Sunday, April 06, 2008

Suburbs Have No Future

In the wake of the disruptions to our civilization which result from peak oil, I'm of the opinion that most people will view raising kids in auto-dependent suburbs as an act of (inadvertent) cruelty.

Living on a quarter-acre lot in some ugly subdivision (that probably calls itself something like "The Estates at Hampton Commons"...) is going to become economically impossible in a world of rare, expensive motor fuel: I'm going to write more about this is a later post, but no combination of bio-diesel, ethanol, fuel-cells, or anything else ["technology"] is going to allow the continuation of our current, low-density-suburb, auto-dependent way of life to continue.

Dick Cheney once famously described this way of life as non-negotiable - and it isn't, though not in the sense that he meant. The laws of physics will be dictating the terms of our surrender, and that's that.

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