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Civitas No. 39 -- October 22, 2003

     The Broadside of Local Politics and Civic Design

Our Motto: “You have to hack your way through a lot of lunchmeat in this world."

Quote of the Month:
“You can’t change the system; you can’t even make it worse” — I.B. Singer

Lenz, Towne, & Curley Try To Hose Skidmore, and other election ruses of a sorry season.

by Jim Kunstler

The five Republicans running for city council told an audience at Skidmore College Tuesday night that they were all in favor of students voting in city elections — despite a blatant attempt last fall led by Accounts Commissioner Steve Towne to have voting machines moved off campus so as to effectively shut down the election district. Towne’s evil stratagem, which was supported by other sitting council members Mike Lenz and Tom Curley, ended up being overruled by the county board of elections.

Tuesday night on campus, the Republican gang pretended that it never happened and that they regarded students as the greatest potential GOP boosters since Lincoln freed the slaves. Republican George Cannon, who is running for the Public Works seat, joined in the arrant pandering. In the 2001 election, Cannon lost to DPW Commissioner Tom McTygue in the Skidmore district by a greater than 80 percent margin.

The same Republican gang — also including Finance candidate Eric Schrek — is still trying to hose the whole city on the water issue, declaring that the county’s $79 million proposal to take water from the Hudson River 18 miles away is better than the city’s $17 million plan to take water from Saratoga Lake four miles away.

In fact, the county proposal is a naked attempt to get the city to pay for future suburban sprawl development in Wilton and Greenfield, and to enrich "blow-and-go" builders who have already begun transforming Route 9 into a Central Avenue wannabe strip of entropic schlock.

Of course we view any further attempts at suburban type development as sand pounded down a rat hole, for reasons explained below — but a lot of damage could still be done to the remaining rural landscape in the craven attempt to set the stage for it.

Otherwise, the Republicans have yet to offer a coherent reason for opposing the city water plan — except that it was designed under a Democratic public works commissioner. The important word here, by the way, is designed because the engineering has already been done for the city plan, and it has received approvals from the New York state departments of Environmental Conservation and Public Health; the county hasn’t even applied for approvals under the lengthy environmental reviews, not to mention the lack of engineering work, so their gambit can’t legitimately be called a “plan.” The only county “plan” is to oppose the city plan.

Meanwhile the Republicans have mounted a vigorous dis-information operation to hose voters in the city’s outer districts, saying that the city water plan would deprive them of their boating rights and drive down their property values. The truth is that the only thing driving down property values at Saratoga Lake is the abysmal quality of the vinyl-and-chipboard houses built around the shore in recent decades, and the only thing that will change boating behavior is the fact that the world’s cheap oil fiesta is coming to an end (see below).

Candidate Cannon has gone so far as to say that Saratoga Lake water is unsafe to drink, a lie obviously refuted by the state environmental approvals. But, as Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels once observed, “if you’re going to tell a lie, it might as well be a whopper.”

The Civitas Parking Doctrine
(File Under Global Energy Crisis)

We base our ideas about parking on the belief that the coming permanent world energy crisis will drastically change motoring behavior in the US (among other things), beginning relatively soon, probably within five years.

US oil production peaked in 1970 and has been declining ever since. Hence, our addiction to imported oil. There is good evidence that the world as a whole passed peak in 2000. What we have been experiencing the past three years is a world producing the most oil it will ever produce — the absolute climax of the cheap fossil fuel fiesta. From now on, world supply will steadily decline while demand continues to rise. The situation is badly complicated by the fact that most of the remaining oil in the world belongs to people who hate us, who would actually enjoy watching us suffer and fail.

Add to this the sad truth that there is not going to be a “hydrogen economy,“ at least not anything close to the fluffy picture that has been sold to the public. And no combination of “alternative” fuels will enable us to run America the way we have been running it for the past five decades, not even partly.

There are people who believe that the earth contains a creamy nougat center of inexhaustible “non-organic” oil. We are inclined to disagree. And even if some technological miracle rescues us in the future, there is likely to be a long interval of economic and political disorder between now and then.

The American public has been woefully clueless about this developing situation, largely because the only realistic action in the face of these problems would be to drastically alter the way we do things — and as the first President Bush once famously declared: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” America is unfortunately stuck in a psychology of previous investment — meaning we’ve got so much of our wealth tied up in the existing infrastructure of daily life that we can’t imagine changing it.

The net effect of the coming global energy crisis will be the end of the 2% to 7% annual growth that industrial economies regard as “normal and healthy.” The coming oil crisis will be especially severe for the US for the following reasons: 1.) Suburban sprawl land development has replaced manufacturing as the nation’s chief economic activity (and sprawl represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.) 2.) Americans towns and cities have been systematically destroyed. 3.) Ditto local networks of economic interdependency in farming and everyday trade.

In the face of what’s coming, Americans will have to start downscaling and re-scaling everything we do and fast. We will have to live closer to work, get serious about producing more food closer to home, reconstruct local networks of wholesale and retail trade — because Wal Mart and its clones won’t survive the process of globalism-in-reverse that will attend the permanent oil crisis (no more 12,000-mile pipeline to cheap products made by Chinese factory slaves), and last but hardly least we’ll have to give up our addiction to cars (“It’ll never happen,” you might say — just watch.)

For more information: http://www.peakoil.net

Now, those caught up in the Saratoga parking melodrama no doubt base their ideas and wishes on the belief that there is no coming oil crisis and that life will continue just like before only more so well on into the 21st century. There will be evermore cars and car-based tourism. Therefore, we need more parking lots and decks.

At Civitas we happen to believe that it would be a poor investment to put city resources into parking structures at this time, given the short horizon to the coming energy crisis. A parking structure has got to be considered at least a 20-year investment. We don’t have 20 years worth of cheap oil left in the world.

That said, we believe the public is so deluded about the need for parking, that it would be pointless to try to argue against it. Incidentally, all the major party council candidates are in favor of building more parking decks. This is itself very good evidence of mass delusion.

In the meantime, for what it’s worth, we like Supervisor candidate Cheryl Keyrouze’s proposal to park tourist’s cars in fields on the edge of town and shuttle them to the center of Broadway or the racetrack on some kind of public transit. At least for the time being, until it becomes clear that the world really is headed for a massive change.

By the way, the first manifestation of the global energy crisis is the shortage of natural gas that occurred last spring at the end of the heating season. That crisis is still unfolding. Many of you have perhaps already noticed the leaps in your monthly NiMo bill. The price of natural gas has oscillated wildly since 2001, always ratcheting higher It’s going to get much worse.

Instructional Corner

When these UFOs land, they don’t fly away. This one on the corner of Caroline and Henry Streets has been with us for thirty years. The abysmal urban design standards of the previous generation persist in our daily lives. By the way, the issue here is form. Not content. There’s nothing wrong with a Chinese take-out and some offices. The problem is the ugly box they come in.

End

E-mail the editor: Kunstler@aol.com

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