When Green Dollars Go Nowhere,

They’re Probably Not Green.

“The True Nature of Secular Stagnation.”

When Dollars Go Nowhere

There’s a term called “Secular Stagnation” floating around both Wall Street and Washington DC once again This term is essentially a monetary narrative on the plight of an economy that becomes stuck in a long term period of slow growth and low interest rates due to a certain set of external control factors that in and of themselves have little to no ability to actually control themselves or determine the constructive outcome of any other set of controls. In other words “Secular Stagnation” is a way of saying damned if we do and damned if we don’t and after six years of little to no strategic industrial guidance, America, at the moment, is pretty much damned.

Without any real job growth, without any real strategy to rebuild our nation’s industrial infrastructure, without any real ability for the average worker to establish a long term savings plan, without any real ability to tie public and private education to the industries that are pivotal to rebuilding our crumbling communities, “Secular Stagnation” suggests quite clearly that the industries that are operational in our US economy are at best, barely operational and all the waiting and hoping in the world that somehow our US economy will magically emerge from this cycles does nothing to address the fact that these industries have no bearing whatsoever on the otherwise impressive list of industries that could come on line if in fact people in general had some form of industrial blueprint coming out of Washington DC and Wall Street that would enable these industries to do so.

When one really takes the time to understand the notion of little to no strategic industrial guidance, and, in doing so realize that such lack of guidance is akin to attempting to steer a rudderless ship on a windless sea, the real danger is of course, never really knowing what the water will do next. If one decides to let the tide move the ship, the ship could end up anywhere. If one decides to let the waves move the ship, the ship could easily be wrecked. If the ship simply sits there, it runs the risk of running aground as the water upon which the ship is floating will either eventually evaporate, or, cause the ship to rust away as the water has corrosive properties negative to the industrial life of the ship but quite constructive to itself as the minerals taken from the ship will naturally replenish the waters’ broader organic economic power base over time. With little to no strategic industrial guidance, the ship that is supposed to be sailing across that water on its own mixed energy power supply platform simply cannot sustain itself as there is simply not a mixed energy power supply platform in place that would enable the ship to do so.

Yes, no matter how one chooses to view it, “Secular Stagnation” destroys the ship, the shipping lanes, the shipping ports, the shipping containers on the ship, the commerce of the ship builder and the economy of the nation that is supposed to be relying upon that ship to maintain its overall sense of continuity based industrial order. “Secular Stagnation” basically states, that while for all practical purposes a nation’s economy should be growing at a rate considerably more than what it is currently growing at, the only reason it is not is due exclusively to the fact that the concept of economic development or economic management of an economy has been lost in the greater failed translation of the technological advancements industry has made or is capable of making for itself but has not been able to do so due almost exclusively to the lack of stable regulatory leadership.

Right now, right this minute, the entire US economic philosophy is more or less being out done by declining fuel prices. Combined with overall slow industrial growth and dangerously low interest rates, the savings the average consumer has been realizing on a gallon of gasoline and that are supposed to be redirected into a consumer driven economy are of course not being spent in such a manner. As the level of consumer caution is quite rightfully high, clearly the main reason why is that by and large, the price of fuel has for far too long been allowed to be the benchmark for some esoterically sustainable model of economic world order. As it is rather obvious today that such a model is essentially useless as it simply and entirely overlooks the growth of emerging energy circles that are directly related to the global fuel market on one hand while being infinitely related to the multitude of industrial functions that will firmly dictate to that global fuel market both the when and the how such fuel will ever again be utilized? In other words, why use fuel as a benchmark for global economic growth measurement when in fact its probably about ready to be left in the ground or if not left in the ground be harvested and transported from a much more localized industrial prerequisite.

If you think about this for awhile, if you think about a world economy that is essentially devoid of any kind of economic relationship with oil, most likely both you and I, and, anyone else that might possibly envision such a concept might very well be escorted off the planet by those inclined to disagree with such logic. Having said this, it is in fact such a discussion that will yield the economic diversity that spawns the industrial diversity needed to use the function of fuel in such a manner as it does not need to leave the ground at least not in the manner it currently does but in a manner that allows all other fuel entities the same level of global economic lubricant required to end very redundant and of course, quite harmful “Secular Stagnation” both nationally and globally.

