Glaivester has diagnosed the “Problem with Clark Stooksbury.” Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t my inability to keep my big mouth shut or my hummingbird-like attention span. It is my neglect of the issue of “black crime” against bicyclists and how it relates to peak oil, or something like that. The VDare post he links to advances the notion that the reason people don’t ride bikes is because of crime. “But that’s the problem that keeps Americans from adopting bicycles as a large scale method of transportation, the danger of being beaten and killed.”
I’m not even sure how we got on to this topic, since I only quoted from one person who mentioned bikable communities as part of a menu of options; but I’ll take the bait.

I’m sure that there are neighborhoods in many cities where fear of crime keeps people off of bicycles and off of their feet as well. There are several reasons to stay off of bikes in Knoxville, where I’m from, including the fear of being pancaked by the parade of Escalades, Excursions and Explorers on our highways. But the more important reasons would be the heat, the humidity and the hills. If we started out on bikes en mass this time of year, the emergency rooms would be clogged with heat stroke cases. The areas of Knoxville where crime alone keeps middle class whites from riding or moving to are comparatively small, I’m guessing. The Knoxville News Sentinel recently produced a map showing the location of homicides in the city for the last several years. It shows more murders concentrated in the poorer, blacker parts of town; as one might expect. It also shows that some of the nicer, new urbanish neighborhoods are reasonably safe, while crime makes it the suburbs on occasion.

Glaivester may be correct in stating that as whites move back to the cities in greater numbers, crime (although not just black or minority crime–I’ve never heard of anyone proclaiming on their death bed that “at least I was stabbed by a white person”) will become an issue in some places. Hopefully, sanity will reign and those areas of the country that don’t allow concealed carry will allow it while the rest of the country discontinues the war on drugs that has done so much to fuel crime; but I’m not holding my breath on either front.

In any event, the energy issue that I have been “constantly harping on” is one that isn’t going to go away. A few years ago, I noted how prescient TAC was to have had a cover article by James Howard Kunstler about peak oil when Katrina-related refinery shutdowns had temporarily driven gas prices into the unheard of three dollar range. Three dollars is now disappearing in the rear view mirror.

I also noticed that Glaivester says that I am “denying any alternative solution” over a link where I note some of the externalized costs of extracting fuel from Canadian tar sands. I think we should probably drill in some places where we currently aren’t–ANWAR and perhaps off shore in some places. I don’t delude myself into thinking that extracting oil from these places will make a big difference, nor do I believe that we should subordinate every concern to procuring oil.

One must pay close attention to discussions of new oil finds to avoid excessive optimism. This post, for example, by Tom Plumer at Pajamas Media says of the Bakken oil formation centered in North Dakota, “On Tuesday, Bloomberg had a story that referred to “Saudi-sized reserves” in the Dakota oil fields. Do you mind if we retrieve it . . .?” But while the Bloomberg report indeed refers to huge potential reserves there is a catch:

Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey‘s Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold a whopping 413 billion barrels. If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar, the world’s biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels. . .

The challenge is getting the oil out. Bakken crude is locked 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) underground in a layer of dolomite, a dense mineral that doesn’t surrender oil the way more-porous limestone does. The dolomite band is narrow, too, averaging just 22 feet (7 meters) in North Dakota.

The USGS said in April that the Bakken holds as much as 4.3 billion barrels that can be recovered using today’s engineering techniques.

Although there is far less recoverable oil in Bakken than in Saudi Arabia, we should, and in fact are, extracting oil from there.