The best solution to a world oil crisis...

[Bru]

We have heard it all. There has been an "intricate clamor of tongues" (to use Stephen Crane's words) about how to best address peak oil and global energy shortages. With respect to cars, we have heard about hybrids, hydrogen engines, ethanol, biodiesel, and many other means of making them less dependent on oil. The intentions of all these possible solutions are noble, and we should continue to look for ways of improving technology that will enable us to guzzle less gas when we get in our cars.

But the absolute best solution to this whole problems of a global oil shortage, global warming, and air pollution, which hardly gets talked about compared to all the other "solutions" mentioned above, is not using a car at all.

The truth is that American cities have been designed so poorly since World War II that they are largely dependent on the car. The narrowminded way we suburbanized is perhaps the most blatant environmental disaster with respect to oil usage in our nation's history. If we had built our cities more compactly, and relied on the traditional town layout instead of sprawling suburbs (and later, exurbs), we would not at this time be having any discussions about an oil crisis, an oil shortage, or any such problems. Because the fact is that we live by the car, so we will die by the car.

We made the assumption in America that nearly every transportation need had to be met with a gas-powered automobile, thus using energy to carry around not only ourselves, but also one ton of steel wherever we went. Fading from our society are corner grocery stores to which we can walk, jobs to which we can bike, and social activities for which we can use mass transit.

Sure, cars are important. We depend on them, rightly, for many things. They are the most practical in traveling to remote locations, moving large loads around, and some vacations. We need police, ambulance, fire, and other emergency vehicles in every city. Some people need cars because their physical condition limits alternative mobility. There are many legitimate uses for personal, private automobiles. However, there are way more instances for which cars shouldn't be necessary, and if we all lived in more coherently planned communities, where the purpose of the planning was to have cars be only one of the main transportation alternatives, then we wouldn't need to be scrambling as a nation for merely different fuels for our cars.

Remember, a bike is one of the most efficient vehicles (if not THE most efficient) ever made in terms of work/joule. We have not even begun as a nation to scratch the surface of the full potential of bicycle infrastructure in our cities and towns. If one needs evidence of this, just look at our latest transportation bill, and how much highway spending there is compared to bike and mass transit spending.

Having more efficient cars is very important, but this is a mitigation, not the ultimate solution. Our sights should be set primarily on reducing the need to drive in the first place, and then, secondly, on making cars more efficient for when we DO need them (e.g. hybrids, biodiesel, etc.). The best way to achieve this goal is to stem the tide of suburban development as quickly as possible. This is the simplest solution, and it does not require any miracle of technology. On the contrary, it calls for using the wisdom of those who lived in a time when technology was not so advanced, namely before the post WWII suburban boom.

More of my thoughts on this subject can be found at my latest blog article:

http://brudaimonia.blogspot.com/2005/11/on-failing-to-see-forest-for-trees.html

[leftstreet]

1. Mass transit. Light rail.

But watch the Transportation Committee hearings on C-Span and you'll see "they" are trying to privatize it.

[Coastie for Truth]

15. Privatization of rail and urban transit was a failure

I grew up in Pittsburgh PA when we had Pittsburgh Railways, Noble, Brentwood, Harmony, etc. Most were operating under Chapter XI protection, with disabled vehicles.

The County took the whole thing

-- then wasted big bucks by tearing up tracks (a selling job by a Pontiac MI based diesel bus manufacturer; the same bus manufacturer that lobbied San Francisco to replace it cable cars with diesel buses).
-- and killed an innovative rapid transit system using BART and DC METRO technology (with rubber tires).
-- and paved over commuter rail to use the r/w for diesel buses, dumping them all on crowded downtown streets.
-- but they finally build (rebuild) one reasonably modern light rail line.

This was not the authority's fault - it was the fault of a dysfunctional politial infrastructure with over 120 municipalities in a county of under 2,000,000.

But even with all of that -- and Pete Flaherty's inept mismanagement, and Tom Murphy's growwly inept mismanagement -- the Port Authority is still better then what it replaced.


The point: It is impossible for a private transit company to make a profit off of the fare box -- because of the indirect and direct subsidies thatwe give pesonally owned cars. Thus provatization is a failure.

The sub-point: It is impossible for the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Amrican Enterprise Institute, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Dennis Hastert, Mr. Bill Frist, etc. to accept the fact that there must be publuc funding for transit.