In other words, our overall lackluster economic growth has everything to do with the fact that the price of fuel has simply never figured in any form of industrial advancement that might just entirely and quite constructively rewrite the function of fuel, or, more specifically, the contemporary 21st century manner in which the fuel is bought, sold, distributed, legislated, financed and, of course, strategically and politically leveraged in a truly multifaceted mixed energy economic scenario. Whereas again “Secular Stagnation” is a result of having an entirely overly safe and overly protective regulatory framework in place that governs only the aspects of a nation’s economy that can at best only operate somewhat on that old fuel model belies the fact that it does so only to the point where no one with old fuel money can invest in the ideas of people who desperately need new fuel money.

As this irony is most certainly being demonstrated by the overall mediocre economic growth in every industrial sector today, it is as well most certainly being demonstrated by the fact that those that are supposed to earn the new fuel money by being employed in the new fuel industries are entirely unemployed on one hand, while on the other, being altogether prevented from establishing either a personal savings or investment platform from which, among other things, they can retrofit their own homes and communities with these new fuel technologies to begin with.

So, knowing what more or less everyone knows collectively, what happens when we remove ourselves from the single tier circle game of old fuel economic methodology and enter instead into the multi-tiered world of global commerce whose focus is on everything that is industrial having multiple economic relationships with a broad host of mixed energy sources?

The simple graphic below illustrates the plain nature of ancient industrial and economic “Secular Stagnation”.

When Dollars Flatline

I call this graphic “When Dollars Flat Line.”

Taking the time to study this graphic, there are a number of elements to grasp:

The red vertical line represents the earths’ axis, and, in particular, the earths’ industrial axis.

The gold circle represents the earths’ global economy.

The large dollar sign located slightly to the top of the earths global economy represents maximum economic growth potential or “Secular” growth potential.

The smaller dollar sign more or less floating unattached from the earths’ industrial axis, the earths’ global economy, and, the earths’ “Secular” growth potential the redundant fuel factor, or, “Stagnation” factor that is essentially floating around the global economy with little to no economic attachment or regulatory authority to direct it or re-harness its industrial potential.

Needless to say, the fact that the fuel factor is so aimlessly floating about and distinctively smaller in scale than the larger “Secular” growth potential illustrates the fact that while the world is amassing some rather large sums of money, as that money can be personified by the unusually high growth of stock market volume, all that volume is actually doing is reaching a point of involuntarily imploding from its own misdirected industrial growth strategy. This is actually an illustration of the damned if we do and damned if we don’t scenario I mentioned earlier. Having all the money in the world, but, not even for a moment, having a world to invest that money into. What is so remarkable about this portrait is that America has been living this way for the better part of the past thirty years, and, as it has, we can look to economic growth worldwide and say that this particular fuel model has worked well in serving the needs of developing economies worldwide, all of those economies today are in precisely the same industrial non development predicament as the US.

Something that is interesting to note about the above graphic is the fact that the red line that represents the earths’ industrial axis is not flowing through the gold circle that represents the earths’ global economy. As it is instead sitting quite peculiarly beneath the earths global economy altogether, this illustration again personifies the “Secular Stagnation” that is essentially worldwide in industrial dysfunction as it is clearly single tiered in economic structure.

The next graphic illustrates something a bit different………

When Dollars Spiral

………..”the multi-tiered world of global commerce whose focus is on everything that is industrial having multiple economic relationships with a broad host of mixed energy sources.”

“When Dollars Spiral” is the name of this graphic.

Most notable in this graphic is the fact that the red earth industrial axis that was more or less entirely detached from the global economy in the first graphic is now clearly the dynamic industrial magnetic core of multiple global economic tiers all of which have strong mixed energy fuel cores actually in orbit with the global economies those tiers represent.

