"New Orleans was here LONG before both the levees and air-conditioning, and it was one of the few Southern cities that actually DECLINED in population between 1965 and 2005."

Exactly. Point is, if it were a Northern city it would have disappeared entirely. Instead billions are being poured into rebuilding it right where it is.

"(If I hear one more damn Chicago tourist come into the shop complaining about the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes, I swear to God I'm gonna bite 'em.

OF COURSE IT'S A STEAM BATH FILLED WITH FLYING INSECTS! IT'S NEW ORLEANS! IT'S AUGUST! WHAT ...DID YOU EXPECT?)"

Thanks for proving my point.

Nawlins is between a giant river and a large lake, near swamps, is low-lying and over a thousand miles south of Chicago. Perfect configuration for heat, humidity and bugs; anybody with any awareness of Nature understands that. But the widespread use of A/C has caused those Chicagoans (and almost everybody else) to become detached from the realities of weather and climate.

Why would anyone with any sense voluntarily go *south* that far in the summer and then be surprised at the weather?

"Air conditioning is just one result of cheap energy."

Not really. In fact I think it's the other way around: the demand for A/C helped push the cheap-energy agenda.

"Things were originally organized the way they were because energy was expensive in general, but in particular with respect to transportation."

Sort of. Inland-water transport's popularity originally came from the fact that you didn't need to build a right-of-way. Rail transportation's popularity came from its speed and defiance of weather, night and most terrain. Both benefited from the ability to carry very heavy loads.

"With energy so cheap you could just carry everything all over the world in trucks and planes, it didn't matter where you located factories."

Sort of. Most of that stuff crosses the ocean by water on huge diesel-powered container ships using extremely efficient power plants. Airplanes move people and high-value relatively-small packages.

What really caused trucking to grow in the USA were two factors:

1) The government builds and maintains almost all the roads, while almost all of the railroads are private companies having to build, maintain, protect and pay taxes on all of their property, regardless of how much they use it. Trucks pay for ROW use as they go while trains have to invest heavily up-front.

2) The railroads are/were much more tightly regulated. The Staggers Act of 1980 changed that in the right direction, but not before enormous damage was done.

"As energy costs increase, it seems likely that a lot of these rust belt locations will become important again, as water and rail transportation are, far and away, more energy efficient than anything else."

I hope you are right.

But there were three things which pushed the "globalization" of industry (meaning sending manufacturing jobs away):

You are looking at the first: low-cost worldwide communications using PCs and fiber-optics. Need a set of plans and a 500 page specification 10,000 miles away? Just email it as an attachment.

The second is just a box: the cargo container. Load it here, unload it there, transfer it from truck to train to ship to train to truck in a matter of moments at much lower cost. No handling, very little pilferage, and the container is its own warehouse.

The third is a political climate in which it was OK to ship good jobs away. IMHO the landmark event for this was Reagan's breaking of the air-traffic-controllers' union. Which said loud and clear that organized labor gets no respect at the federal level.

The pure genius of that whole move was that so many ordinary middle class working Americans were led to believe that it was a good thing, rather than seeing where it would lead in the long run. IOW, they didn't see that eventually it would be *their* jobs which were impacted.

Got to Wally World and see how many of the air conditioners say "Made In USA"...

http://people.bath.ac.uk/ccsshb/12cyl/

http://www.gizmag.com/go/3263/

Each cylinder is over 100,000 cubic inches and develops over 7500 horsepower. Thermal efficiency exceeds 50%.