The article on Silicon Valley is of immense importance. I suggest that you focus on two underserved communities--East Palo Alto and Belle Haven Menlo Park east of 101. Both are traditionally ignored majority minority places with dominant working class populations. Both are seeing housing prices escalate through the roof (no pun intended), with resulting displacement and gentrification.

Everyone in these communities should be affordably housed, including the indigent, and it is totally within the means of Silicon Valley to see that this happens.

I have suggested that the $20 mil Facebook has promised to donate to these communities (abutted by its world HQ) for housing take an innovative approach--not just more routine, overbuilt mainstream houses on almost-gone open space. Backyard tiny houses may be one solution, using existing properties and enabling integration between working class homeowners and a diverse array of tech and other types of workers, as well as students. Adding on to the backs of existing houses is another. But there are others that integrate visually and socially with what is there now.

https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/09/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-get-about-people/539799/

Gail Tverberg says:

September 28, 2017 at 3:17 pm

Where I live (older neighborhood adjacent to a university campus), the trend is to finish off basements and rent them out as apartments. Or for a group of students to rent a home, trying to as many people into the home as the zoning laws will allow (or more). Or for an organization that does drug rehab to buy the homes and use them as temporary housing for several clients at a time. I believe this cost is paid by health insurance.

I don’t see backyard homes. They use too much energy to build and maintain. I see apartments and homes being used by non-related groups of people. In some cases, there may be separate apartments. In others, each person (or two people) may rent a bedroom, and the group may share and kitchen living room (if zoning laws will permit this). Zoning laws try to limit this, as much as they can.

PRESERVING GLOBAL CULTURE

https://news.yale.edu/2017/09/27/yale-leads-effort-protect-cultural-heritage-0?utm_source=YNemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=yn-09-28-17

PRESERVING CIVILIZATION

Political correctness can be appropriate or inappropriate, depending whether it serves a survivable civilization or not. You can't have stability (on which nuclear management depends, among other threatening forces) on the backs of disgruntled groups.

NUCLEAR THREAT: 

There are hundreds or thousands (depending what you count) of nuclear danger sites that are like Fukushimas in waiting. FE has made this point and it's well taken.

- needs sophisticated governance for indefinite management of all such sites, requiring:

- relative global stability

- a very high level of redundancy

- a very high level of regional buy-in and education

- major attention on regional land use planning

GOVERNANCE AND PSYCHOLOGY: 

You can't have reliable governance without addressing what's in people's minds.

GENDER: 

Women being a global category, as is land, makes the categories alike in some ways, and perhaps inseparable. Attention to gender might be a way to get beyond race. Gender appears to be a more structural (word) issue than race (a construction of civilization), in that it subsumes race and is not as artificial or arbitrary.

MAINTAINING CIVILIZATION: 

- The likely global formula for housing is backyard tiny houses, since they can supply income to existing home owners while housing masses of new and increasing low-income people (well educated or not) .

- The likely formula for food is ubiquitous gardening--backyard, workplace, schools, near-urban greenhouses, as well as industrial farms--all focused on making soil.

- The jury is out as to whether civilization can be made complementary to nature.

- Reliance on nature alone for any future way of life does not seem feasible.

NOTES: 

- Other people are much better at scholarship and the pedagogy than I-- mine is a lay person's view, using commonsense, although it requires (aesthetic) intuition to reach that commonsense level.

- The FE challenge expanded: Currently, I see an urgent need to study and practice life ways of indigenous peoples, especially hunter gatherers. A part of doing this might require ubiquitous application of the FE challenge (making it a means of status) within our management of civilization, however and for whatever durations that "work."

- Lots of issues are beyond common sense, and require the kinds of expertise that can be found on FW, in academies, in religion, in business and industry, but it could help to have a small number of commonsense guideposts that remain stable amid the inevitable sorting out of hyper complexity. 

- I look at only the simplest skeletal issues of relationships and synthesis, but even though the system is self organizing, it doesn't self organize in isolation of such heuristic (best guess) initiatives by humans.

"Comparing 2016 with 2000, and using constant 2016 values throughout, American GDP increased by $4.6tn. But, and again at constant values, aggregate debt grew by $21trn over the same period. This means that each dollar of recorded growth was accompanied by $4.60 of new debt."

Is this like growing backward? Would not growing work better?

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/104-why-mr-trump-cant-raise-american-prosperity/

The Case Against Civilization – The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-civilization

Gail Tverberg says:

September 21, 2017 at 9:11 pm

"Without fossil fuels, women have to be mothers and the caretakers of the home and garden. Besides the need to be at home with several children (so that an average of two will live to maturity), there is also the fact that they are not physically as strong as men. Without fossil fuels, physical strength is much more important in the mix of abilities.