To put this particular graphic into perspective, it probably would be best to start at an actual fuel pump of say a local neighborhood service station. Considering that the price of a gallon of gasoline is at a remarkably low price, it would appear as if customers would be regularly lining up to fill up only to go off on a drive to some local retail store to spend the money saved on a gallon of gasoline on stuff people spend money on when not spending that money on gasoline. Whereas in the old fuel economy this of course would undoubtedly be true, in the old fuel economy people actually had jobs, had homes with reasonably appraised values, had savings accounts and modest mortgages along with built up equity in their homes, and, more or less had at their disposal, an understanding that the American economy was actually growing. Unfortunately, the US economy described above pretty much stopped growing domestically as far back as 1985 for it was then that American manufacturing corporations began to see the opportunities of shifting their profit making focus to global markets whereas foreign manufacturing corporations did the same here in the US. Whereas all of this at the time appeared to be the most logical expression of corporate global expansion, and, within that logic the world essentially became a haven for global retailers of “everything manufacturable” all that manufacturing ended up doing was to spread the inevitable global collapse of labor markets via automation of the manufacturing process all of which was buttressed by the over simplified assumption that a gallon of gas would be the only thing the consumer worldwide would need to purchase in order to continue to purchase everything that also used that gallon of gasoline to make what the consumer was no longer a part of making or in fact earning a living from doing so in the first place.

As I’m not stating anything here that is not already known about the lackluster growth of every manufacturing sector in all economies worldwide, that gallon of gasoline is in fact staring the entire world of global commerce right in the face today.

Getting back to the “When Dollars Spiral” graphic above. Getting back to the neighborhood service station with the gas pump that is really not pumping the amount of gasoline that by historical standards it should be pumping, the simple reason why it is not is that nobody really needs the gasoline to go anywhere because there are no jobs to be had if in fact somebody were inclined to go somewhere. With that being said and the “When Dollars Spiral” graphic depicting multiple tiers of economic growth being associated with a much more dynamic understanding of fuel management, let’s take a look at just one tier of possibly new industrial investment associated with an equally new perspective on how to manage that gallon of gasoline.

First of all, one has to consider the fact that while years ago there could be found several neighborhood service stations within a given neighborhood and all of them had distinctive fuel brands associated with the family of automotive based repair services offered to the neighborhood by that service station, today there are but a few service stations with but a few distinctive fuel brands associated with these stations. In addition, when Texaco or Standard Oil or Mobil or Gulf or Phillips 66 and others were the brands associated with these service stations, these brands also had their own line of such items as engine and transmission fluid, brake and power steering fluid and so on attached to them. As these product brands were intrinsically linked to the mechanical skills offered by those who owned and operated these service stations, their eventual demise represented at the time one very distinctive period of “Secular Stagnation” in our American industrial economic history. As this stagnation ushered in a period that represented a very much wholesale destruction of a broad host of labor intensive service industries, it did as well usher in an entire new sector of retail industries that essentially placed the American work force, which of course, was the neighborhood workforce at the mercy of the corporate entities that continued to strip that neighborhood of its original industrial identity.

Enter the food based neighborhood service station of the 1980s and 1990s ie: Casey’s, Becks’ 7/11, BP, etc. that had virtually nothing whatsoever to do with servicing neighborhood vehicles, and, of course, had little or nothing to do with serving neighborhood based fresh cooked food, and, at best had little to do with the fuel brands that were once synonymous with neighborhood vehicle care, neighborhood growth of needed service sector jobs all of which took place while the neighborhood patron either sat at the neighborhood diner, went to the barber shop or the butcher shop while waiting for the neighborhood mechanic at the neighborhood service station to repair the family sedan. The food based neighborhood service station then, once again, represented yet another period of “Secular Stagnation” in our industrial and economic model. With this next period of economic stagnation pulling our national industrial base even further from a labor focused industrial base, that gallon of gasoline, still seemingly being the anchor to a global economy, continued to undermine virtually all of the infrastructure based industrial and economic fundamentals that assured the continued evolutionary inventiveness of the otherwise brilliant American creative industrial mind.

Think about this for a minute.

Whereas the neighborhood service station model has, over the course of a relatively short period of industrial time (the last forty years) been altered in quite the negative economic and industrial manner as that negativity is measured most directly by the loss of real multifaceted, neighborhood based industrial job growth as well as valid American domestic based industrial and economic expansion, the historical industrial periods previous to this time frame had decidedly different outcomes for the people of America.

