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Freakishly cheap gas? Nation broke? Just hit the road
Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle
The Last Road Trip
...It is the frightening rule du jour: the cheaper gas gets right now, the more completely screwed you know we are. At the same time, a cheap tank of gas is one of the few strokes of fiscal relief we have right now, a tiny reprieve from the brutal economic turmoil. What a thing.

But on the whole, it is not good news. Normally, the price of a barrel of crude drops a couple hundred percent in less than a year and we'd be out celebrating

... Not this time, baby. No one, not even the most right-wing, SUV-loving Peak Oil denier, is claiming the crash in oil prices is actually a righteous and positive sign overall, despite how some economists say it's the one thing that's kept us from complete fiscal Armageddon, at least for now.

This is what it really means: massive production slowdown, worldwide. It means: Auto industry collapse.

... A shift is nigh. It feels like it just might be the end of that classic, nostalgic America of yore, the last gasp of that sweet, impossible snapshot you might have of the classic road trip, all charming roadside attractions and funky cafes and strange, tiny towns dotting the byways like weird hallucinations. Plus, filling the tank for 25 bucks? That's just ridiculous.

After all, America is changing, and not a moment too soon. Our once noble but greedy land of cheap gas and giant cars and hot concrete ribbons stretching to the horizon is finally be shifting to something slightly more... I'm not quite sure what. Responsible? Mindful? Shrewd? Less oily? We can only hope.

What we know for sure: Principal Obama is about to step in and take away much of our unchecked gluttony, the belt tightening will go all the way to the spine, cheap, plentiful oil is going the way of the rain forest, giant, lumbering cars are more irresponsible than letting your kids watch Fox News and even Wall Street kingpins are being slapped down a few dozen rungs on the ladder of respect and admiration. End of an era? Sort of. More like: End of an identity.
(31 December 2008)

Malls, the Future of Housing?
Lisa Selin Davis, HousingWire
The mall as we know it today is a mistake.

The lonely box of concrete plopped in the suburban diaspora, outdated and, in many cases, dying, isn’t quite what Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born Holocaust survivor largely credited with inventing it, envisioned. Instead, the regional enclosed shopping mall was supposed to be a community center—a little bit of downtown and a car-free haven that would include day care facilities, offices, and, perhaps most importantly, residential living components a stone’s throw from the building; the mall was always supposed to have housing nearby.

Perhaps today Gruen would finally be satisfied, because in its newest incarnation, the mall has finally become not just a place to shop, but to live. The mortgage meltdown, shifting demographics and a growing antipathy toward suburban sprawl have caused developers to see malls not as retail dinosaurs but as giant land banks, where going vertical can appease environmentalists, potential buyers and stockholders alike.

It’s happening slowly, but it’s happening all over America, and industry experts expect the trend to grow
(29 December 2008)
Comments blogger Matthew Yglesias:
I think trying to build housing in shopping malls is a potentially promising idea.



Wasting Our Watts
Michael Grunwald, TIME Magazine
This may sound too good to be true, but the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available. It has astounding potential to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten our planet, the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our security and the energy costs that threaten our wallets. Unlike coal and petroleum, it doesn't pollute; unlike solar and wind, it doesn't depend on the weather; unlike ethanol, it doesn't accelerate deforestation or inflate food prices; unlike nuclear plants, it doesn't raise uncomfortable questions about meltdowns or terrorist attacks or radioactive-waste storage, and it doesn't take a decade to build. It isn't what-if like hydrogen, clean coal and tidal power; it's already proven to be workable, scalable and cost-effective. And we don't need to import it.

This miracle juice goes by the distinctly boring name of energy efficiency, and it's often ignored in the hubbub over alternative fuels, the nuclear renaissance, T. Boone Pickens and the green-tech economy. Clearly, it needs an agent. But it's a simple concept: wasting less energy. Or more precisely, consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory. It turns out to be much less expensive, destructive and time-intensive to reduce demand through efficiency than to increase supply through new drilling or new power plants. A nationwide push to save "negawatts" instead of building more megawatts could help reverse our unsustainable increases in energy-hogging and carbon-spewing while creating a slew of jobs and saving a load of cash. (See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.)

Now this may sound like Jimmy Carter's 30-year-old plea for us to turn down the heat and put on sweaters or like an eco-lecture nagging us to turn off lights, drive less and otherwise change our behavior to save energy. It would be nice if we did, but that's conservation, not efficiency. We don't have to sacrifice comfort or change routines to get efficient. Doing less with less may be admirable, but efficiency is about doing the same or more with less.
(31 December 2008)
Energy efficiency gets a little respect. -BA