Post Oil Pacific Coast

The Pacific Coast from Chile to Alaska is a long populated stretch of territory with rough seas, excellent fishing in the right places, and potential trade once you find a port. And ports are the tricky bit, which is why San Francisco and San Diego harbors are so valuable, and why Puget Sound has a big population concentrated in a place that's hard to grow food and rainy. There's a place to anchor boats out of the swells. And that makes all the difference.

Noyo Harbor on the North Coast of California

Where I grew up, near the California coast north of San Francisco, there were several ports, though none very big outside the SF Bay itself. The harbor in Bodega Bay suffers from siltation and requires dredging to keep the channels open during high tide. They have oyster beds and clams for local chowder, as well as bakeries for fresh sourdough french bread, all delicacies. Bodega Bay is in the San Andreas fault fracture zone so may deepen in the Big One or maybe it will rise out of the water.

Point Reyes Station, which is on Tamales Bay 12 miles to the South of Bodega Bay offers more limited harbor, being shaped to receive waves from the north and thus is full of silt. A good place for oyster beds, which is what it mostly does, various abandoned restaurants and inns along the road to the Point Reyes Seashore (National Park). The bay also contains shark eggs from the various species that live there including great whites. A good place for bicycling, btw, though the roads are very narrow so even better for a scooter rally. The local campgrounds are COLD from the sea and fog, but the dairies, cows, elk, and peculiar sights out to the western lighthouse make a worthy day trip from San Francisco or Marin. Sir Francis Drake anchored in the Bay to the south that takes his name and people (friends of mine) have found actual historical artifacts there that washed out of the sand, like Spanish utility daggers appropriate for the time period (rusty as heck). No docks or real harbor, however, and the waters are full of great white sharks and jellyfish and sea lions, which also bite.

Some of the biggest sharks ever seen and the worst shark attacks were in that bay. Do not surf at Stinson Beach. Look at the pretty water. Buy a fish dinner at a cafe. Take some pictures. Just stay out of the freezing shark infested water, thanks. I imagine that someone with an electric car would drive till the battery got low, find a motel with a charging station for the night, get a good meal and beer at the local watering hole, conversation, and get up the next day to do it again, maybe hoping to catch a car-carrier ferry boat at a port big enough to handle one, like Noyo above.

The car ferries will definitely come back. They were just too effective at carrying freight and vehicles and even cows around, up and down the coast, all the way to San Diego, and north to Victoria, Vancouver, and Seattle. Too useful and cost effective not to have them again. They cost less than railroads, though they aren't quite as convenient. So we'll get those again too.

The coast from the south of Eureka down to Pismo Beach is largely cliffs, with the exceptions of Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay. There are precious few places for a ship to pull in and offload cargo and vehicles. At least, not a big ship. When you scale them down to the size of the harbor, a harbor you've dredged to deepen and provide better turning areas for ships, then things get interesting. Much like Narrow-Gauge Railroads serve peculiar areas and needs, small port facilities can be served by smaller ships. They don't carry as much cargo as a big ship does, but a small ship can go upriver into Sacramento and possibly further to Marysville where all the rice is, or down to Stockton, or into Noyo Harbor and Eureka, to take up cargo or make deliveries.

It may be slightly cheaper to fix port facilities than rebuild the Pacific Coast Rail Road, allowed to rust out about 15 years ago. My home town had a stretch of that through town which ran down to Petaluma, then turned east across the salt marshes of the Carneros District for Vallejo and the railyards at Mare Island. I really think someone will make a killing on freight if they get that up and running again, supplying food and medicine up to the coast, and building materials from the regrowing forests back South again. After all, if its too hard to get to the redwoods and have a protest, then get home again to see that groovy concert in Berkeley, they just won't go. Hippies are about personal convenience and arrogance, not civil rights or honesty. And I know this because I grew up around those lazy hypocrites.

