{"id":57275,"date":"2021-03-27T15:18:39","date_gmt":"2021-03-27T20:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57275"},"modified":"2021-03-27T15:18:39","modified_gmt":"2021-03-27T20:18:39","slug":"going-to-extremes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57275","title":{"rendered":"Going to extremes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Going to extremes<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
\n

It only took us a century to use up the best of the planet\u2019s finite reserves of fossil fuels. The dawning century will be a lot different.<\/b><\/p>\n

In the autumn of 1987 I often sipped my morning coffee while watching a slow parade roll through the hazy dawn.<\/p>\n

I had given up my apartment for a few months, so I could spend the rent money on quality bike-camping equipment for a planned trip to the Canadian arctic. My substitute lodgings were what is now referred to as \u201cwild camping\u201d, though most nights I slept in the heart of downtown Toronto. One of my favourite sites afforded a panoramic view of the scenic Don Valley Parkway, which was and remains a key automobile route from the suburbs into the city.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Journeys in a green frog-skin world, series contents here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Even thirty-five years ago, the bumper-to-bumper traffic at \u201crush hour\u201d had earned this route the nickname \u201cDon Valley Parking Lot\u201d. On weekday mornings, the endless procession of cars, most of them carrying a single passenger but powered by heat-throwing engines of a hundred or two hundred horsepower, lumbered downtown at speeds that could have been matched by your average cyclist.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I would try to calculate how much heavy work could have been done by all that power \u2026 let\u2019s see, 1000 cars\/lane\/hour X 3 lanes = 3000 cars\/hour, X 200 horsepower each = the power of 600,000 horses! Think of all the pyramids, or Stonehenges, or wagon-loads of grain, that could be moved every hour by those 600,000 horses, if they weren\u2019t busy hauling 3000 humans to the office.<\/p>\n

This car culture is making someone a lot of money, I thought, but it isn\u2019t making a lot of sense.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

an outside chance, Bart Hawkins Kreps<\/a>, fossil fuels, ecosystems, ecosystem collapse<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Going to extremes It only took us a century to use up the best of the planet\u2019s finite reserves of fossil fuels. The dawning century will be a lot different. In the autumn of 1987 I often sipped my morning coffee while watching a slow parade roll through the hazy dawn. I had given up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[11879,11876,1723,1057,328],"class_list":["post-57275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-an-outside-chance","tag-bart-hawkins-kreps","tag-ecosystem-collapse","tag-ecosystems","tag-fossil-fuels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57276,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57275\/revisions\/57276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}