House of the rising Moonglum

My usual warning bell to ring is Peak Oil, but there are plenty of other issues out there as well. It really just comes down to scarcity, Energy, Food, Water. Energy, and therefore oil, is of course heavily used in manufacturing and distribution of goods. I think that this is pretty well understood. But another commodity that is used in many industrial processes is water. I’ve been running across that more because of the extensive use of water in shale oil extraction. But it is also true in all other forms of manufacturing (and agriculture) too. The BBC News has a neat info graphic and article that shows how much fresh water goes into each item you buy. None of those were too shocking to me, but I bet I would be amazed on things like cars and houses. Need to try to find that chart on the internet.

(IIRC, My wife showed me a site that shows different amounts of water going into different foods a while back. Clearly the higher up the food chain you eat the more water you are going to need, but there were some outliers as well. I’ll post a link to that chart too if I can find it again.)

Well the results are in (pdf), and most of all I am impressed at the number of people who actually voted. The number one item (sidewalk repairs) got over 900 votes, and 1,692 total votes! Guessing at the rest of the numbers I would say that a few percent, possibly even up to 5 actually voted in this election. It was really fun to have a bit of a say in where the menu money goes, although I do worry that we didn’t emphasize streets and lighting more.

On the actual results, the first two, sidewalks and bike network show good stewardship in my opinion. I was also really glad to see that the priority one street resurfacing and the CSMA signal both made it in. I was really sad to see that the priority one lighting didn’t make it in. That would have gotten us a huge bang for our buck, but we did vote in a different lighting project. So all in all, I think I am really happy about this. We got a number of critical infrastructure projects in there, but also some fun touchy feely ones, like the dog park at pottowatomi.