Comments on: Village Towns for Norwegian Countryside

By: Øyvind Holmstad

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 08:16:57 +0000

Kunstler opens the year beautifully!

“Similarly for “infrastructure” spending touted by the forces of Trump as the coming panacea for economic malaise. I suspect most people assume this means a trillion-dollar stimulus spend on highways and their accessories. Well, that also assumes that we expect another fifty years of Happy Motoring and suburban living. Fuggeddabowdit. We’re in the twilight of motoring anyway you cut it, despite all the chatter about electric cars and “driverless” cars. We won’t have the electric capacity to switch over the Happy Motoring fleet from gasoline. The oil industry itself is already headed for collapse on its sinking energy-return-on-investment. And our problems with money and debt are so severe that the motoring paradigm is more prone to fail on the basis of car loan scarcity and unworthy borrows before the fueling issues even kick in. Every year, fewer Americans can afford to buy any kind of car — the way they’re used to buying them, on installment loans. The industry has gone the limit to help them — seven-year loans for used cars! — but they have no more room to maneuver. The car financing system is broken. Bear in mind the original suburbanization of America back in the 20th century — along with its accessory automobiles — must be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. So, a rebuild of all this stuff would represent more and possibly even greater malinvestment. We could have applied our post-WW2 treasure to building beautiful walkable towns and cities with some capacity for adaptive re-use, but we blew it in order to enjoy life in a one-time demolition derby. Life is tragic. Societies make poor choices sometimes, and then there are consequences.”

– Forecast 2017: The Wheels Finally Come Off: http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2017-wheels-finally-come-off/

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By: Øyvind Holmstad

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 14:40:30 +0000

Michel Bauwens tells in this podcast that we use 3 times more energy transporting stuff around the world, than at producing it: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/michel-bauwens-reputation-role-commons/2016/10/17

If we include the transport of people we might use 5 times more energy for transport than for production. With VillageTowns all this mindless transport can be reduced to a minimum, while similarly increasing quality of life significantly.

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By: Øyvind Holmstad

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 18:35:55 +0000

“One way out of this quandary would be to substitute the word “activity” for “growth.” A society of human beings can choose different activities that would produce different effects than the techno-industrial model of behavior. They can organize ten-acre farms instead of cell phone game app companies. They can do physical labor instead of watching television. They can build compact walkable towns instead of suburban wastelands (probably even out of the salvaged detritus of those wastelands). They can put on plays, concerts, sing-alongs, and puppet shows instead of Super Bowl halftime shows and Internet porn videos. They can make things of quality by hand instead of stamping out a million things guaranteed to fall apart next week. None of these alt-activities would be classifiable as “growth” in the current mode. In fact, they are consistent with the reality of contraction. And they could produce a workable and satisfying living arrangement.” – Kunstler

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/slowly-then-all-at-once/

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