The WaPo series “Oil Shock” continued today. All in all a good series that has been running since 27 July. How can you not like a series that profiles your past life?
The oil field profiled in the 29 July story looks EXACTLY like the oil lease North and West of Bakersfield where our family lived during the late 40s. That house in the background in the page A-8 photo with a few scraggly athel trees could our house. My father and mother were farmers. He also worked in the oil fields during World War II – too old for military service. The job in Central Valley “old field production” was a way station after being forced out of farming in the Santa Inez Valley. While living in Coalinga they decided to move to Montana where hunting, fishing and sub-irrigated meadows beckoned.
But back to the series: Today’s story: “Gas Prices Applying Brakes To Suburban Migration; Reality Check on the American Dream” repeats much of what you have heard from Bacon and Risse for over 20 years. All the usual suspects say the usual things including the mouth pieces for Business-As-Usual and the Autonomobile. See the note on funding of transportation “experts” in THE PROBLEM WITH CARS.
Ironically WaPo chose to feature a home in South Riding. South Riding started as a quasi New Urbanist Planned New Village. Of all the places in the eastern part of Loudoun County, South Riding still has the best shot at Balance and “community” at the Village scale. There is a range of building types, a plan with the original intent of becoming an “English Village” and a core of First Families that believe in creating something better than more dysfunctional human settlement patterns. Full disclosure: The South Riding governance structure is a former client of SYNERGY/Planning.
In the end, the story is more He Said, She Said journalism — with a small “j” — but at least it mentions the problems even if it papers over most of them with Geographically Illiterate foolishness such as we will not “all decide to live in apartment houses.” Who in the world said “everyone” would or should? Only the strawperson spinners of the Autonomobile crowd. A Balanced (Alpha) Community could have fewer apartments that Single Household Detached dwellings and no “high-rises” but that does not keep the Autonomobile crowd from throwing up red herrings and strawpersons to scare the uninformed and ride the tiger a little longer. See “Tiger Riders” 2 June 2008.
For those who continue to obfuscate an understanding of human settlement patterns by railing against S/P’s campaign for the use of precise language, take a look at the graphic sidebar on page A14. You will note Radial Analysis (truncated by the lack of data below the County scale) and the use of terms like “Core.” We suspect the editors never looked at the side bar. It makes too much sense and if you read it with care you understand how much of WaPo coverage is misleading at best and often intentional obfuscation.
An aside: Check out The Shape of the Future page at Amazon.Com. Look at the “Inside the Book” feature and at “Statistically Improbable Phrases.” This is a feature that Amazon added not long after our book was published in 2000. The same sort of software now produces those “word balloons” that are popular on “style” pages. A lot of what were “statistically improbable phrases” in the early years of the decade are not any longer.
Back to gasoline, CNN Money.Com reprinted a Fortune story yesterday “Falling oil prices: The Downside” that is a MUST READ. The reason oil prices (and gas prices) are down is lower demand – here, not in China or India. That is bad news for the economy and the need to establish a rational strategy to reduce consumption and energy waste without causing a long, hard depression. See our column of yesterday – “Beyond the Headlines” – for further discussion of the missed opportunities.
Apparently the mavens of Gambling Venue New York (aka, the New York Stock Market) did not get to their MUST READ pile. They will in a day or two and the market will drop 200 points. That is what gambling venues do to keep the game interesting.
And on the politics-as-usual front: candidates are falling all over themselves to find ways to lower the price of gasoline and energy. They should be suggesting ways to lower the consumption of gasoline, energy and non-renewable resources, not just lowering the price.
Let the market work, stop bailing out the greedy and punishing the thrifty.
At least WaPo gets that right in the Oil Shock series.
EMR