COMING TO PARMA SOON:THE PEAK OIL HOUSING BOOM

Today was our first TT Parma event at the local library. We screened the documentary 'End of Suburbia' and discussed the implications of Peak Oil for Parma.

Unfortunately, when I say 'we' I refer to my father (the skeptic) and one other brave soul.

It was not quite the turnout I expected! However, onward and upward. I will be more vigorous in promoting events in the future. I sort of went at the schedule backwards; setting up events without really allowing for enough lead time for newspapers and whatnot.

Anyway, the documentary can be summed up thusly:  Suburbia is wholly dependent on cheap oil for its existence. Remove either cheap or oil from that equation and Suburbia, we have a problem.

Now, where things get interesting is when we look at Parma in the context of climate change and peak oil. You know, Parma is sometimes maligned. In High School, my Geography teacher used pictures of Parma to illustrate how souless the suburbs were. I remember being horrified at the houses lined up like soldiers and thinking I would never want to live in a cookie cutter.

And, well, here I am! Actually, Parma is a great place to live and I believe, in the context of Peak Oil and Climate Change, we are a diamond in the rough. Peak Oil means proximity to city centers is going to be important and Parma is the perfect distance from Cleveland. Climate change means water will be important and we have Lake Erie. Further, Cleveland will continue to be a vital juncture between Chicago and New York and thrive itself. Ohio, in general, is going to thrive post-peak simply because we have water.

I do not believe that we will see people fleeing from Parma. I think the opposite will occur, people will want to join our community.  The challenge will be in absorbing all the people who will flock to Parma and ramping up infrastructure (roads, older home upkeep) and city services to support an increased population. Street cars or a light rail system connecting Parma and Cleveland (in addition to the Brookpark station) will make Parma as close as you can get to a Post-Oil Utopia.

OIL IS A PICKPOCKET

I am sometimes asked why I talk about the economy and the current financial situation in the same breath as Peak Oil. There is a perception that the economy and Peak Oil are not inter-related when they are actually in a lovely co-dependent relationship that would make Jerry Springer producers drool if the economy and Peak Oil were people. (I'll let you decide which one is cross-dressing and which one is from the trailer park*.)

The cost of gas became an issue for me personally a few years ago. At the time, I was driving to Brunswick for a second job, which is about 50 miles round trip. When gas hit $1.75 a gallon, I found that the price of gas didn't make the second job as profitable as I needed it to be. So I quit. Everyone was agog. It just did not compute that gas was too expensive to make it worth the drive.

Fast forward to the current economic crisis and tell me which came first; high gas prices or default on home mortgages? It was the high gas prices that hit our wallets first. In 2008, our SUVs became too expensive to drive.

The American Way for the last several decades has been to live paycheck-to-paycheck and use credit to fill the gap leaving very little breathing room in the budget. Compound this with houses built in areas dependent on cheap gas for access, plus the fact that many people probably couldn't really afford their suburban estates (but which lenders were only too happy to give them money for) and overnight--with just a switch of numbers on gas station marquees-- millions of people literally could not eke out an additional $200 or $300 or however many dollars it took to fill their tanks, heat their homes, and buy food.

Next thing everyone knew, people couldn't meet their bloated financial obligations and oh, hey, look at that, the stock market crashed. Whoops! While the financial crisis has its roots in poor management and while there are certainly other factors at play, I believe the tipping point was high gas prices. Putting gas in the tank ultimately cost people their homes.

Anecdotally, in the past year I have noticed lots of message board chatter from minimum wage families who can no longer afford to work. Gas priced them out of the labor market. They live far from their jobs and were counting on reliably cheap gas to enable their lifestyle.

Well, folks, cheap gas is gone. Probably never to return.

Even more alarming to realize is that gas is only going to become more expensive from here on out. I watched the Today Show this morning while a financial pundit advised we will see higher gas prices when the economy begins to recover. This is because an economic downturn also takes oil demand down with it. Meaning not as much oil will be pumped until demand goes up. Demand, of course, will go up before supply which will drive another price spike until the bottleneck is eased...or rather if the bottleneck can be eased as we may have very well reached world peak oil production in 2008.

