We’ve got a million or so human beings living in a low-lying area created in the first place by government engineers. The local government of New Orleans, apprised of an approaching storm, summarily orders everybody out of the city about 36 hours too late without lifting a finger to provide the means to do so. At the last minute it occurs to somebody to herd those left behind into a large government-built structure, the Superdome; no supplies are on hand for its inhabitants, and the structure itself is rendered–according to the government’s assessment–permanently useless. Even though the storm misses the city, government-built levees fail in unforeseen and catastrophic ways. Many of the New Orleans cops opportunistically quit their jobs, many more simply fail to show up for work, others take the lead in looting supplies from storm-stricken neighbourhoods, and just a few have the notable good grace to shoot themselves in the head.
colby cosh
Blame enough for all!
Written by jay on September 12th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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“Hurricane Katrina was definitely a catalyst for gas prices but even before that we were facing an upward trend in prices,” said Mike Chung, market analyst at auto website Edmunds.com.
“In response to that, consumers were beginning to look at other vehicles outside of large SUVs. The SUV boom has definitely changed. The whole segment has thinned out into several different segments,” he said.
GM reported that despite its elite credentials, the Chevrolet Suburban saw sales drop 28 percent during August. Ford said sales of the full-size Ford Expedition plunged 40 percent.
Toyota Motor said sales of its heavily promoted Sequoia dropped 32 percent in August. Nissan reported sales of the Armada, which is built in a portion of Mississippi spared by Hurricane Katrina, fell seven percent.
Reviewing the August sales figures, analysts at Merrill Lynch said that Katrina could accelerate “consumers’ natural migration away from large SUVs”.
The big auto makers can see the writing on the wall. Ford plans to halt production of the giant Ford Excursion at the end of September.
“There is no question that the demand for traditional sport utility vehicles has been affected by rising gas prices,” Steve Lyons, group vice president in charge of Ford sales and marketing in North America, said recently.
afp
This is a rather obvious story. It is also a repeat of the early 1970s when, in response to an oil shock, consumers dumped the gas guzzlers and bought Honda Civics.
Peak Oil alarmists would like to believe that the world, and suburban North Americans in particular, are going to hit a gas wall where there will simply be no supply at any price. People with a tiny sense of reality recognize that the racheting up of oil prices - with or without taxes - will ensure that people make car purchase decisions rationally. Which will mean a trend away from SUVs and towards more gas efficient cars. They will also look at hybrids and SmartCars and, in extremis, the bus.
Long before the silliness of Kyoto has much bite simply having the gas prices rise will save us Rick Mercer’s tonne.
Now, those are the short term purchase decisions. A little further down the track comes the question of where people are going to want to live. The SUV is part of a gas fueled orgy of anti-urban behaviour. Its natural habitat, the suburban cul-de-sac, is the actual belly of the beast. Ask this question: if gas gets to a couple of bucks a litre do you want to live 40 miles and an hour commute from work?
Creating density in the burbs, probably around light rapid transit stops, is going to be the next reaction to the $200.00 fill up. And that is a long term story with the entire premise of endless, ugly single family development being radically revised.
Sprawl was drowned in New Orleans. With a bit of luck it will suffer a similar fate elsewhere.
Written by jay on September 12th, 2005 with 2 comments.
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Over at Dr. Dawg’s blog 9/11 is remembered,
To begin with, no, damn it, the world did not change after 9/11. If I hear that one again, I’m going to start throwing things. (Note to CSIS: no extraordinary rendition, please. I was being metaphorical.) Here’s how things stayed the same.
The US declared war on “terrorism.” But an indefinable enemy has been the stock-in-trade of that nation for as long as I can remember.
dr. dawg
It will come as no surprise to my readers if I disagree. 9/11 did change the nature of the world and it thrust a decision onto the West which we had been avoiding for at least two generations. We had to decide whether or not the civilization which had arisen in the West, build upon the plinth of the Greco Roman understanding of man’s role in the world, levened by two thousand years of Christian thought, and driven by the sheer inventiveness of our industry, was worth defending.
We had been able to ignore that question for several hundred years simply by dint of being so fundamentally more advanced than the rest of the world that their views simply didn’t count. It was not that the British Empire loathed Muslims - in fact it rather preferred them by and large to some of the other indigenous peoples it encountered - rather it was that Muslims did not enter the equation at all.
The modern foundation of the National Security state in America - to use Vidal’s phrase - was driven by an enemy as “western” as we were. Marx shared the world view which created the Library of the British Museum, Lenin was exiled in Zurich: these were men of the West who disagreed with the arrangments but not the underlying premise of Western civilization.
What 9/11 did was serve notice that a band of highly motivated fundamentalists were willing to use the West’s own high technology as a means of driving the world back to an imagined 13th century and the delights of Islamic rule. This was an enemy which simply did not accept that Western civilization should exist at all.
The war which has begun and which is unlikely to end for at least a generation is not about territory nor is it about religion as the West understands that term; rather it is about a profound divergence in understanding of the world and our place in it.
For all of the mistakes which have been made by the Bush administration in the conduct of that war the one thing which it has not lost sight of is that this war will either be won or the Islamofascist project will simply be passed on, intact, to the next generation of jihadis.
The odd thing about this war is that victory has a definition which is a dagger pointed at the jugular of the Islamofascist world. It is the modernization - political, religious and economic - of the Islamic world by moderate Muslims. To the degree that politicians in the West understand this they will fight smart. To the degree that they think the war is about terrorism they will simply fight on and on.
At the moment the war is being won. Partially in Iraq where the willingness of the Iraqis, or at least a majority of Iraqis, to accept and work out the terms of a constitution is a huge step forward. It is being won when the British wake up to the enemy within and attempt to do something about it. It is won when the Lebanese kick the Syrians out and it will be a step closer to victory when the Syrians are able to get rid of Assad. Elections in Egypt, doubtful as they may have been, are a key step. So is the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. A huge victory was handed to the West by fate when the Troll of Ramallah died.
These are, however, the early skirmishes. The real battle is to see how quickly middle class Iranians are able to overthrow the entirely illegitimate theocracy which rules Iran. And how quickly Pakistan can become a part of the commercial explosion which is creating wealth and opportunity in the world’s second largest Muslim nation - India.
Getting a generation of Muslim children out of the madrassas and into technical schools so they can compete in the modern world rather than expressing their “humiliation” by feebly trying to blow it up is the ultimate test.
The anihilation of Islamofascism will not occur at the end of a Hellfire missle. It will occur when tens of millions of people are too busy doing well to spend time listening to medeval little men preaching the destruction of Crusaders and Jews.
At the moment modernity is unevenly spread throughout the world. Where its reach fails the opportunity to recruit the suicide bombers and the jihadis flourishes. When you have nothing to live for the prospect of a martyr’s death and the promised virgins looks attractive. For the West, while the destruction of the small group of radical Islamists who destroyed a symbol of the West’s overarching financial, techinical and commercial superiority using weapons which no Muslim nation has the slightest hope of making, will be satisfying, the destruction of the ground from which they sprung will ensure 9/11 never happens again.
Which means the Islamic world, in all its many variations, needs to be drawn into the modern world. How to achieve that integration is the question for the next thirty years. Yes, 9/11 did change everything starting with the idea that the Islamic world was too impotent to matter.
Written by jay on September 12th, 2005 with 9 comments.
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