[ingac70]

2. Easier said than done....

I can live in a nice house 25 miles from work, or pay the same money for a cracker box in a crime and drug ridden neighborhood so I can walk to work.

I thought about getting a motorcycle, but there are wrecks daily on the highway where I live, on the exact route I take, because everyone out here drives like @ssholes.

[Bru]

3. Too bad...

ingac70, I completely understand that some people need cars, just based on how cities have been built/deteriorated over the past 50-80 years and the economics that lead from this. Sometimes its hard to get out of circumstances of traveling a long way for a job. I hope in the future you can work something out that requires you to drive less.

I meant, from my post, that we should be reducing car trips where we can. I'm lucky enough to be currently living in downtown Juneau, AK, where I can walk to work and almost all social events, and take the bus or a bike on other occasions when I need to go to other parts of the city.

[OneBlueSky]

4. we'd save a hell of a lot of gasoline if telecommuting became the norm . .

for people whose jobs don't actually require them to be on-site, i.e. desk workers who work primarily on computers . . . which is a hell of a lot of the labor force these days . . .

[Dogmudgeon]

5. And yet, some of us can not use bikes

I have just enough balance left to be able to walk.

But that's beside the point.

Even if we could reduce the use of automobiles by 99%, we'd still be up the proverbial creek. The problem isn't the methods of energy consumption, it's the entire economic system we have. I'm not talking about capitalism or socialism, but the built-in quasi-requirement that we waste energy by the gigajoule.

And even at that, transportation uses less than a quarter of all the energy we in the USA use (with similar numbers for Europe and Japan).

As the price of energy increases, market processes will undoubtedly compensate for it. But not fast enough. A "gap" between supply and demand will evolve within months of a Peak Oil situation. Since economic growth depends on the growth of energy use, the economy will sag, slump, collapse, or implode, depending on how resilient the smaller parts are. (I think it will be a "slump", but I could be wrong.)

Reducing automobile use would help quite a bit, but it's a short-term solution. We have to dramatically change -- re-engineer -- our entire world, down to the smallest energy-using business processes. The "Garden City" city planning philosophy of the 1920s -- which lost out to the Suburban philosophy -- will have to be revived. Personal vehicles will have to become more like 4-wheeled bikes with protective shells and super-efficient motors for long trips. Going from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs, making high-efficiency insulation mandatory, and using as much off-grid energy for residential use as possible are similar changes we can, should, and must implement.

Now, multiply my few examples by a factor of a thousand or more. THAT is how much work we'll have to put into it.

In the intermediate (25-100 years) future, we will have to use nuclear energy. I see no way around it. No, I don't like nuclear energy as the mandatory solution it's turning out to be. But I like the prospect of 1000 simultaneous Holocausts even less. We'll be hard-pressed to keep things going with a population of 7-15 billion without nuclear energy. And even with nuclear energy, it's going to be a tight squeeze.

I think you've made a good case for one part of the "solution", but this problem is the 800 Pound Gorilla of all time. What we have called "Energy Crises" are small fluctuations in the supply/demand equation. True shortfalls, even those of a few percent, will set off a destructive cascade like ripples in a stream turning into tsunamis. We are not equipped to cope with them. We will certainly be able to survive the first ones, and probably even toughen our economy against them, but as the power-down damage increases, nothing we count on today will survive. And those ripples and their damage will increase rapidly.

How fast can we rebuild our world, from the inside out, before the damage is too great to handle and too expensive to pay for? I think we have a maximum of 30 years, and probably more like ten years, with the first ripple/tsunamis hitting in the next five.

Factor in rapid climate change and loss of reliable agricultural "breadbaskets", political instability, easy access to nuclear weapons, and you can see why the pessimism runs so much deeper than worrying about the prospect of $10/gallon gasoline. The breakdown on the world's economic and financial systems during a climate shift can and would kill most of the people then alive in a universal famine -- a Die-Off.

The good news is that apocalyptics like me have always been wrong. The bad news is that if it wasn't for apocalyptics like me, we would not have survived much past the supervolcano eruption 75 thousand years ago.

We need to think big: Ten billion people big. 1000 quadrillion BTUs big (currently it's 220 QBTU). Moving industrial and energy processes into space big. We need to think big because the grave is a small, small place.

--p!

[Bru]

24. Focusing on just the transportation sector...

My solution is basically tailored to the transportation sector, not to home and commercial electricity usage.

