Following are details on how solar-powered transport networks might collaborate with SCOR to improve resiliency in South Carolina.
Our view of resiliency: Life requires energy. Commerce requires walkable cities.
As background, here is a link to "Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze" summary put together by the then Chair of the South Carolina Infrastructure Bank, Vince Graham.
Requested Actions:
- Can we align JPods funded solar-powered transport efforts with SCOR objectives so JPods can fund the $120 million recently lost.
- Introduce the importance of Economic Work and walkable cities to resiliency.
- Introduce JPods patent for Rescue Rail to mitigate the hardships of hurricanes.
- Provide a summary data from the Dallas Federal Reserve and Energy Information Agency on the crisis of reduced oil supply by 2030. Life requires energy. Less energy, less life.
First, private capital might be able to fund the objectives of your lost $120 million. Could we set up a discussion of your priorities and lost funding? There may be overlaps in objectives.
Second, the resiliency and importance of walkable cities cannot be understated. Life requires energy.
- Metric of energy per unit of Economic Work. We use per passenger-mile. The less energy consumed per unit of work, the greater the resiliency.
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Mode Wh/passenger-mile Capital cost Freight rail 6 Privately funded Bike 15 $100-1,500 user cost JPods 78 Privately funded Walking 110 No capital cost Commuter-rail 881 $100-500 million/mile taxpayer cost Car 1,032 $28,000 used car cost, $12,000/year expenses Buses 1,245 80% of operating costs paid by taxpayers Taxi, Uber, etc 4,204 Privately funded - Following World War II, the US and Europe adopted centralized economic planning based on highways, cars, and cheap oil.
- Conservative policy makers should recognize this as socialism; government control of the means of production.
- In 1960, President Eisenhower recognized the mistake of the Interstate highway.
- This top-down federal centralized planning is also unconstitutional as explained by:
- a vote in the Constitutional Convention,
- Madison in Federalist #45 and in Congress in 1792.
- 21 Presidential veto messages.
- I was born in 1950. When I was a kid, we could safely ride bikes everywhere. Today my grandchildren cannot safely ride their bikes out of their driveway. See the chart below on how we kill bike riders at 4 times the rate of other developed economices.
- This World Economic Forum video summarizes the cost to US cities of slicing them up with linear barriers to commerce. Only 1.2% of US cities are now walkable, yet contribute 20% to US GDP.
- In 1973 Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands had the same highway/car-centric policies as the US. They used the same 43 MWh (equivalent to ~1,200 gallons of gas). They had the same pedestrian and bike road-kill rates.
- Following the 1973 Oil Embargo, they were struggling to shift from their highway-centric policies back towards walkable cities. I set up factors for Honeywell in the early 1980s in the Netherlands and Sweden. I watched the shift back from roads to walking begin. They were moving back to what America was like when I was a kid.
- Sweden and Denmark reduced per person oil use to 60% below the US.
- Sweden and Denmark reduced road-kills of pedestians and bike riders to 400% below the US.
- Walkability is directly correlated with safety. Current transport policies in South Carolina result in such poor safety that parents must drive their children to school to be safe. Palo Alto, CA has shifted their streets to be safe enough for kids to again ride their bikes to school. It is possible for American policymakers to make US streets as safe for kids today as when I was a child in the 1950-60s. Greenville is dangerous, even by other standards in South Carolina.
- The walkable parts of Greenville pay the city's and county's bills. To be resilient, governments must reinforce what provides them resources greater than expenses.
- Networks operate regardless of flooding.
- JPods networks gather 5 MWh/mile/day and store excess energy in distributed microgrids. Any damaged aspect of the network has resilient access to adjacent undamaged networks and energy.
- Rescue Rail and Levee Rescue can be deployed to lower the energy and cost of recovering.
- As JPods, and other podcar networks, displace needs for lane-miles of roads and parking, pavement that adds to flooding can be recovered to help mitigate flooding.
- JPods and other podcar networks also do not create linear barriers to the flow of water, animals, children, commerce, etc...
Forth, the end of affordable oil threatens life.
Ten of the last 10 Presidents identified foreign oil addiction as a direct threat to national security. President Nixon sent his daughter to open the Morgantown PRT as an example of how we can exercise the self-discipline to be energy self-reliant. Centrally planned policies failed to answer these calls to action as exemplified by Nixon: “At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need. We will hold our future in our hands alone.”
Oil-dollars funded terrorist attacks and triggered perpetual oil wars since 1990. These are resiliency failures.
Between 1998 and 2008 rising gasoline prices reduced family disposable income, forcing enough families to use mortgage payments to buy gas to keep their jobs that foreclosures collapsed the banking system in 2008.
This pattern will repeat by 2030. US oil drilling is down 6% from a year ago and 70% below with the Fracking Boom was tapped between 2010-2015.
- EIA report June 10, 2025, this updated their April warning of US Peak Fracking in 2027 and “Production to fall rapidly from 2030 through 2050“
- OilPrice.com: EIA Calls Peak Shale as Drilling Activity Declines
- Bloomberg: Shale Drillers in Permian Basin Face Up to the Prospect of Peak Output
- Forbes: Peak Oil In America: ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ May Be Hitting A Wall
- Wall Street Journal: U.S. Drillers Say Peak Shale Has Arrived
- Dallas Federal Reserve survey of oil companies cited comment: “Shale core exhaustion and inventory concerns are mainstream and well-documented issues. Shale will likely tip over in five years, and U.S. production will be down 20 to 30 percent quickly. When it does—this feels like watching the steam roller scene in Austin Powers. Oil prices in the late 2020s will be something to behold.”
- Dr. Deming: “Change is not required. Survival is not mandatory.”
Solving the problems costs 10 times less than perpetuating them.