Blacks were doing better, back when physical strength was valued. Apparently, they are also better adapted to working in heat also. So their lot may improve, with the loss of fossil fuels."
----------------

"Without fossil fuels, women have to be mothers and the caretakers of the home and garden. "

I assume that there is no viable life without fossil fuels, given the noted danger of thousands of fuel ponds needing sophisticated, eternal monitoring. So I'm not sure why we even talk about life after collapse.

The doomosphere talks (understandably) about our predicament that, by definition, cannot be resolved. So I've come to think that what we have is not a predicament but a crisis. Some people believe that our reality is governed by thermodynamic forces that led us here unavoidably. I think this is a partial explanation, but that we have the mental ability to see where the flow of energy is misdirecting us, enabling us to change strategy and evolve. I have made godawful mistakes all my life, correcting many with time, and see no reason why the entire species hasn't done the same. The brain we evolved with makes us prone to mistakes and worship of false "gods." But we are creatures of evolution too, and that means getting past dysfunctional behavior. We would have died out long ago, otherwise.

Civilization developed in the face of errors perhaps, attempts to solve problems of shortages perhaps. It functioned like a treadmill, where it had to grow or collapse. The main thing is that it happened, leading to luxury and comfort for many, including relative near-equality for women of the west.

Since civilization also had to be defended, male strength was valued and had to be supported by women's servitude.  Since civilization led to escalating complexity, compartmentalization and specialization, it relied on male mental proclivities for compartmentalization and specialization as well. Meanwhile, female brains that were better adapted to synthesis became devalued. Well, as it turns out, compartmentalization and aggression have limited efficacy past a certain point of complexity. And we are at that point.  The competitive and divergent model of civilization would be better replaced with a cooperative convergent one. While men might resist such a change, it is by far the best alternative if they wish to survive.

With industrial technology at it's present unimaginable height, there are no tasks that rule out women. It isn't even clear that women need to be reproducing in large numbers in the near future. Overpopulation density is said (correctly of not) to be one of the world's greatest problems.

But the industrial civilization we have now is indispensable for keeping us alive. Simultaneously, it is sure to kill us in a none too distant future. So damned if you do, damned if you don't. I argue that there is a third choice, which is to embrace but change industrial civilization so that it doesn't destroy itself prematurely or needlessly. A major change would be to bring women into the leadership circle. If women, by virtue of history, are a de facto global species, they should be able to effect some degree of change to nation state competition. The arguments against this are based on the norms of patriarchal competition. But you can't rely on norms and have change at the same time.    

Women Are Natural Gobalists

Women have been subjugated since the dawn of civilization, as have blacks. I suspect that they have been subjected for somewhat related reasons, having to do with power and control dynamics of civilization. Women, however, span all tribal, ethnic, racial, class, cultural or national groups, making them a uniquely global species of subjugation. Women, therefore, are the quintessential globalists.

In keeping with the "ultimate," relatively recent understanding of the seamlessness of the planet--as through the visceral connection to the photographed image of Earth viewed from space, or through the physical mapping, photographing and monitoring of all the planet's territory from satellites--there is now an unprecedented need for a human global category that matches the new understanding of wholeness and indivisibility of the planet. I propose that this category, comprising the majority of earth's humans, is women.

In the spirit of making lemonades out of lemons, it seems that it is the subjugation and bias against women that renders them uniquely powerful as a sort of global species unified by universal civilizational oppression of their sex. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/greening-our-streets_b_7512830.html

Greening Our Streets

I can see enormous benefits to daylighting rivers, not unlike removing dams, but there is a problem with the utopian (progressive) impetus for it.

IMO, the only reasonable motive for public action is to preserve life (including your own). Thinking you can improve a place by removing what is there and replacing is a little like killing the villagers to preserve the village. Once you remove wholesale what other earlier people built, however destructive and flawed originally, you are removing life preserving information. You are using the same hubristic approach that produced these flawed structures to start with.

