43 thoughts on “Procurement Office rejects contract targetting Big Wind opponents”

1. skeptical once again December 5, 2011 at 10:13 am

   In my post on Olduvai theory, I suggested that even if there was a dramatic and worsening decrease in the availability of oil in 2015 and a concurrent rise in the price of oil, this might be offset in part by a shift to a post-digital information society that values virtual things over material things. In such an economy, the purchase of material things takes on the qualities of a non-expansionary ‘steady-state’ economy, where people become minimalists. One only needs so much stuff. However, the consumer market in personal computing technology and “experiences” like tourism or educational products will be exponential in growth. One will need to keep experiencing and learning and growing in order to survive in the new world.

   But what about the have-nots, who do not have access to quality education or high-technology or travel or to generally what are considered forms of “cultural capital”?

   They may end up on the wrong side of the Olduvai Gorge. That is, they may end up in a new Stone Age environment.

   There is already a digital divide in society, between the haves and have-nots.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/opinion/sunday/internet-access-and-the-new-divide.html?src=recg

   At the article states, the current gulf between those with and those without Internet access recapitulates an earlier technological social divide in the 20th century, between those who had home phones and those who didn’t.

   However, there could be a difference between earlier technological gaps and later ones.

   There is a point where there are diminishing returns for technological progress. As one gets wired into the Internet, one gets more clued in, but at a certain point, telecommunications advances are all about entertainment. In informational terms, there are diminishing returns to advances in technology.

   Let’s look for some parallels.

   One parallel might be found in higher education. On the one hand, more people are going to college, so the college degree simply means less in the job market, and mass education, particularly at state universities, alters in character and seems to take on the aspect of a high school. A working-class student is now expected to get that college degree, but he or she never really catches up in terms of quality of experience or in the practical value of the credential. On the other hand, the reading material and coursework at a state university are nearly identical with that of a private elite school, so if state university students applies themselves, they can get a good if compromised education. (Indeed, if one looks at Ivy League graduate students in the natural sciences and humanities and social sciences, most of them are not graduates of private elite colleges, but of small colleges and state universities. On the other hand, few Ivy League students plan on going to graduate school outside the professions.)

   Another corollary might be found in the relationship between happiness and income. Studies have shown that generally as people get richer, they generally get happier. But at around a $75,000 income, that relationship plateaus, and any further increase in income generally does not correspond with increasing happiness. Nevertheless, earning a huge income can help to insure that one will never fall below that baseline of $75,000 that maximizes happiness.

   So the glass is always half empty and half full.

   One only needs so much technology in informational terms, and there are diminishing returns. That is, at a certain point, the most advanced information technology is all about entertainment. Nevertheless, if one is ambitious, one still loses a competitive edge in a marketplace without the very best information technology, and those without that access are already disadvantaged in other ways.

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2. skeptical once again December 6, 2011 at 4:02 pm

   I’d like to illustrate and question briefly a 2009 article by David Villano entitled “Why Suburbs May Become the Next Slums”, especially in the light of rising fuel prices.

   http://www.alternet.org/story/127395/why_suburbs_may_become_the_next_slums/

   Villano starts by pointing out that the suburbs are still attracting families — but its a different kind of family from the idealized image of middle-class and upper middle-class families that were once identified with the suburbs. “The financial meltdown has produced a vast patchwork of foreclosed and abandoned single-family homes across America, accelerating the decades-long migration of our nation’s poor from cities to the suburban fringe. In 2005, as rising property values reduced affordable-housing stock in inner-city neighborhoods, suburban poverty, in raw numbers, topped urban poverty for the first time.” This will actually worsen as the home building industry continues to build suburban houses for which there will be no demand.

   The trend will continue. By 2025, predicts planning expert Arthur C. Nelson, America will face a market of 22 million large-lot homes (a sixth of an acre or more), attracting millions of low-income residents deeper into suburbia where decay and social and geographic isolation will pose challenges few see coming.

   This comprises a complete reversal of the socioeconomic settlement patterns in the United States of previous generations. At one time, it was the up-and-comers who moved to the suburbs, while the poor retrenched themselves in small towns or the inner city.

   The young, the affluent, the professional class and empty-nesters are reclaiming the urban living experience — dense, walkable, diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods in and around city centers — while the poor disperse outward in search of cheap rent. Low-income residents often subdivide suburban homes, sharing them with multiple families. Studies reveal that population densities in suburban neighborhoods increase two to four times when low-income families replace the middle-class, Nelson said.

   It’s not just the economic forces of cheap suburban housing luring the poor to the suburbs, but also government programs that seek to break up concentrations of urban poverty by relocating many of the poor.

   The displaced poor find value in the aging, outer-ring tract-home developments that once promised easy living far from the city’s hustle and bustle. And housing officials, resolved to breaking up pockets of concentrated poverty (where at least 40 percent of the families are living below the poverty line), are thrilled. The federal Section 8 housing program, which allows recipients to negotiate government-subsidized rentals anywhere, is grounded in the belief that a safe, stable neighborhood can help unbuckle the straps of poverty.

   But this can backfire. As more and more of the poor move into the suburbs, the suburbs take on the characteristics of a ghetto. In fact, if the population of the poor in the suburbs reaches a certain critical percentage, it is not the poor who get assimilated into the middle-class culture of the suburbs, but just the reverse.

   But the positive benefits of moving to a neighborhood of less poverty diminish as the number of poor relocating there increases, new research suggests. In other words, families are far less likely to pull themselves out of poverty when their exposure to other poor families reaches a kind of tipping point. George C. Galster, a professor of urban affairs at Wayne State University, has quantified this poverty threshold as roughly 15 to 20 percent of a neighborhood. If the poverty rate exceeds that, Galster said, “All hell breaks loose” in the form of crime, drop-out rates, teen pregnancies, drug use and, in turn, declining property values.

   Prospective homeowners might think twice about buying a house in the suburbs.

   Galster’s working paper for the National Poverty Center, Consequences from the Redistribution of Urban Poverty During the 1990s: A Cautionary Tale, warns that polices to break up concentrated poverty may be backfiring. While the number of Americans living in the poorest neighborhoods has notably declined since 1990, by about 25 percent, poverty elsewhere has inched up. Galster worries that the rush to relocate the urban poor, through Section 8 and other poverty redistribution programs, has pushed many less-desirable suburban neighborhoods to this tipping point.

   And when they tip, he added, neighborhoods tend to spiral deeper into poverty: Declining property values attract more poor residents, gradually displacing the middle-class families that provide stability, further depressing prices.

   But the experience of poverty in the suburbs is much more devastating than poverty in the suburbs. The suburbs may provide the good life to middle-class families that enjoy a high standard of living within the confines of their four walls and a sense of safety within the gates of their neighborhood. But that comes at the expense of the social networks or sense of community that one finds in a small town or urban neighborhood. A suburban ghetto offers the worse of both worlds.

   “The isolation can be both physical and emotional,” Goetz said. “The frequency of interaction with neighbors declines, social networks break down. We haven’t considered that carefully enough.” Goetz said studies show a surprising willingness among the suburban poor to return to urban, high-poverty neighborhoods where services are more accessible and mass transit more convenient.

   But the economic forces impoverishing America’s suburbs are seemingly inexorable.

   But the suburban diaspora of America’s poor is unlikely to subside, most experts agree, posing complex challenges for policymakers. If anything, added Alan Berube, a housing expert at the Brookings Institution, suburban poverty will grow not just from in-migration of the poor but from within as the financial crisis “pushes middle-class families down the economic ladder.”

   If the suburbs are economically heading into catastrophe, the biggest mistake might be to waste government resources on continuing to expand the suburbs.