A case in point here is that the neighborhood (fossil fuel based) service station model actually replaced yet another American industrial model from another American industrial era. This much older model, which for all practical purposes, served the needs of working America in every bit the same manner as the neighborhood service station model did was that of the “Livery Stable” and the socioeconomic industrial dialog that thrived in communities for decades during the horse and buggy era.

Back in the horse and buggy era, the livery stable was the place to go to board both the horse as well as the buggy the horse pulled. It in turn was the home of the neighborhood blacksmith as well as anything having anything and everything to do with the maintenance of America’s burgeoning, pre fossil fuel based transportation industry. Often, the livery stable could be found either beneath or adjacent to the town’s only motel and quite often restaurant/diner/saloon. As this particular period of time in America’s industrial history did indeed represent a certain degree of combined economic livelihood for most Americans in a modestly broad spectrum of industries, the invention of the automobile ultimately placed the horse and buggy era into yet another period of industrial and economic “Secular Stagnation”. Unlike the 1980s however, the invention of the automobile and the remarkable growth of a broad host of entirely new industrial sectors did to our American horse and buggy economy the reverse of what “Secular Stagnation” is doing to our national economy here in 2015. Whereas back then the transition from the horse and buggy into the automotive era entirely new industrial functions produced entirely new job definitions, and, of course, entirely new domestic American economic growth potential, “Secular Stagnation” then simply did not stay around very long, and, as a result, decades and decades of nationwide and worldwide industrial and economic expansion occurred.

As I might be getting a bit off topic here, the point I am making is that all that is effectively occurring today with this particular version of “Secular Stagnation” is the collective frustration over how we can take a gallon of gasoline and turn it back into a pile of horse manure and do so to the point where we as a nation can still maintain a broad based economic, industrial and corporate global presence in the process of creating a very dynamic, mixed energy based, domestic industrial economy.

This is really not that difficult of a challenge however.

Referring to the “When Dollars Spiral” graphic above.

Again at the service station next to the pump that holds the gallon of gasoline we are now standing in front of in the “Secularly Stagnated year of 2015” (as we are waiting for a job in the new fuel economy), there’s a line of vehicles in back of us most of which are not waiting for gasoline as much as they are simply looking for some sort of industrial direction to the facility that might be an appropriate place from which it can be fueled and serviced just as the occupants of these vehicles can find employment and be fed.

Whereas some of these cars are now hybrids and use a combination of gasoline’s and electric energy for propulsion, these vehicles are most likely being used by either local or regional commuters. In the same breath, another group of vehicles are engineered to be powered strictly by electricity or strictly by natural gas and are, for the most part, still either local or regional in function. With these now four separate categories of fuel source propulsion identified, the likely hood of finding one neighborhood service station that will meet the multiple fueling requirements of the vehicles described above is more or less impossible to meet due primarily to the fact that each of these fuel sources require highly specific technologies for them to operate holistically within a mixed energy use, neighborhood based transportation model.

None the less, as each of these fuel sources represent substantial technological advancements to our nations’ overall mixed energy fuel source model, until all of these technologies are fully integrated into our American neighborhood transportation fueling model, we will remain locked into very much counterproductive “Secular Stagnation” that is of course benchmarked by the redundancy of the entirely irrelevant cost of a gallon of gasoline.

But, if in fact we know (and we do) there is a need for electric charging stations to be integrated into our neighborhoods, and, if in fact we know that a certain amount of charging can be done within the confines of the residential garages found within these neighborhoods, we also know that a significant amount of these garages will, particularly in an older urban neighborhood environment, be located in neighborhood alleyways which are of course key 21st century municipal transportation corridors in and of themselves. Thus once just electric charging of vehicles that are defined strictly for personal use has been met on a local garage based level, the electric charging of light commercial service vehicles that may be entering these neighborhoods and being parked in alleyways while the service sector owners of these vehicles are busy retrofitting the homes adjacent to these garages, alleyway fee based commercial electric charging stations are free to flourish economically within any given neighborhood setting.

Whereas a certain amount of electric transportation fueling needs will most certainly be met via garages and alleyways, the actual electric transportation fueling kiosk that is accessed by local retail traffic or regional business traffic coming and going into and out of a neighborhood is met as well as such kiosks are placed within the existing footprint of both residential and commercial streets within a given neighborhood.

