Future Shock with an Irish Accent

Impressive TV clip, thanks for posting, Gordon.
An aside: I’m not a fan of cars — or of suburbs, not at all — but it bothers me when pundits repeat (as happens in the clip) the idea that the car “gave birth” to suburbia. It suggests that w/out cars, we wouldn’t have suburbs. Sub-urban and satellite city style developments were originally built around rail transit hubs, however. It’s just that cars made the whole thing explode more rapidly and deeply — individuated it, made it easier. But the idea (idee fixe?) that low-density living is the only way to have access to nature, as well as facilitate ground-level living for families — that idea was born & groomed in the 19th and early 20th centuries long before car ownership became a mass phenomenon, as 19th-c. planners believed that trains would make those choices possible. The trains’ reach wasn’t nearly “good enough,” though, once mass car ownership and massive subsidies of highway building caught on. Since then, it’s true that cars & suburbs have fed each other (resulting in more sprawl, more driving), but suburbs existed first. Cars and suburbs are separable and exist separately in terms of underlying desires — which is just something I think is useful to keep in mind when trying to crit or fix them… 🙂 .
Incidentally, in terms of understanding how oil consumption underlies everything in our lives now, I’d encourage anyone to read Margaret Visser’s book, _Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal_. She shows that corn is in practically everything (including packaging & non-food items), and growing corn is totally dependent on petroleum. You’ll never look at an “ordinary” meal in quite the same way again! Also on that note, you’ve probably already come across Richard Manning’s “The Oil We Eat; Following the food chain back to Iraq.”