However, there's another wave of migration coming. It's about what happens when people finally act on the realisation that various cities (e.g. Detroit and Sheffield and possibly even Solingen) are just not going anywhere in the modern economy.

What exactly will happen I don't really know, but I suspect that these cities are destined to become small, possibly semi-prosperous market towns in the middle of a rural hinterland. And that population decrease won't all come about through ageing...

Frank Delaney ~ Ireland

However, I'll respond off the cuff to the claim for "efficiency" of long haul transport:

No mode of transport is as efficient as not transporting stuff unnecessarily.  We tend to measure "efficiency" of transport by T tonnes moved M miles for G gallons of fuel, but we never ask whether the transportation of the items in question was sensible or necessary.  Those G gallons of fuel (and a lot of knock-on costs) would be saved by not transporting the stuff in the first place.  I can argue that my Prius (this is a thought experiment, I don't own one) is more efficient than any other car, but if I drive it to the mailbox and back, that's still inefficient and a waste of irreplaceable resources.

Those last few miles to the house (for anything that cannot be grown or made in the home or the neighbourhood) cannot be avoided -- that is the fixed term;  nor is a giant centralised WalMart any improvement on truck delivery -- how is it more efficient for 100 consumers from Somewhereville to drive their individual gas-guzzlers 40 miles to the regional bigbox, rather than for one big truck to drive the 40 miles from the railhead at Centreburg to the high street in Somewhereville?   This gets us back to the paradox of "economy of scale" -- that such economies are understood only in terms of an implicit cost of transport, and that cost during our lifetimes has been risible.  This is about to change.

And I reiterate that a lot of agricultural produce is travelling not by relatively benign rail or sea [though the benignity of those modes can be argued;  I doubt that the now-extinct Yangtse River dolphin would agree that water transport is low-impact] but by air:  flowers, vegetables, meat, seafood, anything that has to arrive fresh.  Hanging out at the air freight terminal of your local airport could be a real eye opener, if you think that luggage is all that's underneath the passenger compartment on both long and short haul flights :-)  the UA air freight terminal in San Francisco, last time I was there (in a courier capacity for big pallets of scientific equipment) stank of fish, brussel sprouts, and slightly decayed orchids.  Live crabs and lobsters twitched hopelessly in tough polyethylene bags.  Soft fruit was stacked in crates.  It was like the Blade Runner version of Billingsgate Market, the biotic wealth of the region unitised and barcoded amid the pervasive perfume of jet fuel and burnt rubber under the scary actinic glare of the arc lights.

But regardless...  predictable weather conditions are a precondition for low-risk long haul transport, and those days are over.  The good ol' continental weather summary-charts-by-season (NOAA publications) with their reassuring little compass-rose wind vector annotations, are history.  Losses and delays are going to increase, and this increases the margin at which it is "worth it| to ship goods.  High risk and tough conditions for ground and sea mean shipping either (a) very high value and durable goods, as in the spice trade, or (b) rough stuff that travels as ballast when you're deadheading home again, as in coal and gravel.  For air, apply (a) but not (b)...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

Posing the question of road security must also involve dealing with the crucial problem of trucks. Every driver on the auto route is confronted, each day more so, with agonizing "walls of trucks," even though those roads remain safer than national roads. Although truck drivers involved in accidents are less often drunk than automobile drivers, apart from the fact that a single wrecked truck can block an auto route and thousands of automobile drivers for several hours, these crashes are more deadly: with a little over 6 percent of the kilometers traveled (2006 statistics), the "big rigs" account for 9.6 percent of the vehicles involved in fatal accidents. Some 14.5 percent of those killed are in an accident with a heavy rig. For the most part, these victims are not the occupants of trucks.

Yet in France, as in the European Union as a whole, the road's share of freight transport keeps on growing: for France, the figure has gone from 75.3 percent in 1994 to 80.5 percent in 2005 (Eurostat statistics). To allow the number of heavy trucks launched on the auto route to grow this way without restraint is madness, from the point of view of road security as well as from the perspective of the fight against pollution and global warming.

Le Monde Aug 14 07

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

Fractal growth:  in worker strikes, public demonstrations, (about economics, politics, ecology)more localized and much more often worldwide, until the perception is one of (full circle) global revolt.

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.

when an ideology has failed -- such as Infinite Growth Capitalism -- there has to be a mass disenchantment and repudiation of that ideology before its associated methods and practices are abandoned

Interestingly, cultures that have regularly experienced severe weather 'challenges' - e.g., the Scandinavian Countries, the northern tier of US states - tend to put a higher value on cooperation than those cultures without - e.g., the southern EU countries and US states.  

Jag gillar lite målade hästar, ge mig massor av dem

I'll believe the proponents of copyright sharing really mean what they say when they're all willing to work completely for free themselves - and not just trying to persuade others to do it.

Since proponents of copyright limitation generally argue that you can make money of what is today copyrighted without copyright, this statement only makes sense to those that are previously convinced that copyright limitation is nonsense.

Similarly, I think this would make a whole lot of sense for Cato liberatarians:

I'll believe the proponents of taxation really mean what they say when they're all willing to work completely for free themselves - and not just trying to persuade others to do it.

But for the non-Cato liberatarians it does not make sense, as it is a strawman.

Of course wealth, influence and power is very much relative factors, so it depends on where we think the rest of the world will be in the same time span.

one study estimates 40 pct of premature mortality worldwide is attributable to the externalised costs of industrial capitalism e.g. pollution, deforestation, toxicity...

heart and arterial disease is a leading cause of premature mortality in the US and here's a recent study making a pretty good case that fossil combustion byproducts (air pollution) are a direct cause of arterial disease as well as various lung disorders.

to put it very bluntly:  wallowing in the p*ss and sh*t of machines is no more healthy for us than wallowing in the p*ss and sh*t of our own or our livestock's making.  it ain't hygienic.  and it leads to either shortened lifespans or an enormous medical burden on the society as we try to preserve length of life in defiance of our own autopathy.  when you figure that our current heavily industrialised and chemical medical system only adds to the emissions, the toxic body burden, and the climate destabilisation problem, it looks to me like a classic investment trap.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...