   Leinberger agreed, arguing that planners should acknowledge that the suburban experiment has failed. “I wouldn’t add another new road in American today,” he said. “The changing geography of poverty is another reminder that our housing policies today will be felt for years to come, and in ways nobody ever imagined.”

   What this article fails to explain are the economic forces decimating the suburbs other than the continuing expansion of suburbs in the face of collapsed demand, leading to cheap housing that attracts the poor.

   It fails to explain the migration of the affluent to the cities — why, as it says, “The young, the affluent, the professional class and empty-nesters are reclaiming the urban living experience — dense, walkable, diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods in and around city centers — while the poor disperse outward in search of cheap rent.” It also fails to explain what attracted the relatively affluent to the suburbs in the first place.

   It also fails to explain what rising petroleum prices will mean for suburban commuters. Auto-related expenses for a suburban family average 30 percent of family income. What will happen to suburban families, especially the disadvantaged, if and when gasoline prices double or triple, even if the price increase is temporary? Or, what will happen to the alternative of mass transportation in the suburbs as fuel prices increase, especially considering the concurrent budget crises that would accompany fuel crises? As the recent recession illustrated, just when drivers can no longer afford to run their cars and attempt to make a switch to mass transit, bus and train routes and schedules are cut back.

   What would the political and ideological consequences of more crime and poverty in the suburbs look like? Would middle-class and affluent people seek to bolster social programs to help the poor that they increasingly encounter in both the suburbs and the city? Or would they turn toward a program of “law and order”?

   Of course, none of this even touches on the issue of home prices and foreclosures or the health of the finance industry. The suburban house was seen up until lately as a kind of bank account, a rock solid investment that could not lose value, as well as an ATM from which one could extract equity in the form of loans.

   However, as the Case-Shiller home-price index indicates, home prices fluctuate, but eventually return to 2.5 times family income. If average suburban incomes shrink as the poor move to suburbs and the rich move to the cities, even homeowners in the suburbs who have paid off their mortgages will be in trouble because, as the average income in their neighborhood falls and accordingly so do home prices, they will not be able to sell their homes in their retirement for the amount that they sunk into that home. The economy in general could be seriously so impacted by this evaporation of home value that incomes in general throughout the society might fall. This could produce a vicious cycle if a situation emerges like in Japan, where home prices have fallen for twenty years because incomes have continued to fall.

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3. skeptical once again December 8, 2011 at 12:02 pm

   How will declining production of petroleum supplies affect the suburbs?

   Would general solutions be appropriate for the suburbs of Oahu?

   http://utopianist.com/2011/02/rising-oil-prices-will-turn-suburbs-into-remote-slums-report-says/

   A February 2011 article by Brian Merchant on how “Rising Oil Prices Will Turn Suburbs into Remote Slums” is based on ” a new study from the Australian Planner goes so far to argue that unless it radically reforms its urban planning and transportation policy, suburbs will become slums.” Although there “have been plenty of stories done on the topic of suburbs-turning-slums in the wake of the housing crash … this report suggests that the price of oil will make the shift permanent.” Here is text from a website Merchant refers to:

   http://www.theage.com.au/national/report-warns-of-oil-woes-20101227-198k2.html

   One of the study’s authors, Professor Peter Newman of Curtin University, who is also an adviser to the federal government, said the most compelling finding of the research was that ‘urban sprawl is finished’. He said: ‘If we continue to roll out new land releases and suburbs that are car-dependent, they will become the slums of the future.’

   The study’s co-ordinator, Dr Jago Dodson of Griffith University, forecast a grim future, with Australia’s trade deficit, which was $9.3 billion in 2008-09, due to hit $25 billion by 2015, largely because of oil imports.

   Merchant’s article goes on to state that mass transportation is not an option because it is the suburbs, not automobile ownership, that is becoming obsolete.

   Newman points out that it will soon become prohibitively expensive to link remote suburbs to urban areas with public transportation — those communities will then be cut off and isolated from regional economic centers. As oil prices rise, people who have the resources to do so will move out (back towards the cities) and housing prices will plummet. From there on out, it’s pretty easy to imagine the decades evolving such locales into grim places filled with crumbling cookie-cutter tract housing.

   Hell, this generation’s young professionals are already trending towards living in walkable communities — soaring oil prices will only make the Levittowns of the world even less appealing. And all of these principles apply to the US more than anywhere — though the foreclosure crisis has stalled development for the time being, you can bet that suburbs and exurbs will begin growing again, long before the rug is eventually pulled out from under them. Which is why we need to start planning more sustainable communities — as democratically as possible, of course — for the long term, right now.

   Newman is right: urban sprawl is finished.

   There are a couple of interesting comments in the comment section, which is what I’d like to address. The first comment observes that electric cars fed by solar energy might be immune to the effects of an oil shortage.

   The author completely fails to have any vision of the status qua doing anything other then lying down and dying.
   not a single thought turned to adatave tech.
   Nothing about electric cars.
   about solar futures.
   about having a garden in your back yard to feed you.
   nope he thinks the future for mankind is to be crammed nut to ass in urban slums (well he calls them livable cities but people moved out of them for a reason and that reason wasn’t just to piss him off)

   Another reader responds to this comment with another comment on the creation of an artificial supply of and demand for suburbs in the United States, and the way cities are misrepresented and maligned in the national imagination.

   White Flight supported by a government focused on outward expansion with a one-two punch of the GI bill and the Eisenhower interstate system. Citizens were being offered record low mortgage rates, with a portion of the down payment being funded by the government (so long as they purchased new construction in certain regions) and a brand new transportation option that offset the loss of public transit.

   I am ashamed that American cities are viewed as cramp slums. This isn’t 1850s Brooklyn. I spend more time outdoors, in parks, swimming in lakes, walking and riding my bike than any of my suburban colleagues. While they are stuck in rush hour traffic for two hours every evening I am riding home through parks along the lakefront, making it home to my family long before they are even outside the city limits.

   The first comment finds the redemption of the suburbs in an age of alternative energy technology. Electric vehicles powered by solar panels would presumably replace a petroleum-dependent economy, and rescue the suburban population from the bleak fate of migrating to the urban core.

   First, that kind of solar-based economy is a long way off, and those electric cars are in the meantime indirectly powered largely by nature gas and coal. Second, the trend today is for the affluent to move to the cities where the amenities they seek (jobs, entertainment) exist.

   This brings us to the second comment. The cities just are not as bad as they were during industrialization. Moreover, the creation of suburbs was always a heavily subsidized project that many now see as a distortion of market forces.

   An issue related to the state subsidization of suburban development would be zoning laws, which proscribed how residential areas would develop in isolation from non-residential uses.  A Discovery News article from March 2011 addresses this in its own commentary on Newman’s study. Indeed, the article starts off on the topic of zoning.

   http://news.discovery.com/autos/high-gas-prices-suburbs-slums-110321.html

   Americans rarely think much about zoning, but it governs almost every facet of how we live our lives. And unintended consequences of 50-year-old zoning codes may be about to turn some of our loveliest and quietest suburbs into the next slums.

   Zoning codes adopted in the United States isolated residences from any commercial and industrial activities, often in curving cul-de-sacs sans sidewalks. Many developments could be entered only from a single point off high-speed arterial roads.

   No longer could you send the kid to the corner store on his bike to pick up a gallon of milk. That corner store became a big-box chain store up to 10 miles away, and public transportation was ignored as a relic of decaying central cities.

   The problem from this point of view is not cars, but suburbs and zoning.

   We’re not entirely convinced by Newman’s prediction. More stringent corporate average fuel-economy laws are improving the average gas mileage of all vehicles. U.S. gasoline consumption actually peaked in 2006, and will likely fall more in coming years.

   Households can switch to more fuel-efficient cars, and some level of telecommuting holds promise as well. Still, the housing market ruthlessly adjusts the value of all residences in real time.

