Monday, January 10, 2005

 

The End of Oil: The End of Racism, Too?

Don't expect to see this on America's evening news tonight -- they're too busy frothing over the "memo scandal". (Even as they refuse to ask why FOX's Carl Cameron still has a job after his far, far worse sins committed against John Kerry.) But for those of us in the reality-based community, it might be interesting to know that the folks who run a large chunk of the world's oil wells think we'll be seeing the end of cheap oil in the not-too-distant future:

Greg Greene made The End of Suburbia with editor Barry Sliverthorn, about the way the so-called American dream will be affected by an end to cheap energy. "The whole post-war American way of life ended up being centred on the suburb; the nice house with a nice lawn and the picket fence; a nice car in the drive. "It stopped being about escaping tyranny or finding democracy. Instead, it became about achieving a way of life that was propped up by cheap energy."
The article goes on to mention, among other things, how Cuba has coped with having its oil supplies all but cut off due to the embargo (lots of urban gardens, for starters), but I'm surprised that the article -- and, presumably, the DVDs referenced -- don't address the main reason for the growth of the suburbs that cheap oil made possible: Racism. We acquired cheap oil just as millions of blacks were leaving the South to escape Jim Crow. The migrating blacks settled in big cities -- and when they did, white people started moving to the 'burbs as soon as they could afford to do so. (It's why most conservatives vastly prefer building roads to supporting mass transit. Mass transit might bring more of those people into their lily-white 'burbs and rural areas.) The End of (Cheap) Oil is going to force a lot of these people to have to make some tough decisions about where they live and why they live there. Who knows? They might decide that living next to black people isn't so bad, after all.
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