Surprise! It’s all about oil.

We tend to think of ourselves in a multi-modal, 21st century post-industrial world with ease and diversity, free of the heavy industry straitjacket of the world before 1980. The days of contested spheres of influence have been replaced by craftily written agreements and wars fought over far-flung natural resources have been left behind in the bloody twentieth century and the British Empire before it. After all, the base concerns of whirring machinery are nothing to the miraculous simultaneity of the wireless web, aren’t they?

Unfortunately not. As everyone has by now realized, without gasoline (or its helpmate diesel) or kerosene, it is impossible to get out of Houston. The problem with this crude commodity is its sheer ubiquity. Our post-urban world is entirely predicated on the easy availability of petroleum. I once saw Charlie Rose interview the chairman of ExxonMobil (headquartered just up the highway from Ken’s house) and he pointed out that perhaps the biggest problem with any and all sources of alternative energy was distribution; he quoted exactly how many retail fuel stations there are in the U.S., and it was some staggering number in the high hundreds of thousands or low millions. Think about it: there’s a gas station in nearly every street in every American town or city. As the storage capacity of each of these really isn’t very large, they require a tanker truck to visit at least bi-daily, and these tanker trucks need to make continual trips to central depots which must be in turn supplied continually by pipelines coming from relatively few places, most notably (in a fit of overwhelming and hilarious irony) Houston. Take out just one element in the process, whether it be electricity to the pipelines or roads for the tankers, and you’ve got maybe a day and a half of supply under normal use and whatever residual supply is left in the tanks of individual vehicles – and that’s under unremarkable normal use.

Ever since Winston Churchill made his fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy to the wonder fuel [read The Prize by Daniel Yergin] the civilized world has been putting more and more of its eggs in the basket of high-density liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Things have now reached the point where most people in the older cities (New York, Chicago) and, well, everybody in the newer cities (Dallas, Los Angeles) can’t work or buy food without the operation of the complex dance of fuel supply. It’s not just individuals either: as Witold Rybinski is fond of quoting, car cities are truck cities. If the fuel stops, everything stops.

Is this the price we pay for on-demand and just-in-time efficiency? We live in a world where being a pedestrian is really no longer an option. Whether it’s war with China over Indonesia’s fields, or stunting India’s growth so that San Jose will continue to operate, it looks like the same old scarcity is here to stay.

I wonder how the supply chain worked with horses . . . . .

Travelogue: Southern California.

*Welcome to surf city, **USA**. Orange County is always a bizarre
experience of being almost at home, but not quite. The roads, which
don't really feel like roads as they wind between the hills in visual
isolation, are new and wide; the buildings are the new-form strip
centers and ordinance-restricted big boxes that would be at home in
Collin County; and the people are homogenous, affluent, and almost
entirely white. It's a new, shiny, and surreal landscape. The
geography owns a larger place here that almost anywhere I've seen. The
unusual flora screams its individuality everywhere you go: Palm trees,
spindly ground cover, and the uber-strange sight of whole hillsides
without a single tree. The topography is the biggest adjustment. For a
son of the great plains, conditioned to surveying the entire horizon at
a glance, and comforted by the security of knowing your surroundings and
your place in them, the coastal hills are a continuous exercise in
claustrophobia. Even in the midst of massive suburban development,
there's an isolation of only knowing the valley you're in and the
housing perched on its hillsides like so many scavenger birds. By never
knowing what's on the other side of the hill, there's never a sense of
context, or where your spot relates to the before and behind. *

* *

*San Diego** was part stereotype and part surprise. There is the cliché
beach culture: high informality, streets of intentionally ramshackle
shops, and the exclusive enclave crawling up the ridge road along the
prospect over the beach. Urban **San Diego** is something of a shock:
While there are the obligatory glass office towers of every American
city, the historic core has little in common with **L.A.** and much more
with, well . . . to put it frankly . . . Guthrie, Oklahoma. The
shocking juxtaposition of Victorian streets with palm trees and aircraft
carriers took a little adjustment. *

* *

*The ocean is always an inarguable asset, but the society that's sprung
up along its edge will take me a while to digest still. Every time I go
I have trouble deciding whether I love it or can't stand it. The whole
region doesn't have that pulse of place in the people of a city like
Chicago or NYC. Maybe there just aren't enough natives to grow a
consistent viewpoint. Maybe everyone's just so relaxed that I don't
notice it. *