The thing that is interesting to me about the Today Show segment is the acceptance of $1.75 or $1.99 per gallon gas like it is not already higher than the $1.29 or $1.19 we used to pay. There seems to be a gag order on the fact that gas prices have remained elevated, as if they are hoping we won't notice. Or that maybe consumers' wallets are made of elastic and we can absorb cost increase after cost increase without any impact on our other finances.

It makes me wonder if they noticed the reports their network did on how salaries, when adjusted for inflation, have gone down, not up. Or the reports on employees taking pay cuts in order to keep their jobs. Or the reports on employees forced into unpaid work furloughs or reduced working hours. Or the reports of price increases in foods and other basic necessities. Our elastic doesn't have far to go before it snaps.

How will we sustain an economic recovery if high gas prices wipe out our wallets faster than we can fill them with money? High oil prices started the economic ball rolling and seem intent on keeping it from going any other direction but down. This is why I talk about Peak Oil and the economic crisis in the same breath, because they are one and the same.


*No offense to cross-dressers or people living in trailer parks, those just seem to be the demographic riffs that Jerry Springer likes to play on.

WHY DO WE WATER OUR LAWNS?

This morning I was researching some little green gizmos for door prizes at TT Parma events (first one this Saturday!) and was specifically looking at water conservation. I read site after site espousing all sorts of tips, one of which was all the ways you can water your lawn and conserve water.

But why do we water our lawns?

Oh, I know the standard answer: So it's green and verdant and soft on our toes (although I would bet most of us never really walk on our lawns barefoot). There are city codes and social standards and what the neighbors will think. I believe someone has even written a book about society and lawns. Green grass is that important.

Well, guess what? We never water our lawn. Never. And it looks just as good as the one maintained by our neighbor. A neighbor who agonizes to make every blade perfect. Who fertilizes other people's lawns (including mine) on our street because it is just that important to him to have beautiful grass as far as the eye can see.

He waters. We don't. Our lawns look the same. His is ready for a close up in Better Homes & Gardens while we have a few spots of crab grass and maybe ours browns first at the end of the season or during dry spells, but the overall effect is the same. Well, except for the caveat that we've probably given our neighbor a facial twitch with the way we don't keep up our lawn.

Why don't we water our lawn? Not because we are trying to conserve (which would be the right answer) but because we are lazy and cheap and don't care about our lawn. We water food growing plants or flowers (usually) and that's about it. So please don't think I'm talking from my green high horse here, I'm not. I am green on this issue purely through sheer sinful laziness.

Aside from the fact that you now know sloth is one of my sins, tell me, am I alone here? I googled 'no water lawn' and 'do I have to water my lawn' and all I got back were pages and pages of results with tips and techniques on how to water my lawn. I don't get it.

Do you water your lawn? Have you thought about seeing what would happen if you didn't? Or what if you watered your lawn or garden with harvested rain water? We haven't done the rain water thing yet, but plan to start this year since we will be attempting to really garden this season (versus killing plants by ummm...not watering them. Have I mentioned I'm lazy?).

Edited to add: I did find an article Greener Grass, Less Water on Science Daily that talks about the environmental impact of lawn upkeep. The advice, though, still involves watering grass. Be sure to watch the video accompanying the article which is interesting as well.  And, this is tangential, but I'd just like to say that every single public park I've been to in Arizona (which is, you know, a desert) violates every single one of the article's suggestions for water conversation which makes no sense to me.

GLOBAL WARMING IN A COOL CLEVELAND

First, there's a good conversation going on over here regarding the New Scientist article I posted yesterday. Check it out if you have time.

As for today's topic...

In case you haven't noticed, it has been super cold in Cleveland this winter. Yesterday, I skipped my coat as I often do and regretted it about two seconds after I stepped outside. Being lazy (or as I like to think of it, an overwhelmed mom to a really active toddler and as long as she is wearing a coat, I figure I'm doing pretty well) I did without, but my hands were numb by the time I loaded the groceries in the car.

