So the blogosphere is abuzz with some early entries to the Re:Burbia competition, and I thought I’d take this occasion to explain why I personally had no interest in the competition.  For anyone not familiar with the competition, the brief states “In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!”.  My basic response to this question is that we don’t redirect these existing spaces to promote all those wonderful things; we redirect the people living in those spaces to to our existing urban centers.

There’s a great article in the Atlantic which gets to the heart of the reason I have no interest in ‘fixing’ the suburbs:

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas—roads, sewer and water lines—cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

Worldchanging has a review of Lawrence Powell’s book “Dead Pool” in which he discusses the predictions that the water supply for much of the Southwest are rapidly declining.

How rapidly? Powell cites recent studies that with current water demand and even very minor climate change (which is not what we should expect now) there’s a 50 percent chance that both Lake Powell and Lake Mead (the two largest reservoirs in the U.S.) will “reach dead pool” by 2021. That means so little water will be left in them that the water level falls below their dam’s lowest outlets (and so no more water flows from them). As Powell notes, “A probability of 50 percent means that there is an equal chance that the reservoirs could fall to dead pool later — or sooner.” [his emphasis] The take away is that, unless profound changes are made, the desert Southwest will run out of water in the next couple decades.

“For the Colorado River basin and the Southwest,” Powell says, “the threat from global warming lies not in the comfortably distant future — the threat is here today. West of the 100th meridian, the danger derives not from the slow rise of the sea but from the more rapid fall of the reservoirs… business as usual cannot continue.”

The changes needed are virtually unimaginable now. Powell shows that right now, farms in the region use 80 percent of the water, and cities use the rest — about half of that for landscaping (which is why there are fountains in Phoenix and lawns in Las Vegas). Even cutting back agricultural use and slashing landscaping use and combining them with the most aggressive conservation efforts imaginable would still only at best buy time for a new way of life suited to a much drier, much hotter climate to emerge.

Could the be the beginning of the re-emergence of American regionalism?  Will different geographic portions of the nation (and world for that matter) be forced to so radically change their lifestyles in response to climate change that regional ways of life and cultural practices will begin to emerge again?  There was a story on NPR yesterday about a radio ad campaign in Brazil encouraging everyone to save a toilet flush per day by urinating in the shower; I wonder what other cultural practices will be questioned as we try to grapple with a radically different relationship between culture and commodities.

From the International Energy Agency, via the Independant:

In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago. On top of this, there is a problem of chronic under-investment by oil-producing countries, a feature that is set to result in an “oil crunch” within the next five years which will jeopardise any hope of a recovery from the present global economic recession, he said.

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The IEA estimates that the decline in oil production in existing fields is now running at 6.7 per cent a year compared to the 3.7 per cent decline it had estimated in 2007, which it now acknowledges to be wrong.

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In its first-ever assessment of the world’s major oil fields, the IEA concluded that the global energy system was at a crossroads and that consumption of oil was “patently unsustainable”, with expected demand far outstripping supply.

Oil production has already peaked in non-Opec countries and the era of cheap oil has come to an end, it warned.

In most fields, oil production has now peaked, which means that other sources of supply have to be found to meet existing demand.

Even if demand remained steady, the world would have to find the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias to maintain production, and six Saudi Arabias if it is to keep up with the expected increase in demand between now and 2030, Dr Birol said.

This ties into my earlier post regarding the Net Hubbert Curve; as we use up the easily accessible oil supplies, the amount of energy required to extract energy increases, so not only are we facing the (apparently rapid) decline in reserves, we’re facing decreasing extraction efficiency.

This is not good news…

It’s been a few days, so here comes the first of a few posts I’ve had on the back burner for a while.