   This was evident in a late-2008 visit to California’s High Desert, the very furthest reach of exurban development. The area had seen huge waves of “affordable” town houses and starter homes for buyers priced out of Los Angeles.

   Located 90 miles from central LA, the area was simply too far from most jobs. When gasoline prices spiked in 2008, half-built condos were abandoned, fully-built developments stayed empty, and developers walked away.

   This article couples a condemnation of government interference (in the form of zoning regulations and suburban growth subsidies) with a faith in progress in the form of new vehicle technology that might save the suburbs.

   One ray of hope may be plug-in cars: The cost of driving a mile on grid electricity is one-fifth to one-half the cost of driving the same mile on $4-per-gallon gasoline in a 25-mpg vehicle. They’re pricey today, but they’ll get cheaper over time.

   Unfortunately, the elected representatives of suburban enclaves are historically many of the same ones who have consistently voted against Federal funding for development and rollout of plug-in vehicles–which could come to be viewed as sacrificing long-term salvation for short-term convenience.

   The contradiction of this perspective is obvious from this last sentence. The technological quick fix of an electric vehicle would be just as heavily subsidized and engineered as was the creation of the suburbs. In the comment section one finds voices that claim as much.

   “Subsidized electric cars will never be cheaper than gasoline fueled vehicles, plain and simple. It may cost less to fill, but this is offset in massive taxation to pay for these subsidies. If a technology cannot stand on its own without subsidy, it’s not a viable solution.”

   “Plug-in cars offer hope? Not much. Only short term until the utility companies decide they have to build new generating facilities to cope with the demand. Coal fired plants? Riiight. Problems? Sources distant from needs, use of open pit mining, product not environmentally clean, and ultimately, a good quality product is finite. Nuclear? One word: Japan. Solar or wind? Geothermal? We’ll see. In any case, we’ll be paying even more for energy usage as it relates to housing. Bit of a push-pull situation, wouldn’t you say?”

   But the comments also point out that the “suburbs” need to be redefined because some of them are mixed-use and self-sufficient, and not simply purely residential as in the past.

   “i dont know what this guy thinks suburbs is, anyone who lives 10 miles to the nearest gal of milk, lives in the stix, not suburbs,  i live on long island, and you cant swing a dead brat without hitting either a supermarket, 7/11, deli, some kind of business or store.”

   “I have lived in Southern California my whole life. When I was a Children’s Social Worker for Los Angeles County I had to drive wherever my children were placed. I was often driving to Fontana, Rialto, San Bernadino, Pomona etc….  I actually saw the housing developments being built and then decline. A lot of the people who bought the homes where given the insane loans that balooned and they couldn’t afford to pay them. I am fortunate to live in thriving Long Beach California where I can walk to the market or coffee shop. Millions of people in California commute to work. I hope this story does not came to pass but it probably will…..”

   “The solution is to turn suburbs into functioning cities.    Sacrifice some nearby tracts for commercial development.   Urban design has not changed much in thousands of years:  transportation limits and the boundaries of other basic necessities limit the size of cities.    The Romans knew this, and it’s why, with the exception of Rome itself, they built cities to be a certain size, and then once exceeded they built another city elsewhere from the ground up.”

   “I don’t go more than 5 minutes down the road to shop and I live 15 minutes from work. I almost never hit the freeway, even, these days. I kind of look forward to a shrink in the “radius of convenience.” Although perhaps it’s a silly dream, I like to imagine these suburban enclaves transforming into microcommunities rather than slums, with people actually biking or walking to their local whatever and public transportation becoming a viable option for those who work in nearby areas…   On that note, I agree with Lunarstudio – public transportation has never been a convenience for me unless I’ve been in a foreign place. In London? Awesome. Portland, Oregon? Awesome as long as you’re living in the city itself. Olympia? Same, but slower. Greater Seattle area? A joke. In all American cases I’ve experienced it’s too expensive to use regularly, just to keep up with itself cost-wise.”

   “Luckily i live across the street from where I work and my local grocery store is 2 miles down the road.  I can’t imagine living across town or, as some of my coworkers do, driving an hour just to get to work in the morning and an hour home.  I also go home for lunch most days so I figure I’m saving an average of $300 per month.  I fill up my truck once every 6 weeks for $40 instead of every two weeks where I used to live.  I have a friend who spends $50 every 4 days to fill up and drive back and forth to work.  I guess I got lucky when I moved to my new place last September.  I hate looking out my door and seeing where I work every day but the money I save makes up for the view.”

   These comments offer a helpful clue on what can be done to adjust to this gentrification of cities and impoverishment of suburbs that will be accelerated by rising oil prices.

   The public funding and tax structure that has long gone into the expansion of suburbs could be re-channeled into providing each suburb with a basic urban core, which would help to make suburbs more self-sufficient and less vulnerable to gas price hikes and to provide jobs to those in the suburbs who will be increasingly impoverished.

   We need to cease building new roads and sewers — the “bricks and mortar” infrastructure of the Old Economy — and focus instead on helping to provide new telecommunications infrastructure to already existing suburbs, as well as providing technical job training to those who live there. Commuting will become too expensive, so jobs will have to shift to local jobs and Internet-based jobs.

   Should the adoption of electric cars be subsidized as well? In a sense, that would be like subsidizing commuting, which then entails the subsidization of an entire transportation infrastructure. In fact, subsidies could be seen as a major part of the problem to begin with. Middle-class people move to cities in part to escape urban decay, but the cities decayed because middle-class people were moving there — largely because of subsidies. The enormous subsidies that went into building the suburbs were what helped to kill cities in the first place. Moreover, the suburbs required massive and wasteful resource investments compared to the cities, with the added tragedy that these vast and inefficient suburbs may largely be abandoned as oil prices rise. Caution should be taken that further investments in the suburbs are not simply propping up a dying industry or supplying patronage to the home-building industry or to an auto industry seeking to ‘greenwash’ itself.

   In terms of Hawaii, creating an urban core in suburbs might run into resistance. For example, Kailua has been cast frequently as a local suburb that could evolve into a “walkable community”. In reality, there is an intense hostility in Kailua to innovation, especially toward the creation of multi-story buildings that would render commuting less necessary.

   Another example might be Kapolei, which was designed to become a “second city”, a dense, mixed-use urban area that would preclude the need to commute. Even politicians claim that this did not happen, that Kapolei simply has not evolved into a true urban area. The reasons given for this failure vary from government incompetence to a desire on the part of people from small-town settings to live in such settings.

   If Hawaii’s geographic isolation make it particularly vulnerable to oil shocks, the dominant proclivity of its populace to live in low-rise settings makes it even more vulnerable. Despite the vision of Hawaii’s governor to create a ‘third city’ — a redeveloped high-density urban setting in urban Honolulu — there are virtually no voices in Hawaii at the popular level calling for an urban re-orientation. Hawaii’s overwhelming ethos is anti-urban.

   This might mean that Hawaii could be positioned for astonishing levels of rural and suburban poverty in the years ahead, beginning in 2012 as global oil production decreases and accelerating in 2015 as the full shock of decreasing petroleum supplies becomes apparent.

   On the other hand, this could be an impetus for the creation of that ‘third city’, even without government support.

   But that ‘third city’ might be a tent city.

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4. skeptical once again December 9, 2011 at 12:17 pm

   One thing that I think the national and local media is not picking up on is how peak oil, natural gas development and food prices will interact, and how this may eventually affect national politics.

   There has not been enough discussion on how peak oil will affect agricultural production. Here’s an interesting take on what will happen:

   http://watd.wuthering-heights.co.uk/mainpages/agriculture.html

   When we think of the problems associated with peak oil, our first thoughts may turn to transport, electricity, or plastics. The use that tends not to come to mind, yet could be the most devastating of them all, is agriculture.

