I showed my students "The End of Suburbia" last week and one of them not only found the worksheet, but had the courage to come out and ask where the answers are on this blog. That's a first. It's also a sign that it's time to post an updated guide.
I recommend my students begin with Sustainability through the looking glass with Jeff Wattrick of Wonkette. It has links to where I've posted the answers in this blog as of a year ago. Here are the second and fifth paragraphs, where I give answers to questions 1, 2, 4, and 5 (hanging a lampshade on my doing so in the footnotes) and link to blog entries with answers for 8, 9, 18, 29, and 30.
For example, part of the answer to #8, "include how peak usage contributed to the crisis" is mentioned in the introduction to the worksheet post. I comment on the answer to #9 "What are the issues involved with the various modes of generating electricity, concentrating on the problems with natural gas?" in Portland is watching "The End of Suburbia", where I note things aren't as bad now as they were nine years ago when the film was shot. I mention part of the answer to #18 "How do the people interviewed think the American people will react to energy shortages? Include the political effects" in several entries. All one has to do is search for 'maniacs.' I used it first in a post about Michele Bachmann demagoguing the price of gas. Finally, one of the possible answers to #29 and #30 (it will work for either) is in Kunstler in a Big Yellow Taxi and some more are in the introduction to the worksheet entry among the student reactions.Since then, I've posted answers to questions in Votes in the suburbs, WNWO talks blackout, and WNWO examines the shrinking middle class. "WNWO talks blackout" merely repeats what I've linked to elsewhere, but "Votes in the Suburbs" and "WNWO examines the shrinking middle class" are new since "Sustainability through the looking glass with Jeff Wattrick of Wonkette," so here are the relevant passages from them.
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Follow over the jump for Jeff's fantasized solutions to suburbia, a way of life that became the new American Dream and promised space, convenience, affordability, family life, and upward mobility, but instead ended up decanting cities into the countryside and becoming the greatest waste of resources in the history of the world and a living arrangement that has no future.*
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*Yes, I just gave the answers to #1, #2, #4, and #5. Let's see if my students use the right search terms to find them. Muahahahaha!
By the way, my students have trouble with "decant." The only ones who understood it worked in restaurants. Once I tell them that the word means "poured out," they comprehended the concept.
One of the points made in "The End of Suburbia" is that political change that would help move the United States away from its unsustainable life style is made more difficult because about half of the U.S. population lives in suburbs, so Suburbia carries disproportionate weight in U.S. elections.I think that's enough for now. Good luck to my students as they surf through all the links and use their information literacy skills to find the answers. If they don't find enough answers, they can always search for End of Suburbia and Carter Doctrine using the search box on the upper left hand corner of the page. Carter Doctrine? That's part of the answer to two questions.
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WNWO has inspired me to answer yet another of my questions from the worksheet to "The End of Suburbia."12. What effects would Peak Oil have on the U.S. economy? Do these predictions sound familiar today?The answer comes from Kenneth Deffeyes, as quoted in a review of the movie at Amazon.com.What would it be like to live after the Hubbard Peak with world oil declining? I have this list of things: seven trillion dollars lost out of the U.S. stock market, two million jobs lost in the United States, federal budget surplus - gone, state budget surpluses - gone, the middle class disappearing.That was the quote that inspired me to show this movie to my classes. I watched the short, updated version of the video online in 2008, when everything that Deffeyes listed in 2003 had already taken place and was about to get even worse. More money was lost out of the stock markets and more jobs were lost then even Deffeyes had imagined. Now, all that money and then some has returned to the market, but a lot of those jobs are still absent, and the middle class is indeed declining.
21. How has reliance on oil affected U.S. foreign policy since the 1970s?For more, look up 'fear premium.' That should deliver loads of relevant information. Happy surfing and searching!
22. What effect has our foreign policy had on our government expenditures and our internal politics?
The low gas prices must be driving Jimmy fucking nuts. =D
ReplyDeleteNo. He's pointing to it as a likely cause of the bursting of the fracking bubble, which will result in more chaos in the financial markets. He likes that. Speaking of low gas prices, that's up next.
DeleteBusting the fracking market is exactly what the Saudis want.
DeleteAnd I bet it still makes him twitchy.
Yes, it is. As for JHK, it would make him twitchy in which way--that it causes him anxiety because it might disprove Peak Oil? He doesn't seem to see it that as evidence of that. Or do you mean twitchy in another way?
DeleteTwitchy in that the Peak Oil Deadline keeps getting pushed back.
DeleteNah, that isn't bothering him or Greer, for that matter, one bit. Kunstler has latched onto the financial system as the weaker link and he and Greer think that lower oil prices will cause the investors in fracking to lose their shirts. That might just bleed into the wider markets, prompting a meltdown just like the bursting of the housing bubble did in 2008. I think it won't work exactly like that. I think that a slowdown in fracking will lead to a rise in oil prices from $75/barrel to $115/barrel. That's a more than 50% increase in one year, which is enough to send the U.S. economy into recession. It's worked every time since 1973.
DeleteFor all my students reading this, I posted another entry since this one that contains answers to the worksheet: Judge Doom and the Red Car. It's for Question 6: How did the auto companies contribute to the demise of streetcars and the rise of cars and roads as the primary transportation system?
ReplyDeleteAdd another entry to the list. Small Business Saturday 2014 answers Question 28: How do the interviewees see the future—global, national, or local?
DeleteHere's another entry. Corn for fuel, a story I tell my students answers Question 24: What are the objections to using ethanol for fuel? That reminds me, I need to write about fossil fuel use in agriculture, a topic covered by Questions 14-16 for "The End of Suburbia" and Question 28 for "Food, Inc." Stay tuned.
DeleteI've just answered all four of the questions I mentioned above in "We eat a lot of oil". The entry comes well-illustrated with updates and corrections to the information in the movie.
DeleteThe next updates will probably be more explicit answers to 21 and 22, which I quoted above, and a commentary on how fracking, tar sands, and deep sea drilling have affected the fossil fuel picture since the movie came out 11 years ago. My students this semester were having trouble with the former and have been asking about the latter. I'll see if I can get those done before I show the movie again in November.
I gave "a commentary on how fracking, tar sands, and deep sea drilling have affected the fossil fuel picture since the movie came out 11 years ago" along with the answers to question 11 in Graphic shows U.S. oil production has increased dramatically under Obama. I'll work on answers to questions 21 and 22 next time.
DeleteI'm sharing the following updates about this entry's readership and comment history to begin another comment thread. This entry became the 13th most read entry of the third year of the blog with 321 page views as of March 20, 2014. Over the next year, it continued to add page views, reaching 836 by March 20, 2015. It also received eight comments during that time, placing it in a three-way tie for most commented on entry during the fourth year of the blog. It finally broke into the all-time top ten during April 2015 with 741 total page views according to the default counter. It has since fallen out of the top ten, being replaced by A conversation with The Archdruid about Objectivism, Satanism, and the GOP, which had fallen out and managed to climb back in. Sic transit gloria.
ReplyDelete