SC92-13

Near our home a very large residential development ( 3.100+ residences, the Hacienda Project ) is in the early planning stages, and the Strata Equity Group are the investment entity that owns the land this project would be built on. They of course are seeking a profit in the endeavor for their investors. I have been communicating with the Vice President of Strata, Eric Flodine on some issues I think are relevant to the viability of this project. I gave him the book " The Long Emergency " by James Howard Kunstler which he has since finished reading. I sent him this e-mail information along with some of my own observations recently:

........I don't know if you have checked out the lifeaftertheoilcrash.net site, page 1 and page 2 that I told you about. If not I still highly recommend it as there is alot of great info there on this subject of energy and it wouldn't take you that long to go through. Here is a relevant and timely article from a site that discusses solid info concerning our growing energy crisis:

http://www.ricefarmer.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Energy, Not Money, Makes the World Go Around

Governments are further putting themselves in debt and debasing their currencies for the purpose of economic stimuli that will supposedly pull the world out of the recession and set us back on the track to “sustained economic growth.” Any economic stimulus achieved in this manner is what the president of the World Bank referred to as a “sugar high” (although he was wrong in saying that getting credit markets going again will solve the problem), which will last only as long as all that borrowed money is churning through the economy. The thinking behind the stimulus plans, and behind the belief that unfreezing credit markets will fix the economy, is that money is the prime mover. As long as lots of money is sloshing around, the economy will hum, people will find jobs, and economic growth is assured. And up until now it certainly looked that way.But as a growing shadow is cast across the world’s energy supply, and as we observe with horror and fascination the end of the cheap energy that has fueled 20th-century economic growth and globalization, it’s more apparent day by day that energy, not money, makes the world go around.Let’s consider a hypothetical situation in which I have a large expanse of forest, and I want you to cut all the trees and haul them to a lumber mill. I hand you a huge wad of money as payment. So, what are you going to do with that money? Are you going to buy a hand saw, walk into the forest, and set to work? Of course not. You would be at it for years and get nowhere. What you would do with the money is hire men with chainsaws and diesel-powered logging machinery, and then bring in trucks to haul off the logs. So it’s obvious that the money itself doesn’t do the work, it just buys you access to the energy that actually does the work. If the energy isn’t there in the first place, all the money in the world won’t be enough to log that forest.So the reason that all this stimulus spending will ultimately not solve any problems is because our energy supply is now on the decline. We developed our economies, built vast infrastructure, created whole industries possible only with plentiful energy (such as the airlines), globalized the world economy, and energized the development of high technology with a bonanza of cheap, high-quality energy. Now that both quality and quantity are beginning to decline, the same amount of money is able to mobilize progressively less energy. That is why infrastructure is crumbling worldwide, why governments and financial experts are admitting that we have to redefine “full employment,” why globalization is starting to reverse, why pensions are disappearing, why economic growth is stagnating, why the automotive industry and airlines are on the ropes, and why a whole host of other disruptive changes are setting in.History has always been about who has the resources, which of course translate into energy. It’s surprising that anyone would think differently............

As hydrocarbon energy supplies begin declining, as the evidence now strongly suggest is occuring with oil and soon with natural gas, the masses of people and vast economies that were built by once abundant and cheap energy will begin to decline too. No alternative energy sources by themselves, or in combination will forestall to any significant degree this coming reality. The qualities of life the affluent nations experienced in recent decades was only possible because we reached the zenith of our ability to extract for a realatively brief period easy to get and high quality hydrocarbon liquid fuel. The landscape regarding all of this is changing quickly now and those prosperous times of extreme consumption won't be possible anymore. It will not matter how many zillions of dollars the Fed Guru's will print out of digits in a data base, without the massive amounts of energy which kept everything running, negative growth the likes we have not seen in our lifetimes will ensue. Between this energy crisis and the crumbling state of the western economies the outlook is nothing less than dire for our futures. Kunstler actually does offer up a range of solutions quite regularly in his blog essays but societies headlong rush to keep the " business as usual " infinite growth paradigm intact means that the really drastic wholesale societal changes that would be prudent to take to have any reasonable ability to mitigate to some degree the fallout from these changes will not be pursued. At least not until realistically its far too late. How can the general public even have a chance to make the comprehensive changes needed when we are constantly being lied to about just how really bad thing have gotten, and how there going to get much worse. Trying to asign timeframes to how all of these myraid problems will unfold is something I think people should be very cautious with, since the complexity of all the various interactions consistently make specific projections of timelines eroneous. If all of these observations I'm suggesting to you have merit, the signs of their reality will be more and more difficult to ignore. There will however be much scapegoating and the pointing of fingers in the wrong directions which will continue to confuse the masses about whats really going on.