   The Diesel Farm

   Oil and gas are essential to modern farming. The most obvious use is to run the tractors and machines. Car drivers can switch to public transport, lorries can move their goods (partially, at least) to railways, but the only option for a tractor or combine harvester is a horse or an ox. Clearly modern agriculture could not switch to an animal-power-based system and hope to continue with modern yields. A tractor can plough in an hour an area that a horse would take a day to (0.9–1 hectare). The horse also needs more skill and you have to put aside some of your crop to feed it. Imagine trying to gather the harvests of the vast fields of maize and wheat of the USA using only horse- and human-power. But diesel is only one of the uses for oil and gas. Another, possibly more important use, is petrochemicals.

   Petrochemicals

   Nitrogen is one of the most important elements in fertilisers. In the most common method, the Haber-Bosch process, hydrogen is combined with nitrogen to form ammonia. It requires high temperatures and strong atmospheric pressure, therefore a great deal of energy. The nitrogen is taken from the atmosphere while the hydrogen is obtained from natural gas. The process became economical in the 1920s and since then, fertilisers have become indispensable. Worldwide use of commercial fertiliser more than doubled between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

   The Example of North Korea

   North Korea has no oil or gas so everything that they used has to be imported. After the end of the Korean War in 1953, crop yields increased with the utilisation of modern farming methods. Traditional agricultural practices were abandoned for the ‘more efficient’ modern methods employing diesel-based tractors and machinery and chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.

   Around 1990 the Soviet Union collapsed and support was withdrawn from North Korea and all transactions consequently has to be settled with hard cash. The result was a collapse in the economy and a decrease in the energy supply. The fertility of the soil declined with the loss of production. Replanting without fertilisers meant that fields became more and more barren. Traditional farming is too small to replace the losses and animals are in short supply. Tractors, transport and machinery lie rusting (it was estimated that only 20% of all farm machinery was in working order in the late 1990s. In the late 1980s, 25% of the workforce was engaged in agriculture; this has risen to 36% in the mid 1990s. With mainly human power available, harvest time results in crop wastage. Poor yields result in little money and the inability to buy in fertilisers, diesel and animals to help.

   Hope from Cuba

   Cuba’s economic problems mirrored North Korea’s in other ways. It too suffered with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and also had to deal with a far-reaching US embargo which prohibited sales of food and medicine to the island. In the face of these problems, Castro produced a new and discerning revolution – to completely transform the country’s agricultural system from an intensive, monocultural system to a smaller, more organic one. Production and storage was moved closer to urban areas to reduce transport costs. Urban agriculture was introduced, ranging from personal gardening (similar to allotments in the UK) to organised farms within the urban or greenbelt areas.

   Other techniques are used to replace the oil and petrochemicals previously used. Tractors are being replaced by oxen, the use of natural pest control researched and encouraged, co-operation between farmers increased, and State incentives to reverse the flow of population from towns to the country.

   What this website fails to note that although the typical US farm is totally depended on petroleum for vehicle use and the agricultural system is dependent on oil for globalized transport, the US has ample natural gas reserves for fertilizer production.

   But I would advance that natural gas extraction might be an even greater problem in the age of post-peak oil.

   As oil production diminishes, not only will there be a greater demand nationally for natural gas, but the negative impact on the economy will compel many rural communities to sell drilling rights for ‘fracking’ on their land.

   Even a best case scenario would concede that this will sacrifice some arable land. The worst case scenario would be that it might make large areas of the US uninhabitable, destroying entire water reservoirs and poisoning the land.

   This could precipitate food price hikes, as well as a migration of sorts out of rural areas. This could buttress local agriculture, which would be more active to begin with as oil fuel costs rise. This might be expected to be especially true in Hawaii.

   Hypothetically, what if there was a migration to urban areas on the scale of the move west to California by ‘Oakies’ escaping the dust bowl?

   In that case, unemployed white people would take the place of Mexican illegal workers. As the country urbanized, one might expect the new immigrants to be more receptive to the Democratic Party. In fact, there might be a rebellion against the Republican Party on the part of poor whites. As long as money is coming in and people are satisfied, they vote conservative, but when they face hardship, they tend to vote for the left.

   But migration affects people in a funny way psychologically. Refugees from rural areas won’t become “bourgeois bohemians” sipping cappuccinos and watching “Sex in the City”. People of different cultures tend to give each other an allergic reaction. For example, there were white communities in the South that voted mostly for Obama, but these tended to be isolated from black people. Taking income and education levels into account, equivalent white communities that were adjacent to black communities tended to vote against Obama. Familiarity breeds contempt. So if there were a migration out of rural America, there might be a mutual disgust. So the perception within the newly displaced population will be that there was a “stab in the back”, that it was liberal elites that brought down virtuous red-state farm communities.

   What would emerge politically would be similar to the neo-conservative movement or the Tea Party movement, which would be a “conservative anti-establishment” movement. To progressives, this would seem to be an outrageous paradox. However, the political and economic elite is made up of both the left and the right, as is the general population; populist movements (like the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement) tend to portray selectively their ideological opposition as a tiny elite pulling the strings.

   What is really crucial here is the notion of a “national betrayal”, which would mirror the rhetoric in the late 1970s and early 1980s of the right wing in the US in the aftermath of the Vietnam War or, more disturbingly, of Germany after its loss of the First World War. However, what would be at stake in the extreme hypothetical scenario mentioned above — the total economic collapse of rural communities in ‘red state’ America and their physical migration to more urban areas — would be potentially more traumatic than Germany’s post-war humiliation and economic collapse in the Great Depression.

   The point is that rural impoverishment will not necessarily lead to a revitalization of progressive politics. When people are hurting, they tend to vote for the center-left. But when they are devastated, their voting tends toward either extreme (and the extremes of left and right are not so different from one another). From what I am reading about peak oil and agriculture, catastrophe is not scenario dreamed up by fringe elements. It’s a probability quietly acknowledged by the mainstream status quo.

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5. skeptical once again December 10, 2011 at 9:01 am

   This webpage offers a summary of what in 2008 the oil company Dutch Royal Shell foresaw in the energy future.

   http://www.countercurrents.org/levine150211.htm

   Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. There will be a massive, decade-long economic slowdown, and geopolitical power will shift dramatically to energy-producing nations, the company said.

   The spokesman in the 2008 video provided on the Countercurrents webpage says that the world has “five or six” years before this crisis emerges. That generally accords with the post-peak world of increasing oil scarcity widely predicted by a variety of sources, which generally portray the years 2010 to 2012 as peak years of oil production followed by diminishing oil output.

   However, in 2011, Shell came out and said that the world economic crisis by dampening demand has pushed back the dates of oil scarcity, even though the general contours of what will happen will not change. Everything has shifted farther into the future, but the same projected pattern(s) still pertain.

   What will happen?

   Shell offers two scenarios, a pessimistic ‘Scramble’ scenario in which countries react to the coming energy shortage by competing with one another versus a better managed scenario called ‘Blueprints’ in which governments work with one another to provide alternatives.

   Shell’s 2008 and 2011 reports actually contain two scenarios. The one described above, called “Scramble,” is what it projects will happen if the world continues on its current course. A more optimistic version, called “Blueprints,” includes a squeeze but far less despair because the world acts to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

   Astonishingly, Shell seems to accept global warming as a simple fact, even while it avoids explicitly using that term. The Blueprints scenario would not only help bring the world out of the emerging energy crisis in the future, but would lead to a dramatic decrease in carbon emissions. Shell’s original video from 2008 illustrates this.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ2uIPeiEYQ

   The Scramble scenario also has political overtones that are as dark as its economic and environmental ones, because governments will feel compelled to resort with repression toward their own populations and accept repression in energy producing countries.