But technology is farther along to provide renewable electricity production compared to fueling cars. And I think the shortage of oil will affect us (already is affecting us to some extent) before any other energy crisis.

But you're right...lessening our need for gas-burning automobiles is only a start to the massive effort needed to save us from a global energy disaster.

[NJCher]

6. in many cases, it's a full suitcase

This quote, from your blog:

Most car trips in this country are taken alone, and every one requires transporting not only the person, but also the weight of the car, which is over one ton of steel and other materials. This is very inefficient. It is as if any time we went on a walk, we carried an empty suitcase around with us.

To add to that, one reason for the popularity of SUVs is that it allows people to carry all manner of things around with them. At least with a trailer, one would have to unhitch and unload. Now people carry around all sort of things they don't even need, all of which add to the vehicle's fuel inefficiency. Check out all the junk in the average SUV sometime.

So maybe we should amend that phrase to "carried a suitcase with miscellaneous junk in it around with us."

Anyway, this re-planning can't come a minute too soon for me. The idea of "garden" city planning, mentioned by poster Pigwidgeon, sounds like heaven to me.




Cher

[Oerdin]

7. We'll never be energy independent again

Nor can we simply stop using fossil fuels. Does that mean we should do nothing? Of course not. First off we need to get nearly all of our power from a combination of nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, and tidal. The last four will never make up more then 10%-20% of our total energy production because of expense, the amount of land needed to generate a kilowatt of power, and the uncertainity of the power output but they can make a valuable contribution. The rest needs to come from nongreen house gas producing sources like nuclear and hydroelectric. Next we need to massively increase the CAFE standards so we reach the same levels the EU and Japan already meet. The third part is to build more urban light rail to more efficently move people with in cities and high speed rail (again like Japan and the EU already have)to move people between medium distance cities (like LA to Las Vegas or LA to San Francisco).

Lastly we need to look at reducing the amount of everything we use. That means reducing packaging, improving the building code so buildings are more energy efficient, and promoting high quality reusable goods over the throw away goods we use now days. A carbon tax would be a good way to encourage manufacturers and end uses to look for more energy efficent was to do things. People & companies respond to the bottom line so that's how we should motivate them into getting more efficent.

[phantom power]

16. Nuclear already accounts for 20% of our electricity.

There's no reason that wind power couldn't supply all 100 exajoules we use each year. It could be done with 9 million wind turbines. Nuclear alone could supply the same. I imagine that PV solar could as well, although it would be even more expensive.

At any rate, the oil and coal will run out, so we will become energy independent. One way or another.

[Massacure]

27. Wind depends on how far we can effectively transport electricity.

If Texas isn't windy one day, can we send them electricity from the Dakotas?

Solar is always a loser on a large scale, it is expensive and there is no way to balance the grid around any significant amount of it, mainly becuase of night time.

Edit: Actually, I should clarify PV. A good thermal system can run through most of the night, and will co-gen with a regular power plant.

[Dead_Parrot]

29. Pumped storage?

OK, it's still not much of a help for somewhere as flat as texas, but pumped hydro can store a chunk of energy at a quite high effeciency (80%ish). Normally they are "charged" at night when demand is low, and "discharged" during the day, but you could turn that around if you had a good supply of solar.

Marvel at the immense size of that 'IF', though... :)

[phantom power]

31. Grid balancing as you describe would probably require grid upgrades.

Another approach would be to deploy very large storage facilities. pressurized air, or saline fuel cells, maybe. It's not clear to me how affordable such measures would be on the required terawatt-hour scale. The saline fuel cells looked surprisingly affordable according to my estimates, but I don't trust my estimates.

Yet another approach would be to use intermittent energy like wind to produce fuels for transportation. In this mode, a run of windless days doesn't have as much of an effect, since it's being used for generating fuel stockpiles, not electric energy that is desired for immediate consuption.

And these three approaches can be applied together.

[Bru]

25. Also, efficiency...

In addition to "nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, and tidal" sources of energy, we can "gain" energy by becoming more efficient (actually minimizing the loss of energy).

Energy efficiency isn't talked about a whole lot here, but in the EU they are making it a main part of their energy conservation policy. See the Green Paper from the EU at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/energy/efficiency/doc/2005_06_green_paper_book_en.pdf

[Dogmudgeon]

17. Garden Cities

They aren't exactly wall-to-wall gardens; the term is given to a century-old philosopy of urban planning that was never really given a chance.

