“The euro crisis is part of a larger crisis. We’re at an end-game for the industrial age based on fossil fuels. Every time this global economy based on fossil fuels grows, prices go up, purchasing power goes down and the economy will collapse.” ~Jeremy Rifkin
A serendipitous series of events led me to the feature film embedded below. Sprawling from Grace is a documentary with a convincing argument: that suburban sprawl, and its sustaining car culture, has reached a dead end.
In this documentary, city planners and futurists warn that the inefficient growth patterns of suburban development threaten the foundations of economy and community. It explores how fossil fuel scarcity will put pressure on this model and looks at alternatives that are already leading to renewal.
Adding lanes [to freeways] only induces more congestion.” ~Peter Park, City of Denver Manager of Community Planning and Development
The Suburban Stall
Futurist James Howard Kunstler calls suburbia “an extreme, car-dependent living arrangement… the greatest misallocation of funds in the history of the world.”
Traffic jams cost Americans $65 billion a year. Many people interpret this as an argument for more roads.
The argument falls short of a long-term solution. In some areas—Boston for instance—the limit to additions has been reached with no appreciable difference to congestion.
The world economy is sending clear signals that we are already beyond the tipping point in an unsustainable order. We can no longer afford to subsidize the personal automobile and the infrastructure it demands, without bankrupting ourselves.
Meanwhile, eighty per cent of car trips are discretionary—that is, unneeded.
“We’ve become the Oil Tribe.” ~Randy Udall, Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas
The Petrol Problem
While progressive countries like Germany invest in renewables, Canada has made a bargain with the devil, joining with the oil cartels to subsidize a sunset industry with public funds; funds desperately needed to kickstart the sustainable fuels economy.
The world currently uses 30 billion barrels of oil per year. With the added demands of fast developing economies like China and India, the world has 35-50 years left in a finite resource. As economist Jeff Rubin has stressed, it’s not a matter of the amount of recoverable oil remaining, it’s the amount of deliverable oil that matters.
The United States still uses three times as much oil as China. They recently unlocked their 1 trillion barrel oil reserve–a desperate move that only forestalls the inevitable economic shock.
Ninety-five per cent of petroleum products are dedicated to transportation. Americans spend 25 per cent of their income on automobiles. For less economically robust classes, the number is now closer to 40 per cent.
The Fractured Foundations
It’s also a mistake to believe that there will be a replacement fuel to keep the present car culture running. We simply can’t afford the infrastructure.
And much of existing infrastructure is crumbling. Montreal’s Champlain Bridge—Canada’s busiest span—is in danger of collapse. Newspapers in California cried “carmageddon” last summer, when part of the LA freeway had to be closed for expansion.
Car addiction underlies our economic and environmental crises. Public transportation and progressive urban planning are the antidote.
Creating human-scale living arrangements may help us regain our humanity, our sense of place within community.
How is your city placed to adapt to fuel scarcity and environmental demands? What is your vision?
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That’s a great little film! Of course anything that features Howard Kunstler is bound to be good. I love his “Eyesore of the Month” architectural reviews.
And wouldn’t ya know it – the September 2011 Eyesore of the Month is a building in our very own Calgary, Alberta – the jewel of the prairies, the darling of Halliburton, the home of Ezra Levant and his Hummer and the city that is still reeling from Howard Kunstler’s 2005 commentary published in the Vancouver Sun and everywhere else:
“Now it has become an archetypal city of immense glass boxes in a sterilized center surrounded by an asteroid belt of beige residential subdivisions — sort of what Rochester, New York, would be like if it had an economy. The vast suburbs ooze out onto the prairie to the east, along with their complements of strip malls, power centers, car dealerships, and fry-pits, and on the west they bump up against the foothills of the Rockies.
What’s going on in Calgary, with new subdivisions of half-million dollar houses opening every month, is the North American tragedy in microcosm. Because every new suburban house built, every new Target store opened, every new parking lot paved, every highway widened will be a project in the service of a living arrangement with no future. It is a true madness that beats a path to historic tragedy.”
This is very apropos to my former home of Vancouver Island, which, on its southern half, has urban sprawl that is worse than Calgary. It’s even more apropos that the tony Victoria neighborhood of Fairfield is populated with former oil executives from Calgary and Alberta tarsand oil is being burned in the Jaguars and Range Rovers of wealthy Victoria retirees and corrupt British Columbia government officials and their friends.
Kunstler is one of my favourite curmudgeons. He’s incisive and witty. He cuts through crap with the Sword of Intelligence.
I would say you’ve exaggerated a bit by comparing Southern VI’s sprawl to Calgary’s. The intent is there; it’s just that there’s not as much room to metastasize the blight.
I have no argument against your final observations, though I wonder if any of the tar sands oil makes it to local markets.
Meanwhile, the court eunuchs (I include Her Premierness in that characterization) have no better ideas in their “jobs plan” than dig up more of BC and develop fossil fuels.
“I have no argument against your final observations, though I wonder if any of the tar sands oil makes it to local markets.”
Oh Raymond, you Vancouver Islanders are so innocent and so pure. That’s what I love about Vancouver Island. There are people on the Island who still have the dream of the utopia in the Pacific – so close to the barbarians on the continent yet really so far away, in terms of beautiful dreams for a better future. However, I regret to inform Islanders that a substantial proportion of your Island transportation fuel is indeed courtesy of the Alberta tarsands. I am actually in northern Alberta at the moment and we are sending you hectares of the gloopy black glorp to ruin your innocence.
Just wait until you have shiploads of Alberta bitumen washing onto Vancouver Island beaches when tarsand oil tankers (inevitably) find themselves in spilly situations on the north coast and the Georgia Straight. You Islanders will be fondly reminiscing about the days when the Exxon Valdez caused relatively harmless damage. The Chinese now own part of the Alberta tarsands and the Alberta government is eager to send billions of barrels of tarsand oil from Vancouver and Kitimat to refineries in China. Chinese motorists and Victoria motorists eagerly await the fuel for their motoring desires. Lamborghinis and Jaguars for all!
Thanks for setting me straight on the distribution of “gloopy black glorp,” but as we know from pipeline plans, it will ultimately be sold to the highest bidder. I bet, if we haven’t already done so, there are trade agreements being written that will lock Canada into exports that can be enforced by Chapter 11 lawsuits.
I know that Suncor runs a refinery in Edmonton (with plans for expansion) and Anacortes (across the strait from Victoria) refines the black “glorp” but would be interested if you have any other info.
As much as I enjoy my little paradise on the Pacific (a relatively new redoubt), believe me I’m no gormless Pollyanna and, going on the turnout for today’s climate rally, neither are a lot of other Islanders.
In fact, an awful lot of people are very well acquainted with with the minutiae of tar sands operations and the power behind them. The one thing I didn’t run into today, among young and old alike, was any kind of nihilism–only a resolution to make changes.
I invite you to check out my upcoming report.
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