Because James Howard Kunstler is at it again

[mmcirvin]

here is a lazyweb request to people with a knowledge of transportation and agricultural economics: Given approximately contemporary conditions, is there an actual price per barrel of oil at which New York City (or the major metropolis of your choice) starves to death from its inability to truck sufficient food in from the available farms? If so, care to estimate what it is, within an order of magnitude?

Are existing freight-train tracks into NYC insufficient to feed the city, and if they are, is it so impossible to build new ones that everyone there would die or abandon the city first? Presumably existential threats trump NIMBY.

Comments

[surferelf.livejournal.com]

Interesting problem. I never thought about the rail capacity. I'd be more concerned about the other end, though. Getting the food to the rail w/o trucks would be tricky.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

See, Kunstler's thesis is that after the imminent peak-oil crash, not only will suburban sprawl become unviable, the great cities will all die too because they're too far from their food supply, leaving a world of smallish towns surrounded by farmland. And the reason I'm suspicious is that as far as I know there were big cities (if not as big as today's) even long before the internal combustion engine, and there are colossal mega-cities in parts of the world where people are so poor that oil is comparatively expensive relative to their income. And don't cities give you economies of scale with bulk transport?

But it's possible that I'm missing something.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

Cities tend to be sited on large rivers, cities tend to be sited next to oceans. Smallish towns surrounded by farmland, not so much, not if surrounded actually means surrounded.

And transporting stuff on water has historically been way more efficient and cost-effective, and just plain *feasible* than all that dicking about try to haul stuff into and out of the interior.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Cheer up though, mate, it may never happen. The United States government would sooner conquer the world's remaining fuel reserves by nuclear force than allow its cities to lose their food supplies.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I dunno, they allowed New Orleans to lose its land supply.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

(cheap shot, I know...)

New Orleans

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Nope, correct enough. The events of 2005 showed clearly that the Federal Government is quite willing to just sit on its hands during misfortunes and let large numbers of its citizens die from dehydration and starvation --which could have been fairly easily prevented by simply repeating what the government had done in disasters during generations past. And that the Government is willing to allow regions valuable to the national infrastructure be taken out of commission.

Of course that may have something to do with whether the Federal Government is at the time controlled by people who believe that any show of competence or helpfulness towards citizens by the Government is EVIL EVIL SOCIALISM.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Tenochtitlan was a city of over a million with no running water, no sewer, and no wheels. Dogs were employed to drag stuff around on stone sleds. People did starve there on occasion, though.

[surferelf.livejournal.com]

JHK's peak oil prognostications sometimes make it sound as if he believes it will be a single catastrophic event like having the rug pulled out from underneath our civilization. Given that an increasing number of experts are saying that peak oil is something that has already happened, it looks like things aren't going down like that. When he's not being so melodramatic, he just says that the cities will shrink a bit and the suburbs will become slums.

Cities are more efficient than towns per capita, but big modern cities still need enormous amounts of energy to operate as they do now. If peak oil imposes a cap on the portion of that energy that comes from oil, cities will adapt. It's not unreasonable to think that some cities may adapt by shrinking because the infrastructure can no longer support such a large population.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There was a discussion over on James Nicoll's LJ in which I was wondering why it is that peak-oil doom scenarios so often assume that there's an abrupt catastrophe with little warning the moment production levels out. Carlos Yu suggested that the source of the meme was the original Club of Rome Limits to Growth model, in which everything tended to suddenly go to hell when about 50% of the limiting resources had been consumed. Limits to Growth was not terribly realistic by modern standards, but the vivid image stuck.

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

We had immense cities in the 19th century, before the internal combustion engine, when transport was indeed significantly more expensive. If coal and the railroads could give us New York, London, and Berlin --- hell, if they could give us Chicago largely on the basis of re-shipping and processing food --- then they idea that they will go away when oil becomes expensive is crazy. I once looked up the relative change in the ton-mile price of shipping food from 1880 to 2000, which was quite large, but seem not to have put it anywhere I can find it again.

