The suburbs of 50 American cities will soon be bulldozed in order to let the remaining city cores run more efficiently. This will, of course, begin with the more distressed places, like Flint MI. James H Kunstler should be chuckling right now. First, these places get bulldozed. Then the streets get depaved and turned into gravel.

Then they disappear.

Then the nightmare of the North American suburban disaster unwinds and we get to go on to the next downshifting of civilisation from this decidedly UNcivilised disaster to something perhaps more civil. Perhaps.

I don’t know if I should be happy or not. I am happy to see worthless suburbs disappear. Every time I spend anytime in those environments I get really depressed and angry. Still, I am sad to see all that sunk cost go to waste – this more than half century of investment into an ill-conceived lifestyle. It’s just frustrating and sad to know it was all a big mistake. Oh well. It’s the first step in a long road down the back side of Hubbert’s Curve.

HW

According to IEA and US EIA, Non OPEC-12 oil production peaked in 2004 at 46.8 million barrels/day (mbd) as shown in the chart below. This oil definition includes crude oil, lease condensate, oil sands and natural gas plant liquids. If natural gas plant liquids are excluded, then the production peak remains in 2004 but decreases to 42.1 mbd.

for more on this, go here.

Friday, March 17, 2006
$9 trillion in debt

The USA.gov just voted itself te ability to go to $9 trillion dollars in debt.

The factoid as to how much this debt is per capita is pretty awful, but I have also read that $9 trillion dollars would build 28 Eiffel Towers made of solid gold. That could be cool.

For what it’s worth I figured something out that’s kind of interesting – how long it will take to pay back the debt, assuming the USA.gov is somehow suddenly able to turn $1 million a day “profit”. Now, the simple fact is that the Gov’t has RARELY been able to “turn a profit”, ever, but I won’t go there… So, let’s just pretend the USA.gov can actually pull a million dollars a day and use it to pay the debt.

First we take 9 trillion and we divide it by the million dollars.

that gives us 9 million days to pay it.

Then we divide the 9 million days by 365.25 (roughly the number of days in a year) and we get how many years it will take to pay back $9 trillion dollars in debt at the rate of $1 million dollars a day:

24,640.657 years.

Yes, 24,640.657 years.

Bascially, right around the next glaciation.

It ain’t gettin paid back. Ever. I think we need to get that point out loud and clear:

Hello! China? Japan? South Korea? Great Britain? Hello? Guess what you guys: we’re going to stiff you. You’re not going to see a DIME of that money. Not now, not ever.

Sorry.