Green Jobs Philly

A Plan for the City Philadelphia is ready to become one of the most beautiful and enjoyable cities in America. It’s fully capable of being a model green city. Our city is also ready to become hell on earth, due to rising fuel and food prices.

We’re being forced to think outside the box because, with the collapse of fossil fuel, there will be no box to think inside.

Since normalcy is no longer practical we’ll choose either to rebuild this city or be bystanders at its decline. Within thirty years Philadelphia will be either a green city or a ghost town.

So let’s imagine a Philadelphia that works well with one tenth the oil and natural gas. Prepare to laugh at some of these suggestions. Then prepare to work. Rebuilding Philadelphia so it secures and delights all of us, and our children, will require hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Assuming that we will not be able to bring cheap food from California and Mexico, or even from Iowa, we’ll need to grow much of our food inside and around the city. With 40,000 vacant lots, Philadelphia is ahead of many cities.

Urban orchards and gardens can fill our neighborhoods.

Assuming that heating and air conditioning homes with gas, oil and electric becomes too costly (nuclear processing is fossil fuel dependent and there’s just a 20-year domestic supply), we’ll need to superinsulate our houses. Since even with best insulation current housing will still leak costly fuels, we’ll need to build entirely new housing that’s earth sheltered, needing no fuel to heat and cool.

Assuming that cooling homes with conventional fuels also becomes too costly, we’ll need to tear up as much paving as we can, to reduce the urban “heat island” that boils our homes. Filling every neighborhood with trees, especially orchards, will likewise cool our summers.

Assuming that cars will cost too much to fuel, even fuel-efficient cars, we can put streets to better use when cars are gone. We can fill the streets with trollies again and bicycles, and wild mosaic pathways too, even using them for gardens and playgrounds.

Assuming that fuel costs for filtering water and pumping it to homes, then cleaning it after use, will make water too costly to poop into, we’ll need to replace flush toilets with idiot-proof waterless toilets. These are National Sanitation Foundation-approved, convert-