had to import mountains of grain from the provinces to feed her people. Food was the Key to all ancient cities, they had to get enough food and when they couldn't the cities collapsed.

Now we have suburbia, hundreds, and in some places approaching thousands of square miles of houses, with NO farming. No Food. Los Angeles has a population of about 4 million, but Greater Los Angeles, 19 million.



19 Million people, and No food that doesn't come in but from hundreds and often thousands of miles away? Australian exports huge amounts of food to the US. How will it get there without oil?