Many things change with Peak Oil, and the easy and simplified living we've been doing, the cars running on one type of fuel? That's over. To solve peak oil, or at least make it less bad, you must do MANY solutions, probably all of them. Converting cars to run on compressed natural gas, trucks to run on biodiesel, motorcycles and scooters to run on ethanol (vodka) or biodiesel from OPOC engines. It means giving up easy hourly plane flights from LA to SF or SF to Seattle, and staying in town for longer periods when you travel because you go a lot less often. It means passenger and freight trains up the coastal lines with spurs to the ports, and ports able to take sailboats carrying cargo and vehicles and people. It means warehouses and longshoremen at those ports. It means local hospitals with full surgeries and qualified trauma surgeons because flying people out by helicopter won't be available forever and industrial ports have industrial accidents. Those towns are going to grow because the fish will come back without diesel trawlers to overfish anymore and there will be cannery jobs again, and something to ship out. Fishing will be local and sail driven and deep freeze might not happen so catch of the day or very limited ice supply for the catch makes a huge difference. Japan will start to care about their leaking nuclear reactors a bit more when they're eating the isotopes instead of stealing our coastal fish.

Also, fishing from a sail boat instead of a specialized steel hull trawler? Big difference in how it is done. Somebody has to build those sail boats and they'd better have it worked out, a good design. Every graduate of the US Naval Academy is required to get degrees in electrical engineering and naval architecture (boat building) to graduate, in addition to their own degree choice. That's a lot of potential designers. With electric winches and carbon fiber sails and PV panels for extra power, and sonar and radar with ship to shore radio. On a sailboat made of fiber glass. Why not? It's the future, and not a distant one either. I realize this sounds like Jack London with GPS, but peace is the period between wars, after all, and man has long warred against nature, since nature is an implacable enemy that kills us so easily.

So suddenly we've got lots of fish to catch and a chance to actually manage the stock so there is LOTS of fish instead of barely any. Diets in California would change a bit. Lots more rockfish and snapper for dinner and at restaurants. Way more dairy again because cream sauces are needed to make those fish taste good and with all the effort to travel, you'd need the fats for energy. Lots more oysters and mussels canned and shipped overseas. We sold a great number of sardines to Ireland and England a century ago. They called them Kippers, I think. Got to be a common breakfast dish.

Where the water is coldest and the currents upwell, we get fog and high levels of nutrients so the fish get something to eat, to form their bones and scales. This is why there's a ton of good fishing off of Peru and Ecuador. Upwelling currents with phosphorus. The winds would sometimes shoal the sardines together and they'd wash ashore by the tens of thousands. In Peru the locals would collect the fish in baskets and then lay them out to dry on woven reed mats. It would stink, but they'd dry fast, then pound them into meal. Fishmeal is a legitimate major protein source in South America, carried hundreds of miles inland and south and mixed into soups and various dishes and they've been using this resource for thousands of years. The indians near Santa Barbara did the same thing for the same reason. When white people came with their fishing boats, they started intensive fishing with gill nets of the sardines and made huge catches, canned in Monterey or up in Eureka. We canned them instead of dried them so more protein value, better flavor. A big deal that gave jobs for about 50 years. Then the sardines were pretty well fished out and the new prices killed the market. Same thing happened with salt cod off of Iceland. It was all the rage from 800-1100 AD in London. Tastes change. When columbus brought back turkeys and potatoes and tomatoes and chili peppers the world changed as dramatically as Marco Polo bringing back silks, spices, and noodles. When we lose the oil, enough of it anyway, everything changes for us as well. Once those fish numbers died back, all the jobs went away, the canneries closed, and eventually the ones in Monterey became an Aquarium that's rather famous and the closed businesses became restaurants and tourist traps.

I think we should seriously consider reopening some of those canneries, or building new ones. What Big Sur, the location of this major fish upwelling zone, doesn't have is ports. The cliffs are hundreds of feet high and crumbling. The road washes out almost annually. It's very pretty, but it's a bad location for a port, much less people. The south end is Pismo Beach, full of sand. A hard place to build a port without constant dredging, and not deep water. The north end is Monterey, which is pretty touristy, but the port could be converted back and the sea lions chased off again. Eureka's cannery might still be open. If not, if the buildings can be renovated: great. Locations on the SF bay might serve for a cannery, also. Mare Island is empty. Treasure Island is mostly abandoned. Many potential ports could be used for a cannery today. Even up to Noyo Harbor or Fort Bragg.

