I saw an advert for a game device that claimed to be able to improve peripheral vision. There were a couple of supposedly humorous scenarios showing people getting blind sided when their attention was focused elsewhere. I thought of it while reading this remarkably narrow bit of advocacy for dense urban life styles.

after an initial period of painful adaptation, we can live happily, opulently and indeed more healthily, in a world of permanent $100-a-barrel oil or even $500-a-barrel oil. . .

If we had no fossil energy, then we would be forced to rely on an essentially unlimited amount of solar power, available at five times current energy costs. With energy five times as expensive as at present we would take a substantial hit to incomes. Our living standard would decline by about 11 percent. But we would still be fantastically rich compared to the pre-industrial world. . .

The ability to sustain such high energy prices at little economic cost depends on the assumption that we can cut back from using the equivalent of six gallons of gas per person per day to 1.5 gallons. Is that really possible? The answer is that we know already it is. . .

Recently, I drove my 13-year-old son 230 miles round-trip from Davis to Chico, to play a 70-minute soccer game. Had every gallon of gas cost four hours of my wage, I am sure his team could have found opposition closer to home. . .

The median-sized U.S. home is now nearly 2,400 square feet, for an average family size of 2.6 people, almost 1,000 square feet per person. . .

Some countries in Europe, such as Denmark, which have by public policy made energy much more expensive, already use only the equivalent of about three gallons of gas per person. . .

We can see even now communities where for reasons of land scarcity people have been forced to adopt a lifestyle that uses much less energy – places like Manhattan, London or Singapore. Manhattan, for example, has 67,000 people per square mile. Kensington and Chelsea in London have 37,000 people per square mile. Housing space per person is much smaller, people walk or take public transit to work and to shop, and energy usage is correspondingly much lower, despite the inhabitants being very rich.

Such a lifestyle is not only possible it will be much healthier. We are not biologically adapted to the suburban lifestyle of Central California – lots of cheap calories delivered right to your seat in the SUV that shuttles you from your sofa at home, to your chair at work, to the gym where you try and work on your weight problem. It will also make aging more graceful. We now live as much in fear of losing our gas-fueled mobility as we age as we are of the Grim Reaper himself.

So life after peak oil should hold no terror for us – unless, of course, you have invested in a lot of suburban real estate.

Few fossil hydrocarbons are used for transportation. $500 oil - and the associated increases in the price of other fossil stocks - would do a lot more than stick it to suburban people as the author, Greg Clark, so fervently hopes. He doesn't show his figures but the examples he uses are a trivial part of the consequences of expensive fossils so his glib claims of an 11% drop in standard of living, and a quick recovery, are highly suspect.

More importantly I think, it wouldn't result in the life style changes he longs for. SUVs can be powered by electricity, or biofuels, or even hydrogen. Those who want to live away from dense, urban places will still do so. This is obvious from his example of New York, where the work force of the city and the goods needed to live come from outside the city every day. Workers can't afford to live there after all, and goods are made elsewhere. A classic example of his failure to grasp the situation is the number of workers who drive to a train or bus stop and then ride into the city. They both drive and ride.

Much of this is true of the cities in little European countries he cites. Goods flow into town from far away along with a portion of the work force. There's an old analysis of why British food was so bad for so long that explains it as poor transportation of good into London, something that was cured by better transportation and the fleet or trucks that flows into the city every day with provisions. Better accounting and economics would include the embedded energy of their life styles as well as recognizing that the whole world can't yet engage in a service economy.

Though his examples are trivial and his claims suspect, the notion that the end of the fossil era is not a world ending prospect seems correct. Though it won't result in the behavior changes he seeks - turning the whole world into a twee campus - it will be an improved world for the reduced pollution of burning. It will likely be a quieter world too with less roaring of fueled engines. I'd especially like to have much less noise from flying vehicles of all sorts. Choppers are the worst, but they all suck, especially when they venture over areas that are less dominated by the din of machines, such as, uh, the suburbs.

In a few decades people will most likely have much less personal space and the suburbs will no longer be out of town since population is rising. The extra 3 billion people, half again as many as we have now, have to stay somewhere. It's certain that the elites in wealthy urban enclaves don't want them, so they'll have to live in Jersey, so to speak. It really should be inverted, with the wealthy living outside town and the poor living near their menial labor places. That is how it often works, and seems a more sensible arrangement, though there is lots of labor needed in the burbs too for domestic services and the like, especially since there are fewer home bodies now that everyone works outside the home. It's complicated, even if dim economists like Clark can't, or choose not to engage with the full picture. There are hand held gaming devices that are supposed to be able to reduce this problem.