As the neighborhood based electric vehicle refueling model is more or less non architectural in that there are no buildings required to house this energy source, other forms of transportation fueling will require a building from which to operate. With natural gas having the capacity to fuel an ever increasing stable of vehicles that are both personal and commercial in nature, many are as well industrial in nature. Thus the placement of natural gas refueling depots which have a significantly higher degree of public and environmental safety built into the structures that will house these depots, location of the same will have the same degree of safety attached as well. As the question is what type of vehicles or equipment will actually be using natural gas, the answer is of course everything within a light to medium commercial and industrial hauling range as well as everything within a light to medium residential, commercial and industrial construction equipment range. As each of these uses have, for the most part, predetermined daily delivery routes with built in daily mileage determinations, natural gas refueling stations for such vehicles will of course be found within the commercial, industrial and warehousing districts such entities operate out of.

It should be interesting to note here that in as much as a variety of transportation types and transportation fueling sources have thus far been touched upon in this essay, the one that has not has been the one that is of course the most traditional and is contributing the most to the broader soft nature of our nation’s overall slow industrial and economic growth and broader industrial and economic expansion capability. That fuel source is again, gasoline. As it is, the neighborhood gasoline refueling station that obviously still must be addressed here can be addressed if in fact we take the time to model such a facility in pretty much the same manner as we once did. As the question becomes just exactly what type of machinery being manufactured today still requires gasoline based fuel to operate, the answer to this question is surprisingly still very much residential and neighborhood in use and nature. If one thinks of lawn mowers, chain saws, light duty residential tractors and commercial excavation and site specific construction equipment. If one thinks of snow blowers and rototillers. If one thinks of any gas powered piece of equipment utilized regularly in a given neighborhood, the model for the neighborhood service station once again enables an entirely new set of service industry trades and service industry products to be both sold and serviced in these newly designed neighborhood gasoline based service station models.

In again, the same breath, a huge percentage of personal use vehicles will still require gasoline to operate. Thus within the regulatory framework required from a municipality to operate such a new service station model, multifaceted gasoline based functions must be built into that framework. Once such a framework is in place a broad host of service sector industries begin to emerge to replace in many ways the jobs lost and the transportation based taxation platforms now being depleted due to the extraordinarily low price of a gallon of gasoline will be replaced via the adoption of new municipal transportation codes as well as new municipal building codes.

Whereas such facilities due almost exclusively to increased volume of all sorts of neighborhood based service industries, will ultimately define the actual physical placement of these facilities, the addition of micro public transportation route modeling as such transportation flows through a neighborhood replete with full scale transportation retrofitting of both alleyways and streets will be a crucial aspect of determining such service station placement.

As the above discussion sums up but only one tier of mixed energy use development as that development pertains to the industrial and economic dissection of use for a gallon of neighborhood based gasoline, there are numerous other tiers that when integrated simultaneously, virtually assure the end of “Secular Stagnation” as such stagnation is directly related to a gallon of gasoline.

Referring to the “When Dollars Spiral” graphic above and again.

Gasoline blends and of course overall fuel blends as such blends are integrated into larger neighborhood to neighborhood or regional to regional interconnecting transportation grids begin to establish the architectural blueprint for the substantial growth of additional mixed energy sector tiers. As such tiers justify the holistic use of fuel blends, they do as well justify the use and substantial growth of manufacturing sectors whose industrial focus is the construction of entirely new vehicle platforms. In other words, whereas as an American manufacturer of light duty pick up trucks now in today’s either gasoline or diesel fuel market has somewhat of a limited industrial footprint to manufacture vehicles with a limited range of personal or commercial or industrial range of use from, the moment fuel blends are allowed to fully mature in the mixed fuel economy, so to will the moment in which altogether new vehicle descriptions and functions emerge as well.