Once you head North, just south of Eureka, the sea floor gets a gentle slope and this makes for bad tsunamis. This continues all the way to the tip of the Olympic Peninsula, where the sea floor topography changes once again to steep, only with glacial fjords instead of regular cliffs. Those make ideal ports, though there are quite a few inlets up the Oregon Coast. Coos Bay, for example, is a good sea port. Its mostly tourists and fishermen, but it could be able to handle a lot more shipping and ferry traffic, and a lot of jobs rising from that. The northern ports around Puget Sound are still operating and will continue, only with smaller vessels joining the big ones, perhaps at alternate docks so they aren't squished by the monster container ships while the longshoremen carry crates and boxes and bales out of the hold. Or back in for the next cargo going somewhere. Small ships can go odd places, making odd places a bit more bearable and perhaps affordable. While Anthopogenic Warming is largely a con, climate does change (naturally) and changes back too. If climate warms a bit more, perhaps more people will get vacation homes in the various pretty fjords and inlets of the inland passage next to Vancouver Island. Natural air conditioning was the whole reason for mountain retreats in the first place, and with grid-down becoming normal post-oil, sending your family to a mountain resort or fjord cabin makes sense again. Particularly since we're all going to get used to a single-wage-earner family structure once more, thanks to endemic poverty and resetting our personal scales of wealth and luxury to more realistic levels. Thank goodness TV is so terrible watching it is now a social ill. Looking after your family is getting hard enough to become a priority again. Oh, irony!

And in the end, full employment in either agriculture or tourism is what California is really about. The Pacific Coast has chilly fog and enormous shoals of fish waiting to be caught and served with basil cream sauce. Its got scenery and cozy Bed and Breakfasts for lovers to cuddle. Its got curving roads to suit sports cars, motorcyclists, and bicycle tourists, and if we bring back the ferries and the passenger rail, ways to get in and out for both business and tourists. I think Moonbeam is wrong to focus on connecting LA and SF. LA doesn't matter anymore. Its doomed for lack of water. Focus on the North, on the Coasts, on those little Valley towns with rivers flowing by and empty houses waiting to be discovered by Bay Area companies that could do it all cheaper away from the Bay and its high costs. The support services associated with rebuilding those towns, those ports, those transportation systems is a better use of funds than a tunnel under the delta or a train to nowhere. I really wish he would stick to the important things instead of the stupid crap that makes him look like he's a personal supporter of certain herbal remedies. Fixing the levies would be a good idea, eventually. Before we get a major spring thaw and break them again.

California needs to clean up its act and look like a friendly place for foreign tourists to spend their money. A place of romance and good food. An English (and Spanish) speaking Provence without the bad attitude. A place with young Spaniards and Italians can escape the disasters of their homelands and make a new start beside Japanese and Filipino emigres doing the same thing for the same reason. Folks want to get ahead and not be held back by a family name's reputation, or punitive laws. That's for Easterners trying to become Europe. They're welcome to try, but stop using our money to pay for it. We've got our own expenses and plans for a future that makes sense to us. 

Given success in tourism, I foresee a lot of redevelopment along our coasts, with Monaco-style casinos and villas, renovation of the railroads and support systems for making it all very happy and fun. I suppose we'll want to learn Italian and Spanish and Japanese (Filipinos already speak English), evolving ourselves a bit to accept the benefits of newcomers. I won't pretend China has a future because they're setting themselves up to fail, drastically, and I can only hope my state has enough mini-CNC machines to build the factories to replace the ones that collapse in China when the communists finally massacre their capitalists for being too successful. That's inevitable. California is about reinvention, about building the next Gold Rush, the next bubble economy. The stable background is our nice weather and enormous food crops. That's what we do best. This is why our population is 33 million, more than the rest of the Western states combined. I suppose I would be a good Governor because I understand that, really get it. Its not about pleasing some voting demographic in LA. Its about the whole state, and the employment rate. My plan would make jobs for everyone. And I suspect these developments are inevitable anyway. Peak Oil continues to march on, and I saw mention of numbers that its more like 3-5 million gallons of fresh water per well for fracking, not 1 million. Ouch. So water supplies are even more limiting for extracting the Saudi Arabia of Oil in the Monterey Formation. Wow. This makes electric rail and sail driven cargo even more important, and the working and maintained infrastructure that much more of a big deal. Naturally, none of this will happen before its an emergency, but it will happen after, slowly at first then faster and faster, and the jobs will be numerous thanks to the lack of power tools and health and safety in the post-oil world. It will be manly and macho. We'll have big muscles, maybe even thews. Mighty thews. And brows. We'll all be sweaty again instead of whining about the air conditioner. Maybe that will be good for us. Fewer hamburgers. More fish. We'll be okay.