Petroleum Thoughts 2
I don’t mean to harp on the “too many people” theme but it is a fact that tends to dominate a lot of this consideration.
High Cost of Transportation + Really Bad Weather = Lots of Casualties. The lesson we can draw from Katrina where you had lots of folks with no personal transportation in high concentration and with limited avenues of travel extrapolated into an era when this lack of transportation is more widespread than today is that evacuation will become so problematic as to be discarded. Result: a harsher, more brutal environment where those who are the beneficiaries of adverse weather will suffer and die from it. Or extrapolating what we are seeing in China and Myamar (Burma) right NOW, the dividing line on life altering bad weather – a Tornado takes your home but leaves you safe in a storm shelter – and life stopping bad weather – the weather takes your home and you – is lowered substantially.
The Death (?) of Tourism: If folks aren’t going to go off on automobile vacations then the places that depend on that kind of tourism are going to dry up. Florida may go back to being a sleepy backwater like it was before the Great Patriotic War. But we may expect to see a lot more organized vacations similar to the bus tours sold to senior citizens who can’t/won’t drive but targeted to families with shul age children. One has to wonder how teenagers can sulk about being seen in public with parents on a tour bus.
Telecommuting: One of the obvious things is that the material pace of life is going to decrease. People cannot go as much, as fast, as far given the same amount of money. This may mean that we really get serious about information workplace as something more than Blackberry addicts.
Suburbs: The death knell? Bedroom communities are either going to have to find a way to be internally productive, either with small factories and businesses that produce necessary products or as telecommuting centers, or they are going to become modern day ghost towns. I can easily see Greater Metropolitan Arab as being nothing but a senior citizen retirement community in ten years if it doesn’t find some existence mode other than as a bedroom community for Huntsville.
