2 thoughts on “Another morning in Kaaawa”

1. skeptical once again December 28, 2011 at 12:19 pm

   It’s not “peak oil” that looms. We are in peak oil now. It’s ‘post-peak oil’. That has been expected to start in 2012, and get far worse in 2015 (although the economic downturn delays this for a while).

   Also, it’s not just the higher price of gasoline, but the drag on the economy. For example, the City and the State seemed to have ceased fixing the roads on a regular schedule since the economic downturn of the 1990s. (In fact, if you look at a relatively affluent suburb like Kailua, the houses there have not been painted regularly since the 199os.) With post-peak oil, the roads on Oahu are going to get even worse. Can you handle that.

   It also means more permanent government cutbacks, especially of mass transit, just the way bus routes have been scaled back since 2008. Can you handle more cars on the road?

   It gets worse. As the following website notes, there are abstract economic assumptions that the US can grow out of its current national debt the way it did after WWII. But these assumptions fail to notice basic things, like that the US was expanding industrially after WWII, and had no economic competitors; the situation today is the opposite of that. Also, this “teenage acne” model of growing out of debt does not take into account the collapse of the liquid fuels (oil) market.

   http://www.postpeakliving.com/peak-oil-primer

   Reply ↓
   1. skeptical once again January 1, 2012 at 1:24 pm

      The website that i noted above offers an accumulation of studies of post-peak oil, and it is solid in that sense.

      But its vision of the future and its prescription of what can and should be done seems unrealistic. It is as though all the Y2K hysteria of the late 1990s had been saved in a big can and has been released for the latest crisis. Civilization is predicted to collapse, and we will have to eat our cats and canaries just to survive.

      That might miss the point. The record oil prices of 2008 saw gasoline at $4/gallon in the US. Currently, gasoline is at $3/gallon in the continental US, $4/gallon on Oahu and $5/gallon on much of the outer islands of Hawaii. Yet people in Hawaii are not yet eating their cats.

      What will probably happen over the next few years as prices inch upwards to new highs will be a continuation of recent trends. More people will decide not to buy a house in the fringe suburbs. Home prices in the outer suburbs will then fall, leading more suburban homes with mortgages to ‘go underwater’, where the mortgage is worth more than the house itself, which will encourage more foreclosures. More rich people will move into town, and more poor people will move into the now-affordable suburbs — a process that will accelerate as suburban schools consequently decline and urban schools improve. Since 2008, municipalities swimming in red ink have been cutting back on mass transit routes in the suburbs just when people cannot afford to drive; however, the tax base of dense urban areas might improve with the influx of the affluent, sustaining urban public transit. Also, if gasoline rises by $1/gallon, that might add $100/month to a family budget; college graduates returning home often strain the family budget by $300/month, causing parents to defer their retirement. Rising gas prices could likewise mean more deferred retirements.

      These are the quiet long-term trends that have been evident for several years, and that will continue to grow and become more evident between 2012 to 2015, the initial post-peak oil years (which may be delayed because of the economic downturn’s suppression of oil demand).

      The 2008 oil price hikes had such a devastating impact on consumer behavior because it was, like so many other of the simultaneous crises, totally unexpected and because it came at a time of rapidly contracting financial resources. Since then, people have gotten rid of or grown wary of their SUVs. New record oil prices might not impact consumers in the same traumatic way.

      But after 2015, oil prices are expected to rise dramatically. What will life look like then? According to the following video, the result will be an economic collapse that is not accompanied by a societal collapse, since society will have to ‘re-localize’.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Zq1kJFhh8

      The question might be, how can society re-localize when it was never local to begin with? In fact, the video pitches its institute’s online survival courses — a prime example of a new kind of globalism. The video argues that global tourism will eventually collapse, and indeed, in 2008 there was a move to local tourism. But global trade in 2008-2009 did not completely collapse. And as trade slows, oil prices could be expected to some degree stabilize.

      It’s not an apocalypse we’re looking forward to, but perhaps more of the same. That is still tragic. But the real problem is that nobody in Hawaii seems to be getting into the nitty gritty of post-peak life, although the likes of Abercrombie and Schatz, and Blue Planet and Omidyar, seem to know what we are in for. It’s not in the interest of politicians and “well-heeled nimbys” to appear negative.

      So what is the average Joe supposed to do? Just keep plowing his life’s savings into a mortgage on a house out in the sticks?

      Reply ↓

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