Over the Edge or Over the Horizon, building 100% sustainable cities NOW

Mr. Kim Gyr
57/3 Michigan Street, Empire MI 49630, 231 383 2790
humansolutions@greenmillennium.net

Over the Edge & Over the Horizon
How to remain flexible as Peak Oil & Global Climate Change come and go

The lookouts in the mast tops are now saying, “Peak production of conventional oil came 30 months ago and although new production projects will come on stream in the next few years, they will have a hard time balancing the depletion from existing fields which various speakers placed at 4-5 percent a year and probably increasing. What we in America have not yet begun to grasp is that numbers like this imply the near total demise of the private internal combustion powered automobile. Your local gasoline station is at the end of the distribution pipeline and is the most likely to be cut off. If gasoline available for distribution in the U.S. were to fall from 9 million barrels a day to the order of 5 million through a combination of declining production and declining exports, it is not hard to figure out what would happen when the government gets around to prioritizing uses.
Food production and distribution would come first, then public health (clean water, sewage, sanitation, medical services), then public safety including the armed forces, and finally some level of economic activity that uses petroleum products.
Thirty seconds of pondering this situation should leave you with the idea that there will be very little gasoline available for your gas station to sell to you. For sure, there will be a lot fewer gas stations around ten years from now and you are not going to like the prices.1.” Ho- hum, or Oh my God!?
Since the year 2000, with US population at over 275 million and thoroughly accustomed to a life provided by petroleum resources that we have enjoyed throughout our lives and now take absolutely and critically for granted, are we set to go over the edge or over a new horizon of energy self-sufficiency?
Anyone who is sitting comfortably in their armchair as they read this is just as comfortably putting their head under the very sharp guillotine of the reality that when the US had access to as little petroleum, in 1900, it only supported 76.1 million people2 and 20.6 million horses3 that served to supply them by driving ploughs and transporting much of their food, while in 2007 with the 275 million mentioned above, “There are an estimated 9.2 million horses in America”4, most of whom are far from the draft and working horses of previous times. In other words, while the US population has increased 3.6 times between 1900 and the year 2000, the horse population has decreased by 2.2 times. Will we soon see the world’s population cut by that same guillotine to a quarter of its present number because of food production and supply shortfalls, or can we design ourselves out of this almost impossible corner that we have painted ourselves into?
Now is the time to think clearly and logically of the resources and infrastructure we have available that can be applied and used to support the planet’s human population as we cross this forthcoming, black, energy abyss! All the effort that we can muster globally will be required to save as many of us as possible, up the entire 100% of humanity, but how?
The only energy that we can count on indefinitely is renewable energy – everything else is by definition non-renewable! So, what can we do with wind, solar, tidal, hydro, biomass, and geothermal, although the almost infinite timescale of solar energy is fractionally shortened for geothermal because the Earth will cool before the Sun “goes out”? I strongly believe that we are at only the dawn of the new age of renewables, limited only by the horizon of conventional ideas and technologies that obscures our abilities to look beyond it. Can I take you over that horizon?
The images that follow were generated by some extraordinary circumstances – that came after my heart had stopped for “approximately 10 minutes” following a car accident in Kenya, Africa, in 1980. I had been in the process of emigrating from Switzerland to England, just as England was sliding into a decade of recession at the time, so the conditions under which I arrived, in a wheelchair from Kenya, were entirely inauspicious.
In these circumstances, I found that I had to innovate to survive, to relearn how to walk, speak and remember, so I got a job after only 7 months, well within the “6 to 8 years to regain a normal life” that had been predicted by the neurologist who saw me at the time. And, from that job I staggered, walked and jogged home more than 330 miles in the first 18 months to regain the patterns of muscular coordination that I had lost. I’m still working on the short-term memory capabilities that had made me the valedictorian of my high school class but, if anything, having had the ability to make short-tem memories while keeping excellent access to what was stored in my long term memory has made me even more innovative as I sought to redefine the connections between all the “bytes” in my short and long-term memory in entirely new ways.
