by ReverseEngineer » Mon 12 Jan 2009, 19:21:40
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JJ', 'R')E, I cut, pasted, and forwarded your description of Hawaii to my doomer friend in NZ. His response?
"Calcutta has a better chance...."
Far as Honolulu goes, I pretty much agree with your Kiwi buddy. However, exploration of the rest of Oahu has left me pondering the overall picture here, so here is today's installment of the Uber Doomer Hawaii Journal.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Reverse Engineer', '
')
Uber Doomer on Vacation: Part IVYesterday I took a drive around Oahu to get a further idea about the island and its sustainability in the post Peak Oil world. When you go across to the Windward side of the island, its really another world, and the contrasts between what was built as a tourist trap through the Oil era and what was here as an early beachfront community is marked. I'm putting up a few pictures here to give you guys a flavor of the kind of contrasts I am confronted with in making this analysis.
The first picture is of a bedroom community just outside of Honolulu, where I am staying with friends. McMansions packed one right next to the other with maybe 20 feet between the properties, built probably inside the last 10-15 years. All these communities have Walls surrounding them, you can drive just a short ways to find near slum conditions. The "backyards" of these houses are the size of a postage stamp, it reminds me of the backyards of Brownstones in NYC. Nowhere near enough property to grow anything of substance. Its unfortunate that Hawaii picked up this same style of community planning and development that the rest of the US did, along with the city of Honolulu itself its completely unsustainable.
Here is a photo of Honolulu, taken from the Duke Kamehameha Lagoon by the Hilton Polynesian Village. Only somebody brought up in the Age of Oil could call this a "Village".
First off, besides all the Towers, the Lagoon itself is basically artificial now. There are signs up telling you not to put up any tents or umbrellas sticking into the ground more than 2 feet, because they put in a liner, no doubt made of plastic to stabilize this pool of water. I have no doubt also there are pumps operating 24/7 pumping in fresh seawater and filtering it to keep it sparkling for the touristas. Off the beach itself, its a concrete jungle, there isn't even parking except in concrete parking garages that cost you around $30 a day just to plop your vehicle while you "explore" Paradise in Hawaii. LOL. It is of course a Paradise for the rich Western Consumer, expensive shops selling Jewelry along artificial alleyways that I suppose are somebody's sanitized version of a marketplace town in the era before Automobiles. What is truly hard to picture is what this whole area will be like once the Touristas stop coming, and that day is getting closer at hand all the time. On the radio there is a Campaign to "Buy Hawaiian", where they talk about all the Local Businesses that have gone under in the last year and beg the locals to support their own businesses. The Hilton might still be turning something of a profit here as most of your Western touristas plan these vacations quite a few months in advance, but my guess would be by next year at this time the Hilton will be operating at a magnificent loss, until I suppose Paris Hilton gets a Bailout from Helicopter Ben.
After scoping out the Hilton for our organization party tomorrow, I jumped back in my rental car to burn some cheap gas on a drive around the island first on the H1 and H3 highways built on the Eisnehower Interstate model (although obviously you cannot drive outside the state on these highways, lol), and then along the Kamehameha Highway which is the original road along the coast here that goes back to the days when this was just beginning to be a Tourist destination for Americans in the post WWII era. I remember some of this scenery from a Documentary made back in the 60s, the "Endless Summer", which popularized Surfing along with the Beach Boys and really put Hawaii on the map as a tourist destination.
Once you hit the other side of the island, its no longer the built up concrete jungle of Honolulu, its more like the dying beachfront community of Atlantic City back in the 70s before they began building the big casinos. Tons of older beachfront houses, shacks and motels that look like they were forgotten 20 years ago.
Despite the fact most of these homes look like they have seen better days, according to my friend the property values on the Windward side of the island are triple what they are here, and a McMansion like the one he has would cost well over $1M on that side of the island. Well, perhaps 2 years ago it might have cost that, but now if you could get a mortgage you could probably pick up one of these places for half that, if the bank holding the mortgage would take that write down in assets, which they probably wouldn't. So you see For Sale signs all along the Kamehameha Hwy of some nice houses with good size properties that would probably make a very good Doomstead.
Besides the houses, I also past by a Ranch with probably 50 head of horses on it, and then another ranch that had maybe 20 cattle grazing on the lush Hawaiian grasses. Hardly enough to feed the 1M or so residents of Hawaii overall right now, but eventually after die off I would imagine you could have a decent amount of beef being raised here, along with all the fish protein in the surrounding waters of course. The main question would be whether once the food stops being imported if what cows there are get slaughtered off too quick to reproduce them up to a sustainable herd size.