These cold temperatures mean I hear a chorus of 'What Global Warming' every time I bring up the topic of climate change. Whenever I hear that refrain, I picture a remake of those old 'Where's the beef' commercials Wendy's used to run.

However, one cold day does not refute all the data we have on climate change and Cleveland's own Micheal Scott, the Plain Dealer's environmental reporter, had a great article on this yesterday. If you don't have time to read the article, the picture below is worth a thousand worse. It's from the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and shows that Cleveland is a cool spot in a world of unusally hot ones.

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE IS CHILLING

New Scientist has an article out on what the world will look like with a temperature rise of 4C.

The article is here.

The interactive map showing regional changes is here.

Hot weather never felt so chilling.  Look at who will potentially be growing food on the map vs. who won't. Look at who will be providing energy vs. who won't.  In the twilight of my lifetime and the prime of my daughter's the entire geopolitics of the world will change.In a hundred years it is likely that the US will no longer be the world's breadbasket. If we do not move forward with a green revolution and become green technology leaders, not only does the planet lose,but so does our nation.

In other news, the Dow is currently at 6800 and some change. I believe several financiers have shared their belief that 'bottom' is around 4000. From 14,000 to 4,000. Insane.

If you aren't outraged yet, watch this bit from 60 Minutes about the guy who warned the SEC that Maddoff smelled funny. And nothing was done. Nothing. 

Here is the video (in two parts) from You Tube (if it gets yanked, follow the link above to the 60 minutes site).

ARTICLE ON CANADIAN OIL SANDS

From National Geographic and well worth a read.


Some salient excerpts... (emphasis mine)

The U.S. imports more oil from Canada than from any other nation, about 19 percent of its total foreign supply, and around half of that now comes from the oil sands. Anything that reduces our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, many Americans would say, is a good thing. But clawing and cooking a barrel of crude from the oil sands emits as much as three times more carbon dioxide than letting one gush from the ground in Saudi Arabia. 

The oil sands are still a tiny part of the world's carbon problem—they account for less than a tenth of one percent of global CO2 emissions—but to many environmentalists they are the thin end of the wedge, the first step along a path that could lead to other, even dirtier sources of oil: producing it from oil shale or coal. 

"Oil sands represent a decision point for North America and the world," says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, a moderate and widely respected Canadian environmental group. "Are we going to get serious about alternative energy, or are we going to go down the unconventional-oil track? The fact that we're willing to move four tons of earth for a single barrel really shows that the world is running out of easy oil."

WORKING FOR THE CAUSE

I started distributing fliers for the Transition Town Parma events today. It was nerve-wracking as I was concerned people might want to debate the assertions that the Transition Town movement is based on (peak oil, climate change). I like a good debate, but not while herding a cranky toddler. If someone is unfamiliar with peak oil and climate change, I need more than a few minutes to explain it all and work through all the common 'what about this solution' buts.

Since people have asked, I've also been researching what it takes to formally establish Non-Profit status for TT Parma and we are a long ways away from being ready to file. First, we need more members. Currently our membership consists of one weary stay-at-home mom and a non verbal toddler. (Although I know there are active groups in Ohio. I'm not completely alone.) Once we have members, we need a mission statement, a constitution and money. So TT Parma won't be an official non-proft any time soon, but it is a long term goal.

If you are in the Parma area and looking for a cause, consider TT Parma. Get a copy of The Transition Handbook* and shoot me an email at parmapowerdown AT gmail.com.  The idea is to get a steering committee up and running while also working to create a dialogue within the community.

Beyond flier distribution, I sent a plea for free admission (in exchange for volunteering) to the Leadership Summit 2009. The goal of the Leadership Summit 2009 is to convene, inform, and engage a network of institutions and organizations committed to building sustainable communities. The keynote speakers are Names in sustainability circles and I could learn a lot from what they have to say. I'm crossing my fingers that they need someone to set up chairs and keep the coffee hot!

*A large excerpt of the TT Handbook is available online for free at www.transitiontowns.org.