So basically I'd say what we will be seeing is decreasing energy availability and its increasing price, which will continue to wreak growing havoc on the industrialized economies around the world. All of this disaray will precipitate ever growing social disruptions and growing resource wars. The alternative energy forms ( currently on the radar ) will show themselves to be fraught with numerous problems that will prevent their ability to be scaled to anything remotely close to what hydrocarbon liquid energy forms were giving us at the bust " of our last " great bubble in the 2007-2008 period. Governments throughout the world will become more totalitarian as they try to hold together the societal cohesiveness of their countries. As things devolve there will be a long list of other dire issues that will exacerbate these trends. A few examples like water shortages, climate change, excessive populations, collapsing ecosystems, mass species extinctions, peaks for many vital resources, and many more issues that could be named. Changing the dire direction that humanity has been on since its discovery and beginning use of hydrocarbon energy ( specifically oil ) some 150 years ago has shown itself to be a gargantuan task, like trying to change the direction of the Titanic before it hit the iceberg. There is some small percentage of the population trying to sound the alarms, but the passengers are not hearing it, or in many cases are willfully ignoring it because what it tells them is scary, and very inconvenient. So we will be hitting the ice hard, and I think now its just a matter of how long it will take for our behemouths of ultra energy dependent complex economies to sink back to levels ( and population numbers ) that are consistent with the new energy realities. This huge change has the real potential to be catastropic ( and quickly occuring ) in nature. The masses in general just don't grasp to any extent just how close we are to going over the edge of the cliff on these matters. Regarding solutions to such things, there will be many things attempted and tried along the way. We will all do what we can to cope as these things unfold. Good luck to you and your family Eric :-) PS, And if all of this is true, then the Hacienda Project makes no sense whatsoever. A mega housing development in a remote desert location that will be attempted ( if ever started ) in a time ( into the foreseable future ) of vastly increasing energy cost with declining availability of the same, and vastly decreasing water supplies in the southwest in general. Something to think about.

and I sent him this today:

Pertaining to one of the observations in your e-mail, I think if you were to go to kunstler.com and e-mail Jim about the specifics of this Hacienda Project, pointing out its location in the desert southwest, I have little doubt you would find that Mr Kunstler would consider this community location and format is completely contrary to what he would propose as living arrangements that would make any sense in relation to the many converging crisis trends of our time. You may recall from reading the Long Emergency that Jim feels that the desert southwest will reap the most severe repercussions from the energy crisis which we are now in the beginning stages of ( regarding the continental US ). There is a new residential development that was begun on Standing Rock in our area getting to the point of a long block wall around it and preliminary grading. It now sits silent with nothing being done, a causualty of the difficult economic times we are in. I could cite lots of other examples of stopped construction on projects of all sizes here in Apple Valley. No doubt the builders are waiting, counting on normal cyclical economic history ( which is not what we are currently experiencing ) to bring back the " good times again " when they can go on to finish and profit from these projects. I feel from all the information I've studied, that with the dire and declining trends in the US economic stability, energy depletion ( expense ) issues and water shortage realities by themselves as factors will preciptate declining economic and quality of life conditions for the foreseable future. These three huge issues will be affecting not only global industrial societes on the larger scale, but all the way down towns and small communities themselves ( like Apple Valley ) in very dramatic ways. The $150 dollar oil prices of last summer and the far reaching negative ramifications of its ripple effects in the US economy is but a taste of what is coming.

Look at Las Vegas. It was for a lot of years the biggest residental and tract development boomtown in the US. Now it has devolved into the biggest basket case foreclosure capital of the US. Its change of fortune was first jolted by what high energy prices did last summer, which helped knock over the " house of cards " and the " hollowed out shadow of its former self " that is the US economy of today. And gigantic water issues are now poised to further restrict any new rampant development of this desert mirage. Lake Mead is almost 100 feet below full pool and projections are that at current trends this huge water catchment could be basically empty by 2021, with lake Powel experiencing a similiar fate.

I believe that because of the above mentioned conditions the Hacienda Project will either never be started because economic and resource decline realities will never make reasonably viable for anyone to entertain, or, it will be started to some degree but will succumb to the unsustainability presented by US energy and economic decline. In the latter case it could well eventually become mostly or fully abandoned if conditions evolve to the dire end of very possible future outcomes.

Regarding this project my interest in telling you these things is to give you a heads up that this is what you could very well be facing. I do not think that any local public effort to stop the project will have any affect unless there was some mass movement by great numbers of locals to compell the overseeing agencies not to allow it. I don't see any possibilities of that happening. The issues discussed above may very well stop it ( energy, economic, water ). But even if the county says its a go, and Strata makes a deal with an another entity to take it on, this does not mean that it will make sense in consideration of the larger issues I've discussed with you. Strata seeks to capitalize on its investment in land, the builder of the development will seek the profit gains from their work, the county seeks the taxes to bolster their coffers, but who will be there to be held to account, if it all goes awry because all of these entities fail to see the bigger changing realities of where we've been compared to where were going.

Also Eric these ideas will affect you and your family. My SC post at my Hotspringswizard Blog are my efforts to build a collection of information that outlines the many dots which when connected hopefully can provide the reader a view to what the larger picture is. In SC I include information on many dire issues besides energy because many ills for humanity are coming together in this time, and their combined impact will spin up even more dramatic events. What will the future bring us? Time will tell. Just keep your mind open, your eyes wide to the fact that things are not always what they might seem to be. The good times that will never end as expected by many may show itself to be one gigantic oily mirage that humanity lived in for a time.