   It is interesting and disturbing that the public relations wing of a major oil company expresses the same basic view of the world’s energy future as do analysts who are often dismissed as alarmist by the status quo.

   It would be interesting what oil company analysts would say in private about Hawaii’s economic and political future, especially as jet fuel prices rise and global warming continues.

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6. skeptical once again December 11, 2011 at 1:15 pm

   People are not retiring because they cannot afford to retire.

   One reason that they cannot afford to retire is that up to 85% of recent college graduates have moved back in with their families. Even when these graduates have jobs and pay rent, it still puts strains on their parents’ finances. Paradoxically, because parents still work, there are fewer jobs for their kids, and because these young adults save so much, the economy remains stagnant.

   Here’s a NY Times article from November 2011 on the topic entitled “As New Graduates Return to Nest, Economy Also Feels the Pain”.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/business/economy/as-graduates-move-back-home-economy-feels-the-pain.html

   The article states that this negatively impacts the home building industry especially.

   “Increased housing demand definitely has multiplier effects throughout the economy,” said Gary D. Painter, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of research for the university’s Lusk Center for Real Estate. “We have these sort of missing potential households,” he said, which also means “missing” sales and jobs in industries like retail, construction and manufacturing.

   Some economists are optimistic that there is considerable pent-up demand for new homes because so many young adults are reluctantly staying with their parents. Several of Mr. Bouvier’s friends, he said, are “itching to get out.” As soon as they find work, he says, they’ll leave.

   “Once we get a little bit of job growth, or even expectations of better job market, those households are going to start breaking apart pretty fast,” said Mr. Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics. Household formation probably won’t lead the recovery, but once set into motion by other good economic news it can “supercharge growth.” He estimates that there is pent-up demand for close to 1.1 million new households, which is approximately equal to the number of excess vacant homes for sale and rent.

   “If these pent-up households were to form, then the oversupply of housing would be largely absorbed and housing construction would quickly ramp up,” he said.

   Mr. Bouvier, now three years out of school, is hoping to move into his own house early next year, ideally a place that he can “fix up and turn into good investment.” He says he’ll hire a construction crew to help with the renovations.

   “You know, they really should have kept that tax incentive for first-time home buyers,” he said. “I’m creating jobs after all. I thought that was a good thing.”

   This sentiment might be a mistake. Historically, home values fluctuate, but they basically return eventually to the rate of inflation, making the ownership of a home a good long-term hedge against inflation, but not an investment bonanza that some people imagined it to be. (Indeed, the worst of the housing bubble happened on the east and west coast in working-class areas where people saw home values escalate in prosperous suburbs; they then mistakenly thought that this also applied to themselves, that booming real estate made people rich, rather than the truth, which was that the rich made real estate boom.)

   The illusion that there is this pent-up demand for houses also fails to notice just who buys homes in the suburbs and why: people with children. There have been demographic changes, however. Also, there is already a gross oversupply of houses in the suburbs for that market of families with kids, even if that market grows, as the urban planner Christopher Leinberger noted in a well-known article in the Atlantic, “The Next Slum?”.

   http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-next-slum/6653/

   Demographic changes in the United States also are working against conventional suburban growth, and are likely to further weaken preferences for car-based suburban living. When the Baby Boomers were young, families with children made up more than half of all households; by 2000, they were only a third of households; and by 2025, they will be closer to a quarter. Young people are starting families later than earlier generations did, and having fewer children. The Boomers themselves are becoming empty-nesters, and many have voiced a preference for urban living. By 2025, the U.S. will contain about as many single-person households as families with children.

   Because the population is growing, families with children will still grow in absolute number—according to U.S. Census data, there will be about 4 million more households with children in 2025 than there were in 2000. But more than 10 million new single-family homes have already been built since 2000, most of them in the suburbs.

   One thing that banks are doing is tearing down the houses that they now own through foreclosure. Rather than modifying loans to borrowers, the banks have been foreclosing, and then finding that there are no buyers — so they give the land away for free on the condition that the new owner tear down the house. The banks are making this mistake and losing money because they still operate under the old assumption that there is a massive demand for real estate. It’s an expensive delusion, and also environmentally wasteful.

   This brings me to the issue of the big projects in Hawaii, which in some ways seem to be driven more by the local establishment rather than the needs of the society. For example, it seems like the Big Wind project is not permanent, that the wind turbines have a life expectancy of only 20 years, after which they will be “decommissioned”. Basically, the local utility would have the ratepayers fund a massive but temporary renewable energy project so that the utility would not be fined by the government in 2030 according to the statutes of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. In one scenario, when the system is finally up and running with all the bugs worked out and the State satisfied that the utility has fulfilled its legal obligation to renewable energy, the system would soon thereafter be shut down. (If history in Hawaii is any indication, the utility would then permanently maintain its rate structure after the massive rate hikes to pay for the system, even after the system is terminated. This would be a bonanza to HEI stockholders.)

   Now, is that an environmentally friendly project?

   Likewise, the rail project on Oahu — a multi-billion dollar, fully automated and elevated rail system extending 20 miles into low-rise suburbs where rail usage is problematic — might, if built, also turn out to be a temporary project. After a while, it could be dismantled if those trains are completing their circuits 24/7 with very few passengers. It would not just be an economic and transportation boondoggle, but an environmental one as well.

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7. skeptical once again December 12, 2011 at 8:55 pm

   This is my own update to the update recently given by Shell oil company in 2011 to their “Shell energy scenarios to 2050” originally produced in 2008.

   Shell’s original 2008 analysis was very much in line with standard theories of peak oil. The 2011 update claimed that while these prognostications are still valid, the economic downturn has pushed them into the future.

   In terms of developing alternative energy, this cloud might have a silver lining. Peak oil will arrive that much later, and alternative energy sources are being developed at an accelerated pace since the 2008 oil price hikes.

   Now, it looks like there might be another economic setback, perhaps a new recession or even a new great depression, with the German insistence that European countries engage in austerity.

   From a historical standpoint, this is especially disturbing because most of the European countries with the greatest problems have a history of extreme right-wing dictatorships.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/krugman-depression-and-democracy.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

   Also, there is the probability that the US would also enter a depression if Europe does.

   The “good” news in that scenario would be that peak oil would get pushed even further back.

   Hooray.

   On the other hand, what’s Hawaii gonna do?

   Reply ↓
8. skeptical once again December 13, 2011 at 1:30 pm

   You had a recent post entitled “Geller on transportation incompetence, and Omidyar’s local initiatives”.

   This is instructive in terms of defining ‘incompetence’ — as well as ‘corruption’.

   I would argue that in some ways Hawaii’s bureaucracy is not incompetent — at least according to the standards of a small town.

   Small town life revolves around the family, and a job is just an adjunct to that. In the big city, life revolves more around one’s career and professional reputation, and at the highest level, around one’s legacy (the obsession of Harvard dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg).

   So in a small town at its worst, one of the main functions of government is providing employment, especially for one’s family and friends. In small town New England, for example, one of the most important transportation functions is running the snow plow, and the job might as well go to your cousin Bob (who lives in a trailer on his parents’ front lawn).

   So when one accuses a local bureaucracy that it is incompetent at some task and as a consequence people are getting killed, members of that bureaucracy in a small-town culture would only smile and shake their heads. This is because it is completely obvious to themselves that the bureaucracy is very capable because … THEY HAVE JOBS!

   This is also the logic of the urban political machines that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century in the US. This sort of “corruption” might horrify the higher classes, but as New York’s “Boss” Tweed once told a journalist, no professionalized public bureaucracy could provide the vast and extensive benefits, especially to unassimilated immigrants, and thereby maintain the urban peace, than he did so energetically with his for-profit political operation. By that logic, without a vast patronage machine, immigrants would not have eventually moved into the middle classes and New York would have stagnated.

