What do you think will be the fate of the larger metros in the coming era of resource and capital scarcity, especially with global peak oil looming in the coming decades?
My view is that they will have to contract severely and become much smaller and much denser- the bigger the city the more chaotic and painful this process will be. Cities that are overburdened with mega-structures- the NYCs and Chicagos, will find themselves to be in very, very big trouble. Sprawling suburbia will no longer be a viable living arrangement. The sprawlburbs of the cities have three fates, not necessarily mutually exclusive: slums, salvage, and ruins.
I think the places that have the best chances of remaining civilized in the future are the smaller cities and towns that have a good relationship with, and relatively easy access to, productive farmland. Bonus points if they are located near a water source such as a lake of river.
Peak oil has been 10-20 years away for the last 40-50 years. It’s not a real thing. I think large cities will adapt to changing conditions as they always have, and will be with us for the foreseeable future.
There are experiments with urban farms using grow lights powered by sustainables. Also I would note that on average urban dwellers use less energy that rural ones. For example, I drive only about 3000 km per year and use bases and subways to get around. I am now living in an apartment that is exposed to the elements only one side, hence don’t need much heating. I think cities will be around for a while.
Given the boom in the economies of China and India there’s more competition for resources. That makes them more expensive for a bit, not scarcer. E.g., those rare earth metals used in hitech stuff. Few sources but now there are old mines and some new sources being opened up.
If oil actually gets produced less, that will be a good thing.
Now the real puzzler about the OP. Cities having an issue with all this? Really, cities?
Cities are efficient compared to the alternatives. Things are closer, less driving, better use of mass transit, better communication systems, better for utilities, and on and on and on.
Yes it is. We are already comprehensively broke as a society.
No, it won’t be. Oil is the LIFEBLOOD**** of global techno-industrial civilization. And it doesn’t have to run out to cause severe disruptions. It just has to become marginally scarce and expensive.
Modern cities are far too big, far too suburbanized (particularly in America) and they are completed structured around having an endless supply of cheap energy. That is not sustainable.
Peak oil? Again? I thought the current tin foil flavor of the month was the end of fiat currency.
Cities will be fine and I support more urbanisation. Only with population density can mass transit be practical. I’d much rather be on a city train that on some freeway outer belt surrounded by massive SUVs and pick up trucks.
I read 5 seconds of your cite, the pension plan mess won’t bring down the city of Chicago, it’ll just require taxes to finally get out of the damn mess created by the kick the can mentality of previous mayors. But, the city itself is thriving with more jobs moving INTO the Loop and lots of CTA infrastructure improvements ongoing.
The energy crises in the 1970s were certainly disruptive and painful, in the near term; I know, I lived through them. In the U.S., at least, it’s not like we had large-scale social unrest over long lines for gas, or the knock-on effect on retail prices from higher gas prices; we got recessions.
But, “severe disruptions” may be too strong a description – we adapted. The auto industry figured out how to improve fuel economy for cars, we figured out ways to improve the energy efficiency of our homes and appliances, etc.
If the supply of oil were to suddenly, and permanantly, decrease to a small fraction of what it is now (or suddenly, and permanently, become massively more expensive) – yeah, that would lead to massive disruptions, and wars, and would be, generally, horrid. But, what’s more likely is a gradual decline in availabilty of oil (and/or a gradual increase in the cost of producing oil), and an accompanying gradual adoption of non-fossil fuels.
IMO, what’s far more likely to cause bigger changes in our lifestyle and culture is climate change, but that’s a different topic.
That article says nothing about resources or oil. It mainly talks about finances related to underfunded pensions.
Certainly it will cause issues, but what makes you think it would cause large cities to fundamentally change? After all, they weathered the 1973 and 1979 price rises and continue to function.
Oil prices, adjusted for inflation, really haven’t risen all that much over time. Our economy needs energy, not oil, to function. We’re in the process of shifting to new sources of energy and constantly finding new and cheaper ways to get oil out of the ground.
BTW, I lived through 1973 and 1979. The disruptions weren’t limited to cities.
I think the problems we’'re having with energy and the financial/money/banking system are much more severe than climate change, and also far more immediate.
I agree with there being a slow decline in available cheap oil. The problem with relying on non-fossil fuels is that none of them scale up. No combination of so-called renewable resources will enable us to run the current global, techno-industrial civilization. Not even remotely close.
It’s misleading to simply look at oil prices and conclude there isn’t a problem because there hasn’t been a massive increase in prices. The fact is that oil is more expensive to get out of the ground now than ever. We’ve used up most of the easy to reach, cheap to extract, cheap to refine stuff. We would not be drilling a mile below the ocean were this not this case.
And here’s a basic equation- too cheap oil crushes oil companies. Too expensive oil crushes techno-industrial economies. Oil companies cannot even break even when oil is at the price it’s currently at- the entire shale oil industry is drowning in debt.
I used to believe in peak oil around 2008. Back then proven oil reserves were about 1.5 trillion barrels. As of 2018 it was 1.7 trillion barrels.
That doesn’t even count converting coal or natural gas into oil.
We will transition to electric cars before its an issue.
Also I don’t know if I believe there is capital scarcity. The world is currently sitting on several trillion in idle capital. We’ve got too much capital not being used for anything productive if anything.
Yes, and so what? We’ve managed to make the stuff that was very expensive to extract less expensive, and if the price rises then it becomes even more economical. Natural gas has glutted the market and reduced the demand for oil. Why do I care that oil companies have to drill a mile below the ocean if gas prices remain steady? Where is the shock coming from?
Energy isn’t completely fungible, but it’s getting more so every day. As we use natural gas, solar, and wind to run power plants (moving away from coal and oil) and electric cars are becoming more common, the impact of potential rising oil prices becomes less every day.
You are so completely backwards on this it is hard to figure where to start.
Rural areas will be crushed first IF – IF – this phenomenon you’re talking about comes to pass (and it will not). Scarce oil will matter more for places where more resources are needed for commerce. That means higher costs to run tractors and trucks, higher costs for road construction, higher costs for fertilizer, etc.
Cities are vastly more energy efficient for a given population than rural areas are. It’s totally bonkers to think otherwise.
Large cities are not more energy efficient- it takes an unbelievable amount of energy to maintain them, to get resources in and to get waste out. There’s a reason why pre-industrial cities were exponentially smaller than modern ones- everything about the modern large city is dependent upon cheap and abundant energy to function. The skyscraper is an obsolete building form because they will never be renovated. We won’t have the resources or the capital available in the future. Cities burdened with them (the Chicagos, New Yorks, and Dallas’) will quickly find them to be a liability, not an asset.
And you’re correct in a way- the way we’ll have to do agriculture in a post cheap oil era will be completely different from the way do it now- it will require far more human attention, far more human (and probably animal) labor, and we’ll have to grow most of our food close to where we live.
Yes, many large municipalities are near broke, but not society. The free market is so flush with capital it has a hard time finding investment opportunities and is artificially creating a bubble in equity values.
The local governments made bad decisions on how they employ people and managing budgets and capital decisions. But that doesn’t mean that the communities themselves will collapse.
Secondly, the proliferation of horizontal fracking and it’s lower costs, is probably one of the most significant achievements of mankind within the last 20 years. It completely shifts the world dependency away from the Arab states and has stabilized the price of crude.