Energy
Oil production peaked in the U.S. in 1970 and today only 35% of oil consumed is produced domestically. The U.S. has grown increasingly dependent on obtaining oil that lies in the states which are hostile to American interests. This is assumed by Arth and many others to have led to increased U.S. militarism in oil rich countries and a growing trade deficit. NP seeks to reduce oil consumption by designing neighborhoods and towns that require far less automobile travel. Most daily trips and recreation in a Pedestrian Village would be within pleasant walking or bicycling distance. New Pedestrianism asserts that it is necessary only to connect village centers to create a highly efficient public transportation system.
New Pedestrianism, in its ideal form, reduces the need for oil and other limited energy sources by reducing consumption and utilizing renewable energy. It is anticipated, especially as the cost of photovoltaic cells drops, that individual homes would be equipped with solar panels and solar water heaters, and that solar parks would harvest energy for the whole community. Reducing energy needs and moving away from oil dependency would presumably address health, social, economic, and environmental problems.
Read more about this topic: New Pedestrianism
Famous quotes containing the word energy:
“Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called “self-interestedness.” This was not a portrait of man “warts and all.” It was all wart.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“Viewed narrowly, all life is universal hunger and an expression of energy associated with it.”
—Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958)
“A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate”
—Christopher Hampton (b. 1946)