The idea and the name came from Ebenezer Howard, a turn-of-the-century (1900s) city planner and utopian. Although his plans were idealized, with strictly planned roads, farms, industry, etc., the concept was much more generalized. In the post-WWI era, when population growth took off, there was a generalized "dialog" about whether to build planned garden cities, or to allow for uncontrolled sprawl with permissive zoning laws. You can guess which philosophy won out.

Here's a good introductory page on Howard's original work on Garden City planning, courtesy of John Reps, a significant city planner and Cornell emeritus. The website per se is the equivalent of a small library of city planning papers, many of them classics in the discipline. Even if you read a quarter of them, you will be far better educated than many of the elected decision makers in today's municipal planning organizations.

Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities - http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/howard.htm

--p!

[Nihil]

19. It would be something to aim for though.

I lived in Howard's first 'garden city' (Letchworth, Hertfordshire) for
a few years and it was a very pleasant place indeed. Sadly, one of the
later ones (Welwyn Garden City) was not quite as nice but this might
have been due to the implementors being more "commercially minded" than
old Ebenezer.

Done properly, that style of planning has a lot going for it.

[Dogmudgeon]

20. Very cool

How closely to Howard's idealized plans did Letchworth come?

There are several Garden Cities in North America, and a few of them are actual based on Howard's work. I've heard that the one in Kansas is the biggest one, but it lost the original vision early on.

Our urban planners are probably going to be dusting off EH's original books, along with the urban planners who he influenced.

Le Corbusier, genius though he was, is on the way out. His "machines for living" metaphor just can't cut it in an era when we will have to depend on (minimum-energy) organic metaphors until we can sort out our various messes. Maybe those machines of Le Corbusier will work for space habitations, but not for the Earth; not in the short or intermediate term, anyway.

--p!

[Nihil]

34. Yep!

> How closely to Howard's idealized plans did Letchworth come?

About as close as you could hope really ... drifted at times but has
been maintained "on track" far more than any other one AFAIK.

If you're interested, the Wikipedia article is a quite good summary ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letchworth

... and the current council's web site is OK too ...
http://www.letchworthgc.com/aboutletchworth/index.html

(I lived on the Grange estate - built in the late 1940s - and would
often walk the few miles from the railway station as it led me through
a lovely park where the black squirrels play! Had to move because of
a change of job but would happily return if circumstances required it.)

[muriel_volestrangler]

35. A 'garden city' isn't particularly efficient

it's just a good compromise between efficiency and luxury. I grew up in Stevenage, a few miles from Letchworth, and a 'New Town', which is what the British government did with the concept of 'garden cities' after WW2. It's more compact than Letchworth, but not as nice to live in - the gardens are smaller, and there are less trees. I would guess Stevenage is more efficient than Letchworth, though. It's also notable for an extensive network of dedicated cycle tracks - which, when I lived there, were not highly used. Perhaps that will change.

But Letchworth isn't fundamentally different from other British towns. All are more compact than American ones. Cars and fuel have always been more affordable to Americans, so their cities have been built with them in mind.

[Dogmudgeon]

36. I live near Bryn Gweled Homesteads

Since I'm one of those rare Yanks living in the town in which I grew up, I'm quite familiar with the place. Bryn Gweled -- which means "Hill of Vision" in Welsh (yes, there are a LOT of "Cymruphiles" in the Philadelphia area) -- was set up during the Depression by several families influenced by planner/utopian Ralph Borsodi. Although BGH didn't try to become a garden city, it did succeed as an IC -- Intentional Community.

Bryn Gweled was also strongly influenced by Quakerism. Unfortunately, it also became elitist, much as the Society of Friends had become in my area. The Quakers had become the financial bedrock of Philly before the major post-Civil War immigration waves, so they hunkered down, financially speaking. In Bryn Gweled, you have to be voted in, and a large piece of the decision is based on one's income and assets. Most BGH members don't like this one bit, but view it as a necessary evil. This policy has prevented the community from collapsing on more than one occasion.

Years ago, a BGH kid I knew, who was conversant with Marxist philosophy, explained it as the resulting contradiction experienced by Marxian members of the bourgeoisie in a capitalist world.