   So by that logic, patronage as the mission of government is unassailable. That is, as long as that system functions viably 1) according to its stated goals of providing jobs and 2) in comparison to its absence (the collapse of a middle class).

   This is still the acknowledged function of labor unions, that they redistribute wealth from the upper classes and create the conditions for an educated middle class. The question is whether this is actually happening, whether the union members are using their improved salaries to send their kids to Catholic school and then to the state university, or whether they are simply plowing this money into hyper-consumerism in order to appear upper-middle class.

   One negative example of dysfunctional wealth redistribution would be the effect of the Mafia on the economy of the northeastern US. Traditionally, the Mafia provides neighborhood law and order, insurance and entertainment (gambling, liquor, women). That’s not a problem in itself. In some ways, organized crime provides a way up the ladder and out of the old neighborhood. (For example, Meyer Lansky’s son graduated at the top of his class at West Point.) But more often in Sicilian culture, the son seeks to join the family business. So the problem with “corruption” in this case — or potentially in the case of labor unions — is primarily that people are moving UP in income and so they do not seek to move OUT of the old trade and go to college. At that stage, the old informal services provided by organized crime turn into social rot.

   The other problem is when bureaucracies mature. At this point, contradictory missions emerge. One of the stated goals of, say, an ambitious project to construct a local rail system is to provide temporary jobs for carpenters and electricians and long-term jobs in operations. But to make the new rail system viable economically, the system would have to be fully automated in terms of driverless trains, computerized ticket distribution and an honor’s system of voluntary compliance. Only custodial work and security guards would rely on humans, and those workers would probably be poorly paid immigrants (and their number minimal). Furthermore, this would be an extremely advanced system requiring specially trained tradesmen, so the construction work would not go to local workers in the numbers originally promised.

   The problem is that such grand schemes are often the products of untested, mediocre minds (think of the invasion of Iraq). The best and brightest tend to be more cautious, skeptical and realistic (think of Colin Powell).

   Within the old small-town patronage machine are a few people with inferiority complexes who dream the grandest dreams yet stumble in everyday operations. And that’s all well and good on its own terms … until some ambitious, mediocre politician who is a product of the small-town patronage system (Bush) gets delusions of grandeur and drinks the Kool-Aid. They are in the big leagues now, and held to a different standard.

   The logic of small-town life is also at work with the Big Wind project. In favor of the Big Wind, jobs are being promised, but they will not exist in numbers able to sustain outer island communities. In opposition, there are those who claim that the Big Wind will destroy those communities, but those communities are falling apart economically anyway. Both positions are clueless.

   Life in a big city is dynamic, and brutally so. Life in a small town feels like things will never change, almost like Heaven. Desiring that feeling and having that mentality in itself cannot be faulted, but it creates the conditions of what outsiders would see as incompetence. This applies not only to people who live on Molokai and Lanai, with their floundering responses to the Big Wind, but also to Hawaiian Electric, which seems almost like a 19th-century small-town monopoly out of its depth in this new reality.

   Reply ↓
9. skeptical once again December 16, 2011 at 6:38 pm

   Today’s Civil Beat story “Ewa Developer’s Switch from Marina to Lagoon Raises Legal Issues” might also raise certain economic questions that go unaddressed in the article.

   The article implies that a bait-and-switch scheme might have been at play, that the marina concept was presented to get ag lands rezoned and houses sold, but it was all in bad faith.

   Now, this might have been the case at some point recently, when literature and sales pitches continued to sell the marina concept to potential buyers even after the company changed its mind. But considering all the hoops the company jumped through in pushing forward with the project, this project was probably originally done in good faith, with hope that people would work and play in this new development. Moreover, this mixed-use idea might have been workable when it was first pitched.

   But what this article might have missed is that the economics might have changed. Building new suburbs might not be as viable as it once was for various reasons, and the home building industry is just beginning to figure this out. Of course, the unions and the developers might blame politicians for not committing to building new infrastructure or blame onerous regulations for a slowdown in construction, but this would be a fantasy. The politicians and agencies in Hawaii are in the back pocket of these special interests.

   One new reality is that people just have less money. People who spend more than three times their family income on a house tend to go into foreclosure, pulling the market down with them. Historically, the real estate market is self-regulating in that way. Relatedly, what people once invested in their homes has or will evaporate in certain regions. In contrast, if incomes do rise, so will home prices. Is that happening in Hawaii?

   There are also demographic trends. In the 1950s, half of all American families had children, and the suburbs were a destination for new families with kids. Today, only one-third of families have kids, and supposedly in 2025 that ratio will fall to one-fourth. But the number could fall even further than that because of more recently noted trends in family patterns.

   http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/

   Other trends are educational. The public schools in the suburbs are historically superior to city schools, and this fact could once financially justify a move to the suburbs. This is no longer true, as contemporary K-8 urban public schools are just as good or even better than suburban public schools, a new reality that helps to defer the big move to the suburbs for a family by a decade, if it does not nix it altogether. As more rich people continue to move to the cities and poor people move to the suburbs, the urban schools might become the best schools and the suburban schools blighted.

   So basically the CB article failed to explain why this project got downgraded. Some politician like Richard Lim might like to scapegoat a mythical “well-healed nimby and ten surfers” for the scuttling of this project as he does for other projects that simply fell apart under their own poor administration, but that’s denial. The land development industry is simply not awake to the new realities around them.

   As they say, “Denial … it ain’t in Egypt.”

   De Nile ain’t in Ewa Beach either. It’s gonna be a ‘lagoon’, not a marina.

   Reply ↓
10. skeptical once again December 18, 2011 at 1:01 pm

    In regard to football at UH Manoa, it is interesting that Greenwood is regarded as an absentee landlord by the UH faculty, but when it comes to sports — or rather, when it comes to football — she is then perceived as a micro-manager. This probably tells us less about Greenwood (or about faculty perceptions and biases) than about the priorities of the state, as her background is in the natural sciences, not sports. Greenwood is simply following her marching orders, probably via the Regents, communicated to her in informal settings. If this is the case, then that means that the Regents and the politicians behind them are still locked into the old ways. A quality public university is essential to economic diversification. There does seem to be efforts in those areas, especially with regard to the funding of a film school. But there is a faction of society, in the general public but also in the elite, who are simply enamored of football. Some of these people are presidents of major local banks and so forth, and they do have a certain native intelligence, but they just don’t seem to realize that UH football only wins games when they play really godawful teams. In their business dealings and their own lives, these local elites may display common sense and hardheaded reason, but they really lose it when it comes to football. They have good intentions, but in some respects they seem to live in the past, both in their own glory days of youth and in Hawaii’s boom days of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a different world today.

    This might also show that Greenwood is terrified of losing her job. That’s a good thing, however, because virtually no one of ability wants her job, and she does seem to be competent. Basically, she is like an airline pilot who is keeping an airplane in a prolonged holding pattern over an airport while several crises are resolved down below.

    One of these crises is UH’s dismal reputation among potential university administrators. This is complicated because the national pool of candidates is not only shrunken by the unwillingness of capable administrators to take the Hawaii job, but because so many of the few remaining candidates have the personality type that would be compatible with the society.

    Another crisis might be generational change at UH. Between 1964 and 1968, the number of professors at UH increased by 1000 percent. By and large these people are still there and are reluctant to retire, and they have expectations grounded in the boom years of Hawaii’s past.

    The third crisis might be generational change within the elite, since so many people within Hawaii’s elite — the Old Guard — made their nut in real estate and banking. They are hardworking and accomplished, but they are of the old order. Their orientation is toward the past, regardless of their progressive rhetoric (their notion of ‘progress’ is 1950s-style land development, not diversification). Whenever there is a budget crisis, they start chattering about the benefits of legalized gambling.