As I struggled to relearn how to walk, along dark roads in Oxfordshire in all weathers, my mind went to the cars, buses and trucks that were passing me on the narrow roads, how much each of them weighed, and the energy that it took to move them. I couldn’t help thinking that their weight, at least 10 times that of their often single occupants, took a lot of energy to move, energy from unsustainable sources, so I also began to think of alternative cars, lighter in weight, with ultra-efficient gas turbine-flywheel or battery hybrid power trains, and Linear Cities that didn’t even need cars and got all their energy from renewable sources.
These were of eminently buildable Linear Cities that remove the need for both cars and aircraft, which will be replaced by High, medium and low-speed maglev trains. They put everyone into close proximity to food producing areas that can be accessed, to work them, on foot and have the products that result transported on foot to the aforementioned maglev trains. This removes the need for almost all the petroleum that we currently use to produce food, gives everyone a much more active and therefore healthier lifestyle, and makes the system much more, if not entirely, sustainable!
So, we must start by simply building 1) rows of wind turbines along every north to south expressway, 2) building high and low speed maglev trains at their feet to reduce any transmission losses to the maximum, in conjunction with a “high-temperature superconducting” network so that the electricity generated on windy days and nights in Maine can be most efficiently distributed to New York or Dallas and vice versa, and 3) finally, the linear cities in various configurations, styles, heights and designs to rapidly achieve what is most effective and efficient.
These Linear Cities will have wind turbines (in green) all along their north to south (prevailing winds in the northern hemisphere are from the west) rooflines so that there is minimal loss in transmission of the electricity generated, which can also be distributed using a next generation “high-temperature superconducting” network in their basements.
They avoid the “heat island” effect produced by our historical, evolving and obsolete conventional cites, whose infrastructure they link and maintain, while distributing populations much more evenly over the available land surface to better take advantage of the natural resources that are available, to avoid difficult to manage and socially unhealthy concentrations of people. They also take advantage of the enormous efficiencies that can be gained with the construction of living and working units that share walls and have controlled interior environments, with efficient and non-greenhouse gas producing transportation right outside the door.
But, by far the greatest advantage and opportunity that the construction of Linear Cities can give us is to put points of light on the horizon before the darkness from failing power plants begins to descend. With the exponentially increasing problems of fossil and nuclear fuel supplies and their waste products, with burgeoning populations desperate for survival, the world will almost certainly slip very easily into global conflict, the scale of which it has never seen, that could also cause the kind of nuclear winter and atmospheric distortions that have caused past global extinctions.
We are all used to reading maps. If we can put these and other, perhaps similar, points on the map of future global energy provision, perhaps we can avoid the apocalyptic scenarios that might otherwise occur. Care to give it a thought? Further details are available on greenmillennium.net with illustrations for their application to England where, as a Michigan native, I have spent 15 of my last 31 years in Europe.
The time is now, the time is ripe, and this window of opportunity will shortly be closing. Do we want to leave ourselves in the dark, or would we prefer to find ways to give the whole world light by being brave enough to consider ideas that are no more revolutionary than the introduction of the automobile was in its time, remembering that it is probably the automobile that has both made the last 100 years what it was, and brought us to this edge of disaster! This is a way to get rid of both cars and planes, and to replace them with technologies, and jobs, through the courageous development of revolutionary American technologies that are far more sustainable!

The choice and the means, before they disappear forever, are yours! Would you care to fund a little research to prove the feasibility of the project?

1Falls Church News Press, The Peak Oil Crisis: A Message from Houston, by Tom Whipple, Thursday, 25 October 2007
2U.S. Bureau of the Census, Washington, D.C. 20233, (301)457-2422
3query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20E15FB3E5B13738DDDAA0994DF405B838DF1D3
4Survival story sheds light on America’s horse problem, EDDIE PELLS — AP National Writer, Apr 02, 2007