Now, with hindsight, it's not that you can't improve the past structures, but you first have to appreciate them and change them according to their own intrinsic characteristics (their "forms," etc.). Rather than daylight the entire section of river, creating a separate (and separtatable) park space, it would be more preservationist to create "fingers" of daylighted space that seek to mesh with the urban environment around it. That way, you don't lose "memory," you don't have a massive (simplified) superimposed system to manage, and you spread the management responsibility around to nearby stakeholders. You might get rid of some NIMBY resistance to daylighting that way too.

https://www.planetizen.com/node/94724/bringing-urban-rivers-back-daylight

"Our consumption of sand is outpacing our understanding of the economics and environmental impacts of extracting, transporting, and consuming it, finds research published last Thursday in the journal Science. Out of the complexity of the global sand trade has emerged something of a butterfly effect, in which an economic decision in one place can wreak social and environmental havoc on the other side of the world. "

https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2017/0914/It-s-a-small-world-after-all-say-scientists-warning-of-sand-scarcity

An instinctive approach to the surrounding environment has led me away from using sand for construction. I find that, for all practical purposes, anything you can do with sand can be done equally well with paper pulp mixed with latex paint. It is lighter and has better thermal qualities than sand. But sand has advantages through speed of application and indisputable fire retardancy. (BTW, densely packed paper pulp that is then dried allows no air circulation within its mass, and is therefore fire retardant.)

Trees bring economic benefit to a sampling of cities

https://www.citylab.com/environment/2017/08/how-much-are-trees-worth-to-megacities/537972/?utm_source=SFTwitter

worldofhanumanotg says:

September 12, 2017 at 5:55 am

Yes, nicely described dynamics, which is in line with historical accounts and human nature.

That’s why we can assign high priority to scenarios of at least attempted command style economies post crash, mileage may vary, it would be immediately unsuccessful in some parts of the world, resulting in further cascading chaos and or small governable areas, while working for a while in other places. Obviously with the proviso there is no fulls scale global nuclear/.. war knee jerk reaction, and also at least some %% of regions will be able, willing to commit resources to cool nuclear waste pools for a couple of more years, before longer terms disposal etc.

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worldofhanumanotg says:

September 12, 2017 at 5:55 am

Yes, nicely described dynamics, which is in line with historical accounts and human nature.

That’s why we can assign high priority to scenarios of at least attempted command style economies post crash, mileage may vary, it would be immediately unsuccessful in some parts of the world, resulting in further cascading chaos and or small governable areas, while working for a while in other places. Obviously with the proviso there is no fulls scale global nuclear/.. war knee jerk reaction, and also at least some %% of regions will be able, willing to commit resources to cool nuclear waste pools for a couple of more years, before longer terms disposal etc.

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adonis says:

September 8, 2017 at 8:28 pm

absolutely if the land is used for resilient fruit trees a 1 % chance is better than nothing im thinking citrus trees are very resilient and provide great medicinal value and nourishment

Reply

• 

  September 9, 2017 at 12:16 am

  I hadn’t heard about citrus as a remedy for radiation. It should be well researched, And to the extent that it helps, it should be planted very widely. (That would be in warmer climates than mine.)

  There’s a kind of potassium supplement that I know of–not just any potassium, but I forget which kind.

  Beyond using land to plant trees (which can be a very complex issue due to soil condition, land ownership and such) I think of land use planning as being optimal planning for a given jurisdiction of land. People living near nuclear plants could be rewarded to store fuel, and be able to monitor radiation, dispense remedies, have an evacuation plan, plant and manage appropriate forestries, be trained to manage nuclear facilities as feasible, etc. There should also be a water storage plan that is pretty much fail safe, with lots of redundancy…

  Reply
• 

  September 9, 2017 at 12:49 am

  Beyond using land to plant trees (which can be a very complex issue due to soil condition, land ownership and such) I think of land use planning as being optimal planning for a given jurisdiction of land. People living near nuclear plants could be rewarded to store fuel, and be able to monitor radiation, dispense remedies, have an evacuation plan, plant and manage appropriate forestries, be trained to manage nuclear facilities as feasible, etc. There should also be a water storage plan that is pretty much fail safe, with lots of redundancy…

JT Roberts says:

September 11, 2017 at 1:45 pm

Turgot 1766

“The land has also furnished the whole amount of moveable
riches, or capitals, in existence, and these are formed only
by part of its produce being saved each year.”

“Not only does there not exist nor can there exist any
other revenue than the net produce of lands, but it is also
the land which has furnished all the capitals which make
up the sum of all the advances of agriculture and commerce.

It was that which offered without tillage the first
rude advances which were indispensable for the earliest
labors, all the rest is the accumulated fruit of the economy
of the centuries that have followed one another since man
began to cultivate the earth. This economizing has doubtless
taken place not only out of the revenues of the proprietors
but also out of the profits of all the members
of the working classes.

It is even generally true that,
although the proprietors have a greater superfluity, they
save less because as they have more leisure, they have more
desires and more passions, they regard themselves as more
assured of their fortune, they think more about enjoying
it agreeably than about Increasing It luxury is their inheritance.
The wage-receivers, _ and especially the undertakers
of the other classes, who receive profits proportionate
to their advances, to their talent and to their activity,
although they have no revenue properly so called, have yet
a superfluity beyond their subsistence, and almost all of
them, devoted as they are to their undertakings, occupied
in increasing their fortunes, removed by their labor from
expensive amusements and passions, save all their superfluity
to invest it again m their business, and so increase
it.