    The fourth crisis might be in the general population. New land development projects in Hawaii may start to fizzle, not because of public opposition, but because the real estate boom played itself out seven years ago. Prepared or not, more people are going to go to college, at the undergraduate and graduate levels because the old type of jobs just don’t exist and aren’t coming back.

    If Greenwood can hang in there until about 2016, finding a quality successor for her will be that much easier because of modest changes in the right direction in society. In the meantime, there may be a barely discernible shift away from grand development schemes and toward sustainable development and diversification. This is not because of the visionary efforts of the status quo, but because that status quo might just be in the early stages of crumbling under its own weight.

    But what would that future look like? No one has a crystal ball for the long term. But the medium term offers a few hints, because it is a hybrid of sorts of the status quo and the future. For example, the proposed Third City between Diamond Head and Kalihi has some of the classic traits of old-school, Old Guard “old thinking” as a big, clunky land development project. But it is a shift away from rezoning ag lands for suburbs, and it is a embrace of true urban life in all its high-density, mixed-use glory — two radical changes for almost any place in the US, not to mention Hawaii. It is also a big step toward energy efficiency. (The “car of the future” won’t be a car or a fancy train, but an iPhone and a pair of shoes.) Ten or fifteen years from now in Hawaii, gasoline might be permanently stuck at a minimum of $8/gallon and tourism revenues might get cut in half from what they are now, but the society would not collapse within the urban core the way it might in the suburbs.

    Reply ↓
11. skeptical once again December 24, 2011 at 1:15 pm

    One thing that I had expected from either Civil Beat or the Abercrombie administration was an overview of scenarios of post-peak oil in Hawaii.

    One of the reasons for the push in Hawaii toward renewable energy (aside from the greenhouse effect) was that Hawaii would be economically crippled from the supposedly inevitable and permanent rise of oil prices.

    The renewable energy projects in Hawaii, however, would apply only as sources of electricity. This would protect Hawaii’s homes and businesses from oil price shocks, but not consumers of petroleum. There are not that many electric cars in Hawaii. Are their number growing at a rate that will be sufficient to protect drivers from rising oil prices? And what of mass transit? Almost all of the mass transit in Hawaii runs or is planned to run on oil or on electricity derived from oil. How much will that change? Is talk of change really realistic?

    Most importantly, perhaps, is air travel. As the price of petroleum rises, so will the cost of jet fuel, putting a damper on tourism just as it did in 2008.

    In the long-run, however, will the rising price of air travel really destroy tourism in Hawaii?

    It might be unrealistic to assume that Japanese tourists will stop coming to Hawaii. For the Japanese, Hawaii occupies a special place in their national consciousness as a society that represents everything that Japan lacks (Hawaii is multi-ethnic, sunny, warm, natural, laid back). But they may come here less often and for shorter stays, especially if Japan’s economy continues to stagnate. But coming to Hawaii just once might be a kind of pilgrimage that the Japanese will always feel compelled to make, despite the cost.

    American tourists might be less romantic and more pragmatic. In 2008, American families would compromise on their vacations. Instead of going to Hawaii, they would spend a day at Disneyland; or, instead of going to Disneyland, they would camp in the backyard. There is no sentimental attachment to Hawaii in this market as there is with the Japanese market.

    More Chinese might come to Hawaii, but they would be the richest Chinese. In fact, tourism in Hawaii might shift to the upscale market in general. But in the long-term, the Chinese market might not be as promising as Chinese prosperity and numbers might suggest. China has always been self-contained and self-sufficient, like France. For example, when the French want to go skiing, they go to the French Alps, when they want to go to the beach they go to the French Riviera. In fact, there have always been American dreams of the vast “China market”, but the Chinese don’t buy from foreigners, they sell to foreigners. (In fact, the British had to import opium from India into China in order to balance their trade with China, leading one-quarter or 75 million people of China’s population of 300 million people to become addicts.) The Chinese probably won’t come all the way to Hawaii to gamble since they can do it in Macau (and eventually in China itself), and even if they did they would never leave the casinos to tour the island or spend money.

    Ironically, the floundering of tourism in post-peak oil Hawaii might rejuvenate the film and TV industry here. Instead of travelling, people will stay at home and watch what they are missing.

    Also, more people in Hawaii will slowly move closer to the urban core, perhaps not into the heart of urban Honolulu, but steadily closer, away from the fringe suburbs.

    Reply ↓
    1. skeptical once again December 25, 2011 at 10:45 am

       Of course, another scenario of post-peak oil involves not only more expensive oil and declining tourism, but increasingly expensive food transport.

       So another thing that is not being discussed is local self-sufficiency.

       But here is one person advocating that — some 14 year-old on the big island.

       http://www.civilbeat.com/posts/2011/12/23/14330-calling-all-big-island-youth-for-a-sustainable-world/

       It is interesting that up until recently in Hawaii, this sort of concept seemed to be unthinkable.

       There seems to be an instinctual “Well, we cannot do that….” reaction locally to any call not just for self-sufficiency, but also for anything that breaks with the status quo.

       That is, any call to try anything new is framed as being “unrealistic”. The call to preserve ag lands is met with a response of “Well, land in Hawaii is so expensive because local families need homes to live in….” But if land is so expensive, people need to live in apartments in town; but no one seems to heed that call for realism in home buying decisions.

       But it turns out that the current mode of buying off-island agricultural products will become increasingly unrealistic. But it is as though a large portion of the population fear the idea of change toward self-sufficiency. It reminds me of when I was a kid learning how to ride a bicycle, and my parents would talk about removing the training wheels from my bicycle: I would be overcome by a feeling of real dread.

       So Civil Beat and the Abercrombie administration might have missed an opportunity this holiday season to publicize just how we should eat locally.

       Reply ↓
       1. Ian Lind Post authorDecember 25, 2011 at 11:45 am

          But Gov. Abercrombie has been quite vocal on the issue of food self-sufficiency.

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          1. skeptical once again December 25, 2011 at 1:08 pm

             What I referred to was publicizing the way we could have eaten this holiday.

             I myself am not sure how to do that. Most of the food I am eating today comes from Costco.

             How would I eat local for a holiday meal? Poi?

             I did make an effort to rethink our holiday meal somewhat. To me, it does not make sense to spend one hour cooking a turkey when chances are the temperature outside would be 85 degrees. So this holiday season, turkey was banished and steak, cold ham and salmon have been adopted.

             If you have any ideas of your own in this regard, please send them my way! I want to gradually morph my holiday meal into a locovore festival.

             Abercrombie and others talk about food security in terms of preparing for a freak occurrence, in terms of Hawaii being cut off from the rest of the world. That’s an unlikely scenario to begin with. Also, it would take an entire planting and growing season to prepare for that.

             What’s more realistic is to look at what is inevitable: post-peak oil shocks that will make petroleum prices rise permanently.

             Another is health. Hawaii has the highest fetal diabetes rates in the US due to high sugar consumption (itself due to warm weather and ice cream and soda consumption). I do think that Abercrombies early childhood education initiative might be better replaced with an early child health initiative; it takes a generation to see the benefits of education, whereas health initiatives have immediate benefits.

             Also, the schools should serve fresh locally grown food. Kid’s in France get a three-course meal everyday, by law. I think the US is too corrupt when it comes to dumping garbage into school lunch programs.

             Reply ↓
             1. Ian Lind Post authorDecember 25, 2011 at 2:46 pm

                Let’s see.

                Abercrombie and Schatz campaigned on the agriculture issue.

                Here’s from their campaign pitch:

                “It is time for an Agricultural Renaissance in Hawaii. Prior to Western contact, Hawaii was entirely self-sufficient in the production of food and supported a population nearly as large as Hawaii’s current population.

                Of course, diets and lifestyles have changed, but it is important for us to remember the potential of our rich islands. As recently as 50 years ago, about half of our food was still produced locally. Now, it is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of our food is imported.”