The Hubbert Curve is a graph depicting the expected world-wide oil extraction before and after ‘peak oil‘.  Ignoring arguments about the existence or timing of ‘peak oil’ as well as the accuracy of the shape of the Hubbert Curve, let’s look at another frightening aspect of oil extraction: its efficiency over time.  As the ‘low hanging fruit’ gets picked, extracting oil becomes increasingly difficult, which means that more and more energy is required to extract the oil (energy).  Obviously technology can ameliorate this to some extent, but take a look at this graph showing the energy return on investment since the beginning of the century:

This clearly shows that as we extract more and more energy in the form of oil, we waste more and more energy in the extraction process.  Returning to the Hubbert curve, this is a graph showing the net Hubbert curve superimposed on the gross Hubbert curve:

In other words, the oil supply is likely to plummet precipitously once we reach peak oil, due both to the dwindling supply and to the increasing cost of extraction.  Maybe postponing those wind farms isn’t such a great idea after all…

via The Oil Drum

BLDGBLOG just picked up the story I posted yesterday about 16,000-year concrete, and refers to an earlier post with some facinating bits.  The post is for an interview with geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, author of The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?.  Some excerpts:

The surface of the Earth is no place to preserve deep history. This is in spite of – and in large part because of – the many events that have taken place on it. The surface of the future Earth, one hundred million years now, will not have preserved evidence of contemporary human activity. One can be quite categorical about this. Whatever arrangement of oceans and continents, or whatever state of cool or warmth will exist then, the Earth’s surface will have been wiped clean of human traces.

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Thus, one hundred million years from now, nothing will be left of our contemporary human empire at the Earth’s surface. Our planet is too active, its surface too energetic, too abrasive, too corrosive, to allow even (say) the Egyptian Pyramids to exist for even a hundredth of that time. Leave a building carved out of solid diamond – were it even to be as big as the Ritz – exposed to the elements for that long and it would be worn away quite inexorably.

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So there will be no corroded cities amid the jungle that will, then, cover most of the land surface, no skyscraper remains akin to some future Angkor Wat for future archaeologists to pore over. Structures such as those might survive at the surface for thousands of years, but not for many millions.

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Mexico City has a good short-term chance of fossilization, being built on a former lake basin next to active, ash-generating volcanoes; but its long-term chances are poor, as that basin lies on a high plateau, some two kilometers above sea level. The only ultimate traces of the fine buildings of [Mexico City] will be as eroded sand- and mud-sized particles of brick or concrete, washed by rivers into the distant sea.

This begins to address a discussion Calvin and I have had recently about the time horizon of architecture and the unconsidered possibilities of thinking in the very long term.  I wonder if we’re not the first sentient species to inhabit this planet?  Perhaps the great triassic extinction was actually caused by dinosaurs driving SUV’s from the grocery store to the movie theaters.  Maybe our iron ore mines are extracting the remnants of ancient metropolises.

From Good

Lake Mead stores water from the Colorado River. When full, it holds 9.3 trillion gallons, an amount equal to the water that flows through the Colorado River in two years. The water from Lake Mead is used for many things. It irrigates a million acres of crops in the United States and Mexico, and supplies water to tens of millions of people. Its mighty Hoover Dam generates enough electricity to power a half-million homes. Additionally, the power from Hoover Dam is used to carry water up and across the Sierra Nevada Mountains on its way to Southern California.

In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high. It’s been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was enjoying one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years. Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the last 75 years, we’ve been partying like it’s 1929. Farmers grow rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead; residents of desert communities maintain front lawns of green grass; golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.

In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued a paper titled “When will Lake Mead go dry?” which set the odds of Lake Mead drying up by 2021 at 50-50. No more water, no more electricity, no more pumping power.

“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system,” concluded the paper’s authors. “The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region.”

One of the more radical proposals involves pumping water from the eastern United States (where many regions are suffering the consequences of flooded rivers) over the Rockies to the West. In a Las Vegas Sun interview on May 1, Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said, “We’ve taken water from the West now for a hundred years, maybe it’s time to start taking water from the East, rather than from the West.” Another speculative proposal lies beyond the shores of California, where there’s an ocean of water available for desalinization. In April, the California Coastal Commission approved the West Basin Municipal Water District’s plan to build a desalination system in Redondo Beach that can desalt 100,000 gallons of seawater per day.

The power requirement for either proposal—desalting seawater or transporting water over great distance—is enormous. But if the only other alternative is a mass evacuation from the western United States, what other choice do we have?

On the same theme, Time just published an incredible set of photos of Detriot.

The Financial Times has a great post about Detroit.  A quick preview:

Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it “dying” masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region’s property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.

Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won’t want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation’s worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. “It’s like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been,” said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition.

There are also some hauntingly beautiful pictures of detroit over at seedetroit.com.  A few highlights:

I almost want to take a vacation there to do some research…