Most of the undertakers in agriculture borrow little,
and scarcely any of them seek to make a profitable employment
of anything but their own funds. The undertaker
in other employments, who wish to make their fortune,
stable, also try to get into the same position: and, unless
they have great ability, those who carry on their enterprises
upon borrowed funds run great risk of failing.

But, although capitals are partly formed by saving from the
profits of the working classes, yet, as these profits always
come from the earth, inasmuch as they are all paid,
either from the revenue, or as part of the expenditure
which serves to produce the revenue, it is evident that
capitals come from the land just as much as the revenue
does, or, rather, that they are nothing but the accumulation
of the part of the values produced by the land that
the proprietors of the revenue, or those who share it with
them, can lay by every year without using it for the satisfaction
of their wants.”

JT says: Turgot was a Physiocrat
If you carefully read his conclusion and reflect on the global economy as it mirrors France in his day you will see clear parallels.

Other comment: “It is even generally true that,

although the proprietors have a greater superfluity, they
save less because as they have more leisure, they have more
desires and more passions, they regard themselves as more
assured of their fortune, they think more about enjoying
it agreeably than about Increasing It”

Or it would seem that they think about enjoying it agreeably while increasing it lazily, greedily and short sightedly, without ensuring its long term continuity.

Is capitalism at odds with industrial production

"If you get less energy out than it takes you to find, drill, refine and deliver to the economy then the game is over. "

How much of that is mandated on the wish of owners and shareholders to get rich? I am suggesting that oil production as a money game is at odds with the survival of industrial production (run on oil) after certain limits have been reached. In a theocratic or military government, oil is produced without private parties--corporations, shareholders--getting rich. You take private interests out of the equation, the general public live simply while technology, government services, militaries get funded. The system is run by force or by religion, or both. Industrial civilization continues under different rules. i'm not prescribing anything. It just seems that a neutral party looking at the situation might think along those lines in the process of trying to understand the subject.

https://srsroccoreport.com/you-have-been-warned-the-situation-in-the-markets-is-much-worse-than-you-realize/

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED: The Situation In The Markets Is Much Worse Than You Realize

POSTED BY SRSROCCO IN ECONOMY, ENERGY, EROI, NEWS, PRECIOUS METALS ON SEPTEMBER 9, 2017 — 29 COMMENTS

• 133
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It’s about time that I share with you all a little secret.  The situation in the markets is much worse than you realize.  While that may sound like someone who has been crying “wolf” for the past several years, in all honesty, the public has no idea just how dire our present situation has become.

The amount of debt, leverage, deceit, corruption, and fraud in the economic markets, financial system, and in the energy industry are off the charts.  Unfortunately, the present condition is even much worse when we consider “INSIDER INFORMATION.”

America Can’t Afford to Rebuild

"America is in no position to rebuild. Which is a direct consequence of the fact that the entire nation has been built on credit for decades now. Which in turn makes it extremely vulnerable and fragile. Please do understand that mechanism. Every single inch of the country is in debt. America has been able to build on debt, but it can’t rebuild on it too, precisely because of that.

There is no resilience and no redundancy left, there is no way to shift sufficient funds from one place to the other (the funds don’t exist). And the grand credit experiment is on its last legs, even with ultra low rates. Washington either can’t or won’t -depending on what affiliation representatives have- add another trillion+ dollars to its tally, state capitals are already reeling from their debt levels, and individuals, since they have much less access to creative accounting than politicians, can just forget about it all."

Not necessarily bad, but it means we need another way to do land use planning, leaving open space and (already existing) built environment be.

https://www.theautomaticear...

https://www.planetizen.com/node/94567/houstons-drainage-problem#comment-3501140345

Mapping the UN Sustainable Development Goals

https://www.planetizen.com/node/94687/making-uns-sustainable-development-goals-great-again

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp

Thanks for this! It is so simple (good!) and straightforward. Correlated with Bastiat's thinking is that when something is destroyed, the finite (and ever entropy-bound) energy source that created it (embodied energy) is diminished, leading to long term and systemic economic decline.

Gail Tverberg says:

September 7, 2017 at 2:57 pm

Actually, there are physics issues underlying the course chosen, so the owners really had no choice on the chosen. Many people claimed that there was a way to avoid disaster with answers ranging from (a) wind turbines and solar panels, (b) drill for more oil, or (c) learn to live with less. None of these were real choices, unfortunately.