There are of course zillions of boats here, both of the power and sail variety as well as canoes and rowboats, so getting out to fish these waters shouldn't be too difficult. Your basic problem in the short term is the transition, the windward side of the island has few services, mainly just a few convenience stores and a few grocery stores which my guess would be will go quite empty after TSHTF. So anyone actually living on that side of the island would immediately have to go into subsistence living mode. No idea how many of those currently living over there are prepared to do that, but given all the foreclosures my guess is people are abandoning that area even though it is far more sustainable than the Honolulu side.
The hardest thing of all for me to imagine right now is how this entire economy can crash so fast, and I don't mean just Hawaii, but the whole darn system. When you consider all the wealth it took to build up Honolulu like it is, when you consider all the wealth that has been spent there every day in those hotels and jewelry shops, when you observe the PLENTY of foods available in the grocery superstore near my friend's McMansion and when you observe the massive Armada of the Headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet here and all the Military, its quite hard to see how it could all grind down to a halt in a virtual instant, even with a complete collapse of the dollar. So I am working on a new theory here of the spin down. Not really NEW, but more a modification of some ideas talked about here already of new currencies.
The collapse of industry in China and of the Automobile industry worldwide leaves the world virtually AWASH in Oil at the moment. OPEC nations with Oil can't even sell it for enough money to buy food with. I do not think either America or Saudi Arabia will want to go instantly hungry, and some sort of barter arrangement is going to happen between these two countries to get the oil to the tractors to produce the food here. I believe there will be a complete Nationalization of the Industrial Food Production and Distribution apparatus in the US over the next couple of years. Although the Dollar will be devalued to nothing as a trading currency externally, within the US it will function to buy what amounts to subsidized food. The main question is how you distribute out dollars to unemployed people, and that has to come from a Make Work project of some kind.
Its not really being done with funny money per se, its being done by taking the remaining energy of Oil left, putting it directly into the food production apparatus and then putting the fed people to work doing SOMETHING. As long as energy is not being used to smelt new metal and stamp out new cars, there is quite a bit around just for the food production apparatus using the extant machinery available. It will lengthen the spin down in the developed nations some, although many products will cease to be available for purchase, I think food will not disappear that fast from the supermarket shelves.
So what will the Make Work projects be? Well, Number One will be the Make War and Keep Internal Security project. Keeping the oil supply flowing to the refineries will be tough in the face of terrorism and piracy, and nations left OUT of the Oil for Food barter will get nasty. Internally, here in the US until the problems of housing and food distribution to the unemployed are resolved to some degree, there will be increasing discontent. The goobermint will however continue to print money to pay the goobermint workers including the soldiers and the cops, and it won't be inflationary until the actual shortage of food appears, which it shouldn't as long as the production apparatus is kept moving.
For those not being employed as Cannon Fodder or as Gestapo, the other make work project will be in infrastructure repair and alternative energy development, I think Windmills and Wave Generators will be built regardless of the fact that you never could build enough of them to sustain the population we have with the energy consumption we have. What does get built will sustain some however.
It won't be until the Oil really has been pumped near dry that the Industrial Food production apparatus completely falls apart. Depending how fast it gets consumed in military operations defending it, this could take anywhere from just 5 years to upwards of 20.
What does this mean for Hawaii? Well, the Tourist Trade is sure to drop off and for the locals they will have a tough time as everybody else is having, but the fact is that Hawaii remains an important Military Asset for the projection of force across the Pacific Ocean toward Asia. Food will be pushed in this direction to feed the military, and also to keep the population fed because it would simply cause too much trouble to starve out the locals.
For folks interested in more of my Hawaii Pics, I'll be putting up an album in my
Reverse Engineering Peak Oil Yahoo Group eventually. Anyone can join. Also have some pics up from the Alaska State Fair from last summer. I haven't used the group much to date, but I do intend on developing it some more once I return to the Last Great Frontier.
Anyhow, that is enough musing on possibilities for today, time to go do a little more exploring of Paradise.
Reverse Engineer
but your storytelling powers are wonderful, and you are a truly gifted writer.
You DID invite him to come along, didn't you???)
When you write as much as I do, you have to be interesting or people don't read the stuff. So I try to keep it perky.
