This world we live in...

It's amazing to think of how many billions of dollars are spent on road and highway construction in America, but most people don't give it a second thought. Wouldn't it make more sense to spend a fraction of that on planning communities that are built on a human, walkable scale?

Too many people here on the Wasatch Front are density-phobic. When some people hear the term high density, they immediately think of slummy apartment buildings or ugly condos. Density can be bad and it can be good. A well-designed, walkable and aesthetically pleasing neighborhood with shops that have one or two stories of living space above them can be very, very nice neighborhoods. "High density" doesn't have to be apartment buildings either. Consider dense neighborhoods with Victorian-style houses. Think of homes with nice porches that front onto tree-lined brick sidewalks.

Oh wait, what I just described existed in America once upon a time. It was a time before we decided that we were going to build our entire lives and landscape around the automobile.

Sometimes I wonder what was going through the minds of developers and local government officials back in the 1950s. Ever noticed how a lot of subdivisions from 40 or 50 years ago don't even have sidewalks? Did they believe that walking was just a thing of the past? I guess it's easy to be mesmerized by the ability to drive everywhere when gasoline costs only $0.21 a gallon.

On page 68 of The Long Emergency, Kunstler so aptly states:

"The denial about global peak in the United States is already fierce, as investments in car-dependent, oil-addicted infrastructure are greater here than in any other nation and Americans consider their way of life a God-given entitlement."

And on page 65, he also writes:

"For many Americans, who have never known a way of life without cheap oil, there is a simple inability to imagine life without it. Some say that just because more oil hasn't been discovered doesn't mean that it isn't there. They are unimpressed by data showing that discovery peaked world-wide forty years ago and has been declining steadily ever since."

Amen Kunstler.

Have we hit the peak?

This is from Wikipedia's peak oil article:

World oil production has been essentially flat since the beginning of 2005. Colin Campbell of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) has calculated that the global production of conventional oil peaked in the spring of 2004 albeit at a rate of 23-GB/yr, not Hubbert's 13-GB/yr. Another peak oil proponent Kenneth S. Deffeyes predicted in his book Beyond Oil - The View From Hubbert's Peak that global oil production would hit a peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005 (Deffeyes has since revised his claim, and now argues that world oil production peaked on December 16 2005).

Of the three largest oil fields in the world, two have peaked. Mexico announced that its giant Cantarell Field entered depletion in March, 2006, as did the huge Burgan field in Kuwait in November, 2005. In April, 2006, a Saudi Aramco spokesman admitted that its mature fields are now declining at a rate of 8% per year, and its composite decline rate of producing fields is about 2%, thus implying that Ghawar, the largest oil field in the world may have peaked. New drilling in Saudi Arabia may be able to replace a portion of that country's production decline.

Traditional natural gas supplies are also under the constraints of production peaks, which especially affect specific geographic regions because of the difficulty of transporting the resource over long distances. Natural gas production may have peaked on the North American continent in 2003, with the possible exception of Alaskan gas supplies which cannot be developed until a pipeline is constructed. Natural gas production in the North Sea has also peaked. UK production was at its highest point in 2000, and declining production and increased prices are now a sensitive political issue there. Even if new extraction techniques yield additional sources of natural gas, like coalbed methane, the energy returned on energy invested will be much lower than traditional gas sources, which inevitably leads to higher costs to consumers of natural gas.

There are some countries that have already passed their oil production peak.