Naturally, this should not be taken as a criticism of those who found themselves in a Devil's Bargain, but a criticism of the dynamics of money and capital. In a society where "nothing has value but everything has a price", such a bind is inevitable, and often becomes a source of ridicule by the cynics.

Fortunately, although it had become isolated as an elite for a time, the local Quaker community never surrendered its progressive values, and recent generations have been community activists elsewhere. The Friends and the "Friends of the Friends" are still quite a tight community around here.

--p!

[NJCher]

30. Thanlk you!

Looks like I have some fun reading for after class tonight!




Cher

[padia]

8. A definite restructure

is needed I have always spoke of building up instead of out. In fact me and my father-in-law speak of building a fully contained city in a one square mile 10-15 stories high that way everything is within walking distance. Another scary thing for the Apocalypse crowd our farm industry relies on petro-chemicals. Without oil we have know herbicides, pesticides and the big one no plastics. If we do not implement other techniques, twin cropping, we won't have to worry about the energy crisis we will all die off and then we will be living within the carrying capacity of the bio-sphere.

[ReaderSushi]

11. Post-peak agriculture.

Haven't done much research on the topic but I am led to believe that a partial work around for the lack of petro-chemicals for farming is found in hydroponics. Many plants seem to grow much more efficiently and allows for a sterile environment eliminating the need for herbicides and pesticides. Though we will have to give up meat, no way around that one.

[Dogmudgeon]

18. No work-around for nitrogen

Hydroponic gardening has its benefits, but all plants need nitrogen, which is made into protein. There is no way around it. Many legumes can take their nitrogen from the air, but most of them still need some nitrogen compounds in the soil during critical periods of their development (usually after they drop their cotyledons, but still don't have a lot of leaves).

We won't have to "give up meat" unless there is an extreme shortage, i.e., a famine. Animals that graze on wild lands will still be available, but there will probably be pressure to increase grazing, which would bring its own problems. Ruminant animals can eat a lot of foods that we humans can't digest -- the digestive systems of cattle, for example, can use cellulose as a food source, though we humans can only use it as fiber, since we can't digest it.

But post-peak agriculture will pose many problems, most of which we can't yet forsee. If we start working on the problem NOW, the worst we will encounter will be problems. If we start working on it during a world-wide famine, the few survivors of the die-off will have more-efficient food-growing technologies after the nitrogen in the six billion odd corpses returns the soil and air.

--p!

[IrateCitizen]

22. Nitrogen, farm animals, and so on...

One of the major problems with nitrogen is the complete lack of crop rotation. It used to be that farmers had to know how to care for the land, to ensure that it produced crops year after year. Most farmers on modern corporatized farms are little more than semi-skilled labor nowadays -- first you till the soil, then you spread the seed, then you apply massive amounts of pesticides and fertilizer -- you get the picture.

Legumes actually help restore nitrogen to the soil. That's why the Amerindians planted beans with their corn. The beans could use the cornstalks as growing poles, and they also replaced the nitrogen to the soil as the corn sucked it out. Of course, such techniques also required allowing certain portions of land to go fallow for a length of time, a luxury we no longer seem to have.

As for meat, the big problem we have is the rise of beef. Up until about 60 years ago, pork was the most commonly eaten meat. Pigs are actually much easier for the average farmer to raise than cows, and they take a fraction of the "inputs". Beef is a drain on both water and grains -- the amount required to produce one beef cow is astounding. A lot of farmers used to raise pigs because you could feed them off of a lot of food scraps and biomass waste. We don't necessarily need to stop eating meat, but we do need to eat different kinds of meat than beef and a helluva lot less of it.

[Dead_Parrot]

23. Legumes (& Pulses)

Many legumes live in symbiosis with rhizobia - bacteria that lives in the roots of the plant and fix the nitrogen. So whilst they do need some nitrogen present to get started, once established they pump quite a bit downwards. My parent still grow beans, potatoes and marigolds in thier garden in rotation - The beans and potatoes go on the plate, the marigolds attract the pests and keep them off the crops. it works quite well...

As for animals, there is a four-crop-rotation method that allowed permanent production of crops for humans and animal fodder, enabling you to get pretty much everything out of one farm without having to let anything lie fallow. Whether such a system could be adopted to feed over six billion is a different question, of course, but we eat too much meat in the west anyway: Filling up on bean casserole might be an option.

