09-10-2022, 03:44 PM
(09-10-2022, 10:16 AM)David Horn Wrote:(09-09-2022, 02:46 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Unexpected consequences happen. Just think of what happens to the petroleum industry and political entities and investors and workers who depend upon it.
The fossil fuel industry, especially the petroleum side of it, has been given subsidies, special privileges and, now, outright government sanctions (see Texas under Gov. Abbott) since the very beginning. Its death should not be mourned nor subsidized further. Enough is enough!
One consequence of the automobile was that outlaws such as the Dillinger and Barrow-Parker gangs could exploit the fragmented system of law enforcement in which crooks might behave themselves in one state and do their crimes in another and return to the comparative safe harbor. The legal technicality that interstate flight to evade prosecution was a federal offense was largely ignored until J Edgar Hoover chose to make the FBI its main enforcer. With this the FBI could hound such crooks. "Interstate flight to avoid prosecution" was the ground for arrest, and the FBI turned the crook over to an offended State. The FBI then typically dropped the "interstate flight" charge in favor of more serious crimes as murder, armed robbery, or rape that might lead to the electric chair or gas chamber.
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What will happen with the demise of fossil fuel? Cities that depend heavily upon fossil fuel for income will become contemporary equivalents of Detroit and Flint today and of New England mill towns about a century ago. $hit happens in economics. Much tax revenue comes from fossil fuels as fuel and asphalt. That will be gone.
The car culture that includes racing and modifying old cars (hot rods) will marginalize. Electric cars are quiet, so they do not offer the 'sound of speed'. To be sure, cars manufactured since about 1980 have been incredibly bland. I can't imagine any car culture souping up Honda Accords from the early 1980's or transforming them into "low riders". After all, motor fuels will be hard to come by around 2045.
Ultimately it is the private automobile that must go, except in rural areas. Maybe we will rely upon vehicles more like golf carts (complete with low speeds) than like sedans. The "road trip" will largely disappear because the motorized carts will not fit them. Our perverse patterns of land use will themselves change. Broad highways and big parking lots will become decrepit before becoming put to new purposes.
Technology, economics, and assumptions of human behavior are parts of generational change. This applies even to land use, too much of which we have dedicated to private automobiles.
The infamous "stroad", a street that has rural speeds and heavy traffic and fosters box stores, fast-food eateries, movie cineplexes, rent-to-own rip-off emporia, payday loan places, motels, and convenience stores... often with abutting apartment complexes that one needs a car for going anywhere else (like across the street to the box store). It is the compromise between masses of people and cars in which people need cars to avoid being struck and killed by cars traveling at 45 mph. It's the worst of both worlds.
The stroad is a place where life is nasty and brutish, and if one is a pedestrian, potentially short. I would guess that these are places of poverty. You tell me whether you want to live near one of these urban nightmares or work in the low-paying jobs that flourish nearby. Can you imagine the contribution to obesity and diabetes, both contributors to shortened lives?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.