                The issue of “food security” in the event of a “disruption” is just one aspect of their plan.

                Now, whether or not they’ve managed to take concrete steps on this part of their campaign promise in the first year of the administration is an open question.

                Reply ↓
                1. skeptical once again December 26, 2011 at 11:47 am

                   I found that Abercrombie campaign website, and yes, there are a number of issues within the food security issue that are addressed.

                   http://www.neilabercrombie.com/index.php/issues/more/food_and_agriculture/

                   But I would assert that when the issue of ag lands and food security is debated in public, logistical disruption is pretty much the only theme that enters the discourse — and only briefly at that. Aside from some farmers and managers at Whole Foods, this topic is not on anyone’s mind, not really.

                   Moreover, I am not sure if it is really on Abercrombie’s mind. This was mostly just window dressing so that Abercrombie could defeat “El Guapo”. If you recall El Guapo’s website, there were no policy issues, only a few endorsements (“Filipinos for El Guapo”, “Architects for El Guapo”). This was one of the more disturbing aspects of El Guapo’s candidacy: that he had little knowledge of or seemingly interest in public policy.

                   So if someone goes to a job interview and they are smooth talkers with a kindly appearance and a positive attitude, they might get the job over a candidate who smart but a little stiff and cold (Bainum).

                   But in the big leagues it is an asset to display a knowledge of the issues and to have the facade of a plan. But the real goal for Abercrombie was actually extremely limited: to prevent El Guapo from gaining power.

                   I suppose that discussing just how we can eat local over the holidays will fall to Whole Foods or Civil Beat/Kanu Hawaii or some blog like this.

                   Meanwhile, food prices will rise and the suburbs will grow poorer as petroleum becomes more expensive to produce.
12. skeptical once again December 26, 2011 at 6:51 pm

    One more thing that might need to be explained in greater detail to the public in Hawaii is how we can deal with the rising price of petroleum in terms of where we live and in which kind of abode.

    How does one convince people who live in fringe suburbs to get out while they can, especially after they have invested so much in living there and when they cannot really imagine living in town?

    I have no idea.

    But one thing that might get people to think the unthinkable is to broach the topic of the “joys of being a landlord”.

    Don’t laugh … just yet.

    For the price of one’s house far from town, one can buy two or three apartments closer to town and rent one or two of them out.

    This would provide a concrete example of what people can do to deal with the coming economic calamity.

    In fact, the economic disruptions that would come with post-peak oil might mean that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs, and renting out to other people just might put food on the table.

    The other issue is how we are going to design houses that don’t require much energy input.

    How do we design homes — more specifically apartments — to be ‘zero net energy homes’, especially in a sub-tropical climate?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_building

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13. skeptical once again December 27, 2011 at 3:51 pm

    How will the rising price of oil affect UH athletics?

    Not only will there be less money as Hawaii’s economy contracts in the face of inflation and decreased tourism revenues, but UH teams will find it increasingly difficult to fund their travel expenses.

    Football in particular will come under strain as it finally dawns on the public that Hawaii is doomed to a losing team because Hawaii does not have the economic and population base to support a winning Div I football team. It’s all a fantasy.

    What are the alternatives, which seem inevitable in the long run in this light?

    1. Perhaps more club sports. At European universities, if students want sports, they join a team. Spectator sports are left to professionals, not student-athletes.

    2. Perhaps each campus will have its own teams that will compete with other campuses.

    3. Perhaps new, less expensive sports, like rugby and la crosse, will emerge to compete with more expensive sports like football. (According to a study by the Wall Street Journal, the average football telecast lasts for 186 minutes; but in that period, the ball is in play for only 11 minutes. All the other 175 minutes are given over to replays, commentary, commercials and music and dance. Other sports can have more bang for the buck.)

    It’s taking people in Hawaii a long, long time to figure out that the UH football team only wins when they play the very worst teams.

    What does this slowness tell us about our public higher education system?

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14. skeptical once again December 28, 2011 at 10:50 am

    An article in Civil Beat on the increasing level of light pollution on Oahu: http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2011/12/27/14268-hawaii-astronomers-and-animals-vexed-by-oahus-blazing-lights/ A comment posted in that article by Sarah Lin:

    “Several years ago, under Mufi Hannemann, the city had plans to install three times the amount of lighting on Lunalilo Home Road using the same technology that had been used 40 years prior. After protests by the community, the city changed the plans and installed flat lenses. They also went from triple to double the amount of lighting on part of the project, 40% more on another part and left the original lighting on the remainder. It is important to note that the city made a commitment to use flat lenses in all future street lighting projects, and we must hold them to that. “The question that still lingers, however, is: Why did the city plan on installing three times the amount of lighting when it was clear that much, much less was required?”

    Interesting question. That reminded me of a Honolulu Weekly article from years back (I cannot find it on the Internet now) when street lights were “finally” installed on the Pali Highway. The HW reporter called up all manner of State and City offices to ask just why the Pali Highway was illuminated at great expense, when Kailua denizens actually objected to lighting the Pali. The closest the reporter got to an answer was basically a guess on the part of a government official that illumination would provide a level of safety for driver’s whose car’s broke down on the Pali at night. Granted, this was the pre-cellphone era. But the reality is that there is no real reason. It’s just simply mindless intertia. I think that the UH department of urban planning has some degree of culpability in the tendency for pointless development in Hawaii. I can imagine an old professor from the 1950s pointing to a map in class and saying “You see this dirt road? We need a highway in here. That’s progress…”, and a younger professor from the 1960s pointing to the same map years later and saying “You see this highway? We need a monorail in here. That’s progress…” A part of this tendency is a fascination with technology and a very uncritical way of thinking that seems to go along with that technological fixation. But this is all tied in with a greater worldview. I once read an article entitled something like “Why are there famines?”, which claimed that organizations like the IMF will not allow non-export seeds to be shipped to countries experiencing famine. There is this fear that these countries would then plant seeds for subsistence farming rather than for exporting crops like coffee. Now, this might seem like a capitalist conspiracy, but what underlies this policy is a belief that these poor societies would simply stagnate without an export economy. After all, without the capital that would come from exports, how could a country afford roads, bridges, hospitals and — most importantly — schools? Schools are the most important part of this equation, because the assumption is that without the material trappings of modern ‘civilization’ one cannot really possess education or culture, which is what supposedly elevates humans above the other animals. In a way, this is a very French way of thinking, and it seems to me that the IMF is dominated by over-educated Frenchmen. Of course, the fly in the ointment in this French worldview is the United States, which is — materially, at least — a fully developed society, but with a monstrous mass culture in the place where there should be a refined national culture. At the other end of the spectrum would be someplace like Bali or Tibet — another anomaly in the French view of things — which exhibits (or seems to) a high level of spiritual, moral and intellectual development despite a certain material backwardness. For the French, only France exhibits that perfect balance of cultural and material refinement. For Americans, the development paradigm is simpler. Build stuff. Add more and more technology. Do this, and you can be great, just like us! And all that all that fancy-pants schoolbook learning and culture stuff is nice window dressing, but its really not necessary. Better to build more prisons. Never mind that health rates are actually declining. And never mind that you are building a system that is highly vulnerable to disruption of energy supplies. Time to start a garden. Subsistence farming is good.

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15. skeptical once again December 30, 2011 at 6:19 pm

    FYI:

    ExxonMobil is considered by some to be the best run major corporation in the world. It’s Chair and CEO, Rex Tillerson, has a total compensation package of $29 M/year.

    http://people.forbes.com/profile/rex-w-tillerson/31576

    By contrast, Constance Lau, the head of HEI, earns about $7 M/year.

    http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=1095886&ticker=HE:US

    Is Hawaiian Electric really THAT well run?

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