It's worth bearing in mind that as a species, we've been farming for something like ten thousand years, and actually got quite good at it: It's only for the last century or so that we've been dumping chemicals into the soil to make a quick buck on monocrops. I suspect we'll find a lot of the answers to our problems in history books, rather than a Monsanto lab.

Interesting snippet #72: Production of most nitrogen fertiliser uses the Hauber process, originally developed by the Germans in WWI for explosives manufacture. Swords and plowshares, redux... :)

[IrateCitizen]

21. Look to Cuba for post-peak agriculture in practice

The collapse of the USSR left Cuba virtually without petroleum in the 1990's through today. It had to abandon a good part of its sugar industry that had provided it with export goods to exchange for foodstuffs, machinery and industrial technology. The solution of the Cuban government has been to invest in sustainable agricultural practices, simply because they no longer had the petroleum inputs necessary for modern "conventional" agricultural practices.

The results have been quite impressive, if you read a bit about them. For one, Cuba has invested a lot of money in education to train the next generation of agricultural specialists. Second, almost all of the farming is done with organic techniques and draft animals.

Seriously, if you want to take a look at what post-peak agriculture will have to look like in order to be successful, the Cuban model is perhaps the closest we have to a window to the future.

[izzie]

9. If I recall right Anchorage put in a lot of bike roads.

And I am sure their was a fight about it. Trains etc are a better deal than always taking a car but where are they? Maine has some going to Boston once more and I like to take them or a bus to my car. Another thing is look at the size of homes being built. These people have to heat all that space when they hardly live in half of it. One sure gets tight as they get older. Sorry about that. My real pain thing is Malls. I just do not go as they are so hot. All the sales people are in light shirts where shoppers have to come in in coats and you just about die of the heat. I ended that by never going to a Mall. I know what I am talking about as I owned a shop in an Anchorage Mall. It is like heating the village square.

[Bru]

26. Anchorage Transportation Mishaps

Actually, the "fight" comprised the city assembly scrapping five years of planning by AMATS, along with large-scale support among citizens for increased bike paths/mass transit (which, as I understand, is in a semi-decrepit state in Anchorage), such as the expansion of the Tony Knowles coastal trail.

The City Assembly threw all this out and opted to use their vastly-reduced funding (because of the Bridges to Nowhere) on a narrowminded plan that built basically just roads (with some token public transit/bike trail spending that they need to have to justify TRAAK and CMAQ type funding).

Regarding the size of homes being built, there was just a segment on 60 minutes on McHouses (aka Houses on Steroids) being built in place of smaller, traditional neighborhoods. These houses, with their massive "lawyer foyers" and, in extreme cases, rotundas, must take massive amounts of energy for air conidtioning or heating.

Malls are another huge problem, like you mention, because most are single story (and have to be due to idiotic zoning codes) and take up way too much land. The Main Streets of traditional towns had smaller shops and living quarters above them, much more efficient use of space than the big boxes in the suburbs where most Americans shop now.

[rfkrfk]

10. tax on jet fuel for international flight is zero, not one penny ...

tax on jet fuel for US domestic flight
is four cents a gallon

[One_Life_To_Give]

12. Not quite so simple

With the rise in two income families. There are many families where the home is a compromise of commuting distances. Additionally as society becomes more specialized in carrers. The number of locations for any one profession become less. Which can require us to becoem more mobile than ever.

[happyslug]

13. The best way to see where we are going is to see where we came from.

Thus several Months ago I wrote a paper and posted it on the Peak oil Site about the changes in Urban Areas from about 1900 till today. Thus it is a History of how people moved away from their jobs, first by Streetcars and than by Automobile. I called it "History of the Suburbs". I need to re-write it to remove all the typos and other Grammar errors and make changes based on some further research, but as a whole give you an idea of where we as a society came from, went through and are going to.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=266&topic_id=203

[dcfirefighter]

14. The economics of it all

dictate the rise in suburbia, the increase in two family houses, and the substitution for fossil fuels for labor and productivity.

A failure to share the commonwealth, or allowing individuals to enclose the commons, has led to our present straights. Conversely, sharing the commonwealth would solve our coming problems.

Land Use: Charging near market rental rates for the exclusive use of land (a high level Land Value Tax) would change land use patterns such that we developed relatively dense settlements and cities, in most cases transit based. This would leave more open space for market farms and ecological buffers, as well as reducing energy use for transportation and transportation infrastructure. Generally, LVT is a strong encourager of highest and best use, which means that the number of housing units & commercial sites within range of transit infrastructure will increase.