Let’s for a moment say that due to the limited mileage range of say a natural gas powered urban delivery vehicle, that vehicle is simply incapable of traveling beyond that range and as such is equally incapable of completing all segments of the overall industrial delivery of the finished product. As what I am stating here is not the least bit unknown to any entity within our nation’s overall manufacturing empire, it is again the articulation of fuel sources, all of which have limited ranges that when put together properly fully expand our nation’s overall mixed energy based transportation infrastructure. Where it can be said that all that needs to happen for a natural gas powered delivery vehicle to fully deliver a product from manufacturer to end user is to install more natural gas refueling stations, such a dialog or such a philosophy is in fact precisely what got our nation into the “Secular Stagnation” we are today being forced to deal with. In other words, just because we have service stations across America that dispense gasoline is no reason whatsoever to conclude people can just drive at will particularly when there is little to no economic growth that is creating any reasonable long term job creating industrial economy in the process.

Having said the above, there are needed limitations to be placed upon fuel development, use and subsequent regulation of use if in fact all possible industrial growth stemming from the use of every energy source is to be the most beneficial to our nation’s entire industrial and economic growth model. So natural gas fueling stations, most simply put, must only be placed within a predetermined, “regional based transportation range” that is designed to accommodate the whole economic development of all fuel blends found natural to the transportation needs of any given regional transportation corridor. As the simple continued maintenance of the utility infrastructure supply grid is at issue here, so to is the continued maintenance and advanced management of the transportation grid traveling above the underground natural gas utility grid. As it has proven to be entirely economically redundant to even attempt to fund the wholesale rebuilding of America’s entire transportation infrastructure, segmenting the overall mixed use definition of that transportation grid as it is segmented based upon the use of vehicles powered by specific fuel types simply enables America to re-engineer its highway system to accommodate specific vehicular use on specific local, regional, industrial, rural and agricultural pathways while in turn coordinating the same with railway as well as water transportation corridors that coexist with vehicle transportation routes within a whole transportation region.

Why use a natural gas powered vehicle to go into an area rich with bio-fuel blends?

The answer to this question is that for the most part, there is virtually no reason in the world to do so meaning that for the most part, bio-fuels, being rural in origin are clearly more suited for the vehicles that operate within that rural setting. As it would be rather unusual to see a farm combine operating on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and it would be more than normal to see a natural gas powered light industrial delivery vehicle on that same stretch of road, the contents of both vehicles should ultimately determine the range and the region from which both should logically operate in. As the natural gas delivery vehicle is essentially delivering the finished manufactured product to the end retail or residential (chain) user in any given Chicago neighborhood, the combine charged with harvesting the raw farm product directly from the farm field is essentially at the beginning of the manufacturing chain process. As the beginning of virtually every manufacturing process is essentially a raw material mining process, the nature of the equipment utilized in this process is most clearly heavy duty. As that process moves along the entire industrial assembly line, the equipment utilized to transport the product to different points in the assembly process evolves to reflect the nature and the weight of what is actually being shipped. As knowing this more than justifies the use of bio-fuels as such fuels simply provide the level of energy needed to operate these vehicles to their optimum level of energy efficiency, knowing the most efficient route to travel with these vehicles is equally important. Just as the natural gas powered vehicle should only go so far, naturally the bio-fuel powered vehicle should have similar energy based as well as environmental based restrictions placed upon the entire process.

As what I am stating here is really nothing at all new, as it is a given that certain vehicles types are for certain industrial functions, articulating these functions from a very task specific mixed energy standpoint serves substantially to diversify the industries that are in fact capable of using these fuel sources to their maximum economic potential. Thus just as the natural gas industry will benefit substantially by the intelligent placement of fueling stations throughout America, and, subsequently industries involved in the manufacturing of all equipment associated with natural gas powered vehicles will do the same, the bio-fuel industry is more than capable of doing the same. With the establishment of pertinent support infrastructure being the key to the success of the bio-fuel industry, where bio-fueling stations are actually placed will of course depend upon where manufacturing entities reliant upon the bio-fuel fleet either already exist or should be located in proximity to.

When you think about this for a bit, not only does our nation’s fueling strategy change, but regional industrial zoning and building codes parameters change as well meaning again that “Secular Stagnation” which is of course entirely derived from over secularized management of such issues as national transportation policy is dissolved or absorbed entirely into an industrial framework that not only enable bio-fuel entities to flourish, but’ large scale industrial construction companies to flourish as well.

Having characterized the nature of the bio-fuel industry as being primarily heavy industrial in nature, that same bio-fuel industry is of course quite rural and therefore quite rural community oriented as well.