Reply

• Artleads says:

  September 7, 2017 at 6:54 pm

  I hope (c) can be explained more clearly. It’s often repeated that the system must grow or collapse. Lay people for whom money is a mystery may be stumped by this, and attempt to understand it as follows: The system has to grow in order to pay debt with interest. This is because people want to make a profit through lending. Paying debt with interest seems like an exponential growth process that must end when it’s clear that, over time, the prospect of getting repaid loses credibility. If the debt system is simply allowed to run out of steam, computers shut down, trucks stop running, and there is universal mayhem.

  A lender looking at this looming catastrophe might consider a different line of business long before the end is due. A catchy phrase I recently heard was, “low profit, high volume.” Finance a lot more things that ensure industrial society keeps working (whatever kind of political or economic system it requires to do so). If medicine, computers and trucking can keep on going, the top 30% of income earners might not even notice if they had to live on half of what they earn now. Just as the New Deal required the rich to take a cut for the good of the economic/industrial system, why would strategic cuts that don’t kill anybody not work now?

  What people need is very different from what they want. The money-greed dominant system doesn’t seem workable long term, or to be fixable. If the resources it requires to maintain it for so many billions operate by abstract, digital numbers, 90% of what is actually out there to sustain life is overlooked. It would otherwise require assessment of resources at a much more intimate level than is possible in a top-down, hyper complex global system.

  Reply
  • Artleads says:

    September 7, 2017 at 8:09 pm

    (c) In other words, living with less could grow the economy. Some that have too much could “invest” in the lagging potential economy–greatly expanding the volume of economic players. At some point, rational thinking–the kind of thing that’s missing in my neck of the woods but could help expand economic activity–has to be tried..

    Reply
  • Gail Tverberg says:

    September 8, 2017 at 7:32 am

    The reasons for needing growth go beyond needing to repay debt with interest.

    One issue, since the world is finite, it that there is a need to work around depletion. Thus, it becomes more and more expensive to extract resources of any type that are needed. For example, fresh water from wells may be adequate, as long as aquifers are not depleted. But once aquifers are depleted, some other approach must be used. For example, water must be piped in from a distance, or desalination must be used.

    A second issue is that world population is constantly rising. This means that there is less and less arable land per person. We must work around this problem in one way or another. A popular way is through irrigation. Of course, this runs into limits as well.

    A third issue is that we have a huge amount of built infrastructure such as electric transmission lines, roads, bridges, water pipes, sewer pipes, sewage treatment centers, and hydroelectric dams that must be maintained and repaired. In fact, the amount of required maintenance goes up each year, just to stay even.

    Needless to say, energy limits are tied into all of this as well. We need more and more energy resources to fix issues of both of these types. And as the EROEI people tell us endlessly, it takes increasing amounts of energy to extract energy. This is one (smallish) piece of our overall need for growth, or the system will collapse.

    Reply
    • Artleads says:

      September 8, 2017 at 10:09 am

      Damnable complexity. As the drawings show in the link, replacing the flood control with the water recycling paradigm is alarmingly dependent on complexity, much of it hidden. At least, in the proposed model.

      https://www.planetizen.com/node/94649/changing-paradigm-stormwater-management

Tim Groves says:

I for one think novelty is overrated and variations on a theme—if done well and with a worthwhile theme—can be more useful as well as more entertaining. Even great artists and thinkers end up mining and recycling their own ideas or covering the same old ground in the course of their careers.

Gail’s work covers a well-defined and limited field and tends to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. She explores what’s happening in the macro-economy and tries to make sense of it by fathoming how the different phenomena connect with and influence each other, joining dots, extrapolating trends, and pointing out commonly-held misconceptions.

She’s been laboring on this work for a decade or more and so brand new insights are likely to be few and far between. Also, this sort of work is bound to involve revisiting the same topics and points over and over, coming at them from different directions and looking at them from different angles, and this is not by any means a fault.

For readers of her posts, repetition of many of the the same points helps greatly in helping us to become familiar with them is an aid to memory. We are more likely to retain a grasp of ideas we encounter several times than ideas we encounter only once.

Reply

• Trevor says:

  September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm

  Great points. I’ve been on the same themes for 50 years, so I relate well to what you say. McPherson bumped my game up a notch or two, then fizzled out. Gail has helped me even more, and shows signs of being on a much steadier course. In fact, Gail’s and this site’s combined insights on energy make me now believe that steadiness is a now required way to avoid panic and energy drag. When we determine that there is a similar energy dynamic to the technological and the psychological, steady behavior in both areas seem to make sense.