Cooling a house in Arizona or any other human-unfriendly temperature range can be done without electricity. You'll see lots of folks here with 2 or 3 ventilators exhausting the hot air out of the attics so that the hot air indoors will rise. That's fine for a start and brings attic temperatures down about 15 degrees and indoor temperatures down by 5.

Now, what needs to be done is mass installations of roof sprinklers. Roof sprinklers trickle water over the roof and let evaporation remove the heat from the tiles, wood shingles or tar/asphalt.

The result cools the house down another 3 or 4 degrees by keeping the attic or roof cooler - and all this for pennies a day worth of water intelligently applied. Radiant heat is the enemy. In your garage, it is the roll-up metal garage door that acts as a skillet heating the garage. Wood ones were less conductive of heat. So these metal ones need to be insulated on the inside.

Shade is good. Shade works. If you can't have trees and you have just a little building money a super simple floating roof panel keeps temperatures down immensely.

_______________________________<-floating panel
||__________________________|| <-real roof line

The panels deflect heat from your roof, keeping your attic from turning into an oven and trapping heat indoors. The panels can be made out of plywood or some similar lightweight and inexpensive wood and painted a light color. If you're well off (and have no accursed homeowners association) you can make the panels out of aluminum or simply mount floating solar panels over your roof to double the functionality. Keep the stucture 6-8 inches over the roof and you let the panels radiate their heat to the wind and air.

Build a shade wall in front of your major glass windows. Shield your windows and the radiant heat is cut down another 40% and your indoor temps will be down another 5-15 degrees at different points of the day.

Black friday will not shut down our electric plants out here because our plants out here are nuclear and huge. Elsewhere, most are coal driven and will keep electricity running.

The freeways could eventually be replaced by electric rail systems within a decade or thereabouts if funded and sponsored by a national conversion program, much as the 50's freeway bill funded the freeways. Local electric rail travel is possible for inter-city travel as well. Turbine powered cars could be made that would be far cheaper to manufacture than hybrids and they would not have any battery waste issues or inherent delays in recharging that electric vehicles have.

Or cars could be converted to electric and power could be broadcast to them via tuned induction. All roads and highways would have powerful nearby tuned coils and each car would have a coil that acts as a step down induction coil. Meters installed in the vehicles could report the power consumed and you would be billed accordingly. You could have a back up power source for traveling through regions not so equipped. This wouldn't take much longer to set up than it took to convert regions to cellular communication.

There is a time and place for all things. Feed the hungry and they will never learn to grow food or harvest crops. There are folks out there with most all of the answers needed to make America completely independent and without any need for foreign oil. They know how to cultivate the land and change weather systems by applying a few simple physics principles to the infrastructure.

When the time comes, the answers will be there - they have been there all the time.

;-)