Energy Use: Current economics are ineffective at regulating energy use due to the significant external costs of most forms of energy, namely the largely free dumping of waste products of combustion into the atmosphere, as well as the largely free dumping of mining tailings into the ground & surface waters. Setting acceptible rates of pollution and auctioning rights would allow this revenue to be shared, as well as increasing the price of polluting energies. Additionally, as individuals (oil & mining companies) extract from the commons, they should compensate the rest of us for our loss. They currently enjoy what they take as a windfall profit - taxing them for extraction shouldn't raise prices, but rather reduce profits.

Jobs & Economics: Revenue raised from land taxes and pollution taxes can be used to offset taxes against jobs and productive investment, increasing the demand for jobs and productive investment. As these taxes are reduced, the cost of employment decreases, and some of the work previously displaced by cheap energy & oil will be returned to labor. For example, agricultural jobs replaced by the preponderance of cheap petrochemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides will return in the form of workers composting, intercropping, and cultivating. As the labor begins to compete on a level playing field with capital, and the privileges of land & resource ownership are shared, the need for two-earner families will diminish.

Housing: Housing costs currenlty absorb some 30-50% of the average families' income, with taxes absorbing another 25%. Shifting taxes from income to land use, etc. leaves more available for housing, while decreasing the cost of housign. LVT reduces the cost of housing by reducing the speculative value of land, reducing the tax burden of buildings, increasing the availability of building sites, and increasing the number of housing units. (see this article from the New Colonist)

As for getting rid of cars, and I agree that no car is as 'green' as a bike or shoeleather, there are two sites I visit regularly: www.carfree.com and www.skywebexpress.com the first is ideal for greenfield development, or after a decade of shifts; the second seems ideal for refitting into established cities and towns.

[Bru]

28. Land Value Tax

I like http://www.carfreecity.us/who.html, an organization that is promoting car-free sections of cities.

About Land Value Tax, wouldn't that promote, on paper, nothing but skyscrapers? If the property tax is shifted to just the land, then landowners will try to get as much bang for their buck as possible.

We need dense development, but not to such an extreme where we have just skyscrapers.

What about a hybrid tax that incorporates both building and land location?

[dcfirefighter]

32. Not at all

1) there wouldn't be any point in building a skyscraper in an area that couldn't fill it - outside of urban centers, there is little demand for skyscrapers

2) With a LVT enacted, more infill sites would be available, likely at a better 'deal' than trying to build TOO much taller. Land values would have to be really high (due to a high demand) to justify skyscrapers.

3) zoning laws still exist. I tend to dislike maximum density laws, as they seem to me merely a 'legal' means of keeping people with less money than the current residents out. I support green-space, but feel that it should be public parks & forests, or perhaps agricultural trust land. I don't mind height restrictions, as long as they are fairly generous - it is difficult to account for the external costs of shading, canyon effect, and other social effects of skyscrapers. I have no problem with 4-6 storeys.

The hybrid tax exists, it's a regular property tax. Look in any downtown in this country, and you'll find parcels, sometimes very large parcels that are vacant, covered with asphalt, or perhaps have a strip of one-storey shops - all nestled among 6-8 storey occupied buildings. The owner of those parcels is merely holding out until the price is right. Because he is only paying a fraction of the tax of his neighbors (on who's land many people are employed &/or live) he can afford to do so. He's only put the bare minimum of investment in to be able to afford the carrying cost.

In practice, the initial steps towards an LVT, which are beneficial themselves, are incremental shifts of the property tax to taxes on land value. E.G. a jurisdiction that has a $10/$1000 property tax might shift to a $5/$1000 building & improvements tax and a $15/$1000 land value tax. Usually the initial recommendation is to make such a shift revenue neutral, but change the ratios such that at least 50% of the revenue comes from taxes against land value.

Another benefit of LVT (and actually recommended in a recent official study for the Washington METRO) is that it recaptures the value created by public investment, such as investment in transit. Opening a new subway station, or planning a new commuter rail line, will typically create millions, if not billions in new wealth. This is wealth in the form of real estate appreciation for landowners near transit stations, such that public funds being spent on transit becomes a wealth transfer from those who earned income to those who owned land. With an LVT, there is no transfer.

[Bru]

33. Thanks for clarifying

Especially the last paragraph, about wealth transfer.