I’m trying to connect some dots and would welcome help to correct flawed assumptions.
Once oil was discovered, it had to be used profitably. One way to do this was to use the leftover tar from oil production to build roads. The roads had to go somewhere, and the solution to that was to build suburbs as their destination. I’ve come to learn, OFW has taught me, that the extensive living spaces suburbanization enabled promoted single family living on an unprecedented scale, which increased population proportionately. Our economic system has been growing exponentially, along with this population.
But now we’ve hit a roadblock.
As easily obtainable supply has dwindled, oil has become increasingly hard and costly to produce. Since the entire networked economy runs on oil, the strain on producers has trickled through the rest of the economy, making it less able to afford oil at the high prices producers would need to survive. But that isn’t all, for the oil economy, starting with mass-scale suburbanization, has gobbled up critical supplies of land and other natural resources, so that they, too are in short supply. There is talk that if an extremely cheap source of energy that used the same infrastructure as oil could be found, civilization could hum right along. But that wouldn’t address the problems of more depletion and more pollution caused by the extravagance and complexity of the oil-based civilization our large population has come to depend on. Besides, no cheap alternative to oil has yet been discovered.
It would seem that discussions on this dire situation tends always to leave out the critical issue of land use. Global land use policy to fit the age of oil depends on sprawl. Sprawl is possible through cultural programming that devalues land as having any value other than for economic maximization–the highest and best use policy that planners talk about. So land is the battleground on which the civilization’s wars are fought. The momentum of the civilization is to develop every last piece of land as cheaply as it can, until no more land is to be found. That necessarily increases pollution, uses more oil, and produces more people.
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