Peak Oil and Cities

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Agree, and also about skapusniak's comment that most cities tend to be at water transport accessible places.

Also, major change from fuel price/availibility is unlikely to happen overnight. I could see some cities gradually losing half or more their population over a generation or two as people move out due to prices rising and day-to-day conditions getting more difficult. That's quite a different thing than the city suddenly and unexpectedly finding the population starving.

Re: Peak Oil and Cities

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That can happen anyway for all sorts of reasons, usually to do with jobs. Detroit has famously been slowly evaporating for decades.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I wonder if some of this is just more people thinking about transport in terms of passenger service when freight is the important thing. Everyone knows that American passenger rail is in a baleful state, but as far as I know the railroads are actually doing all right with freight. Most of the trains run on diesel but they need a minute amount of it compared to trucks. The networks don't support passenger travel well because the requirements are completely different.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Heck, part of the problem with American passenger rail is that the tracks are owned by the freight companies, and their needs always supersede Amtrak's.

If you need more info on rail, I have a historian friend who specializes in rail and trolley transport and urban growth. I suppose I could direct him here.

[secretagentmoof]

See http://www.economist.com/node/16636101 for a pretty thorough discussion of America's freight/passenger trains.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Mostly, I feel confirmed that I'm not missing something simple when I think that the purveyors of this particular doom scenario are blowing smoke.

I suspect that an endless oil shortage and more expensive transport will have the net effect of concentrating population rather than dispersing it. As density advocates like to say, the most efficient vehicle known to humanity is the elevator.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Also, although it never occurred to me until some comments here reminded me, American small towns are very often not based on access to water transportation, especially as you move further west. Some are based on rail transportation, although the train may have stopped passing through many of them; others are based on road transport. So the living areas that are most likely to be impacted will be small town America west of the Mississippi. Not the cities, except maybe Las Vegas. I don't think Vegas has anything but road access. Are there any American cities that were based around road/interstate access instead of water or rail transport?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Tyson's Corner.

Follow the Oregon Trail!

[timchuma.livejournal.com]

80% of the population of Australia still lives in coastal cities.

Most goods in Australia still get imported via sea, I am sure people would find a way to exploit wind and solar power quite quickly if they really had to.

Whales were once such a plentiful source of oil they were burned in lamps.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Here's what my friend the historian, with expertise in railroad history and urban development, had to say about the issue when I asked:

"New York would probably be better off than a lot of western cities that didn't get big until after the rail era. Phoenix, Houston, Los Angeles, et al. Distance from food sources is less important than continued access: the east coast got a lot of its food from California by 1900, well before the car era. Cities where you don't need a car as much to get around will be in a better position than cities with strictly autocentric sprawl. The sprawlier places also typically paved over their nearby farmland, making conversion to local farming more difficult. But even in an oil-poor world, it will still be more practical to ship food to people than people to food: if everyone lives in the breadbaskets, that occupies even more farmland.

And yes, those with existing railroad lines will be well-suited to bring back more passenger rail service."

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I should have highlighted this sentence, because it was a "duh" moment for me after I read what Bill wrote: "if everyone lives in the breadbaskets, that occupies even more farmland." You can't have the mostly-rural, post-Peak Oil world that Kunstler is describing: too many people living on farmland reduces the amount of farmland, which puts those people into marginal living conditions. Centralized population areas actually increases the amount of food that can be grown, which means you can store some food for emergencies.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Phoenix/Mesa seems to be high on everyone's list of cities that will be in big trouble from expensive oil and/or climate change. I'd guess Las Vegas as well, though if the casinos ever bounce back, they could be lucrative enough to brute-force in a mass transit system and fast rail lines to Californian cities. (Maybe the real threat to Vegas is just the temptation to legalize gambling in more and more places, eliminating its monopoly.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, Vegas seems like a logical town to run on solar energy, though I know for a fact that they usually have to keep the AC running all night, so there's a demand-cycle issue.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I guess they've already got Hoover Dam.