Having lived in rural America for the past ten years, there is one, and, only one overarching, highly negative economic/industrial reality to be found in rural America. Whereas that reality is multifaceted, it is, from a transportation standpoint, bench marked in the reality of what I call “needless pickup truck socioeconomic consciousness.” This consciousness basically states that regardless of whether or not a pick up truck is actually needed, people purchase them to get the things for the farm they need, even though no one or very few in rural America either work in the farm industry or actually live on a working farm. To the point where the vast majority of these pick up trucks are on average, some twenty years old, the farms, the farm houses, most of the homes found in rural communities and most of the skeletal remains of industries that once thrived in these communities are as outdated as the notion of driving thirty or more miles in one direction to pick up a pack of energy efficient light bulbs that will be screwed into old porcelain light sockets that are wired to decomposing knob and tube wiring that runs from the barn into the chicken coop and is eventually connected to the house that holds the wholly unaffordable energy efficient light bulb to begin with.

With the economic lunacy of such thought being rampant in rural America, again, broad based bio-fuel engineering of not only community based bio-fueling stations as well as family farm based bio-fuel plants would lend significantly to overall transportation as well as architectural retrofitting industries that would flourish if in fact transportation policy mixed again with rural building and zoning codes enabled a much more cohesive union of a variety of mixed energy technologies to be built into a given rural community’s overall industrial economic dialog. A case in point here is the inoculation of solar arrays and wind turbine electrical generation with geothermal heat and cooling building based technology sectors into the bio-fuel transportation technology sectors that would among other things, once again justify economically the purchase of not only state of the art American made, mixed fuel use pick up trucks but a host of American made “family farm sedans” that are of course designed to move larger groups of people across the obviously expansive terrain that is again quite common to rural American farming communities.

As again such a framework fosters the holistic development of yet another 21st century American mixed energy economic/industrial tier, it does as well turn these rural communities away from the highly destructive social diseases of multi-generational alcoholism as well as both illegal and legal drug abuse and trafficking many of these communities have come to be known for.

Thus, as “Secular Stagnation” is of course an overall essay on American industrial redundancy, it is equally an essay on socioeconomic redundancy. But, as there is essentially always a ray of sunshine pushing through the true American industrial consciousness, so to are there logical economic pathways from which that consciousness ultimately benefits all. The problem of course is getting America’s leadership to the point of realizing how little today they are actually getting accomplished and just how much their lack of accomplishment is depleting overall the otherwise graceful spirit of creative American inventiveness.

To put all of this into some sort of rational economic perspective, it might be worthwhile to again revisit the notion of what a service station actually implies to the communities that are in fact in need of true service station industrial grounding.

If you think about the natural gas fueled car, or the hybrid gasoline/electric car, or, you think about the electric car or the bio-fueled country pick up truck, and, in turn realize that each of these vehicle types should logically have a range of travel attached to them, one thing that the owners of each of these cars have in common is the desire to both travel and eat good home cooked food that most likely will only be found in small neighborhood or community restaurants. If in fact the cars these people do own do have a certain limited range of travel and such travel is based upon the much larger national need to harness and employ all forms of energy intelligently, regional and national commuter rail traffic, regional commuter air traffic, and quite uniquely, regional commuter waterway traffic clearly picks up where the range based automobile leaves off. In the process of doing so then, yet another mixed energy economic tier unfolds to combat the greater national economic cancer of “Secular Stagnation”.

If in fact satisfying America’s hunger for travel along with America’s appetite for good food where in fact a serious consideration when legislating mixed energy fuel based transportation parameters, those railways, those waterways and those regional air carriers economically interacting with rental car agencies and local hotel and motel chains, would of course be able to accommodate travelers wishing to actually eat at their favorite country diner or inner city steak cellar or Sushi Bar. As such traffic would no doubt reflect the birth of yet an altogether new tier, “Secular Stagnation” would no doubt again become a part of our nation’s dysfunctional economic past.

Last but not least, there is the subject of American Architecture, the true energy retrofitting of all aspects of our existing residential, commercial and industrial architecture and the integration of a broad host of energy sources into our nation’s public utility power infrastructure that will of course, power our American Architecture.