[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] The Long Emergency: ...

[Terry W. Colvin]

[See also:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633?rnd=1113439994015&has-player=true]


"The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and 
Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century"

James Howard Kunstler

Atlantic Monthly Press
320 pages
Nonfiction


After the oil is gone
Say goodbye to your suburban house, yoke up that horse, and stand by to 
repel pirates! Author James Howard Kunstler talks about the dire world of 
his new book, "The Long Emergency."

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katharine Mieszkowski


May 14, 2005 | Suburbs will collapse into slums. Farmhand will be a more 
viable career choice than public relations executive. And avoiding 
starvation will replace avoiding boredom as the national pastime.

Those are just a few of the predictions that James Howard Kunstler makes in 
his new book. "The Long Emergency" paints a dystopic view of the United 
States in the wake of what Kunstler dubs the "cheap oil fiesta." It's a 
future the author insists is not apocalyptic. Calling it the end of the 
world be too easy.

No, Kunstler believes the human race will survive as we slip down the other 
side of Hubbert's Oil Peak. But the high standard of living we've built by 
gorging on cheap oil will not. America, as a political entity, will be 
history too.


When will the doom begin? It already has. "There have been no significant 
discoveries of new oil since 2002," Kunstler says. And the Saudis have 
screwed up their super-giant Ghawar oil field, long a fossil-fuel font for 
the U.S. "They have damaged it by pumping enormous amounts of salt water 
into it; in fact, the field itself may be entering depletion," he says.

A former journalist turned novelist turned social critic, Kunstler is best 
known for his book excoriating the suburbs, "Geography of Nowhere." Now he 
foresees the end of the entire artifice of American life, from the suburbs 
to the interstate highway to Wal-Mart and the global supply chain that 
supports it.

In Kunstler's world, a teenager will be better off learning how to yoke up a 
horse-drawn buggy than how to change the oil in a car. Woodshop will be more 
important than computer literacy. Among Kunstler's predictions: The South 
will devolve into agricultural feudalism and the Pacific Northwest will be 
beset by a plague of pirates from Asia. Forget about sleek hydrogen-powered 
cars coming to the rescue. For that matter, quit tilting your hopes toward 
wind power.

Kunstler displays a kind of macabre wit about the unpleasantness and strife 
that await us all. Talking to him is like trying to argue with a prophet. 
His assertions have a neat way of doubling back to anticipate your 
critiques. If you express doubt about his views, then you may well be among 
the deluded masses too addicted to your McSUV and McSuburb to accept the 
reality that lies ahead.

Salon spoke to Kunstler at his home in upstate New York, mindful that in the 
future such an hour-long, cross-country telephone call, undertaken so 
casually, could be a remote luxury, a quaint remnant of a bygone era rich in 
the splendors of oil.

Plenty of analysts are confident that in coming decades we'll switch from 
oil to another form of energy, like Europeans switching from burning wood to 
burning coal when forests became scarce. Why aren't you?

That's been a pattern in the last several hundred years, but it has followed 
a supply of mineral resources that we've exploited to their logical end. 
When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to 
understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.

There are at least two major mental disturbances in the collective American 
mind these days that can be described with some precision. One is the Jiminy 
Cricket syndrome -- the idea that when you wish upon a star your dreams come 
true. This is largely a product of the technological achievements of the 
last century, which were themselves a product of cheap energy: namely, 
things like our trip to the moon, combined with the effects of advertising, 
Hollywood and pop culture.

We have now become a people who believe that wishing for things makes them 
happen. Unfortunately, the world just doesn't work that way. The truth is 
that no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables will allow 
us to run the U.S.A. -- or even a substantial fraction of it -- the way that 
we're running it now.

There's another mental disturbance that Americans are suffering from. It's 
the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing -- unearned riches, 
free energy, perpetual motion -- and it's exemplified by Las Vegas. Combine 
the Jiminy Cricket syndrome and the idea that it's possible to get something 
for nothing and you end up with a population that's thoroughly deluded and 
unable to deal with reality. That's precisely where we're at.

You point out that there are all sorts of ways that we're dependent on oil 
that we don't think about.

We have evolved a cheese-doodle agriculture system run by large corporations 
like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which grow immense amounts of corn 
by using fossil fuels to produce immense amounts of corn-based junk food. 
The prospects are poor that we will continue living this way. The 
implications are enormous. We will have to grow much more of our food closer 
to home.

Also, our national retail chain system -- otherwise known as Wal-Mart and 
Co., Wal-Mart and wannabes, Wal-Mart and imitators -- is unlikely to survive 
both the rising costs of oil and far more volatile price fluctuations. Their 
economic equation requires them to predict the cost of transport because 
their margins are so razor thin. And they won't be able to anymore.

Remember: These immensely hypertrophic organisms like Wal-Mart are products 
of the special economic growth of the late 20th century, namely an unusually 
long period of relative world peace and extraordinarily cheap energy. If you 
remove those two elements, all large-scale enterprises --corporate farming, 
big-box shopping, big government, professional sports -- are going to be in 
trouble.

So, the collapse of the cheap oil fiesta is going to...

I wouldn't call it "collapse." That's the cause of a lot of 
misunderstanding. What we're talking about is the process of heading down 
the arch of depletion, not the catastrophic cutoff of oil. Heading down the 
arch implies that we will not have the normal growth of industrial economies 
anymore. And that has tremendous implications for capital-finance 
instruments to produce wealth, namely securities and bonds. All the 
financial paper in the world is essentially based on the increasing 
accumulation of wealth.

You argue that we won't know we've hit the global oil peak until a few years 
after it's happened. There will be hangover.

The rearview-mirror effect.

What will be the first signs of the long emergency?

We're already seeing them. The two clearest signs are serious geopolitical 
friction and the volatility in the oil markets. A third one, which hasn't 
quite gotten traction, will be disruptions in the financial markets. But 
that could happen at any moment.

And the real estate bubble?

Absolutely. The housing bubble is a perverse form of financial behavior. 
It's a consequence of capital desperately seeking a way to increase in an 
industrial economy that has ceased to grow. America is no longer producing 
wealth in the conventional sense. And so the housing bubble is a way for 
residual capital to produce wealth. But like all bubbles, it's a delusional 
thing that will probably end in tears.

You write that even the educated minority in the U.S. is clueless about its 
role in geopolitical problems, like the family in your neighborhood that had 
a sign in their yard that said, "War Is Not the Answer," and two SUVs in the 
garage.

Or all my politically progressive friends who drove their SUVs to the peace 
rallies of 2003.

Why do you think that there's such a disconnect?

Because we haven't been challenged for such a long time. The last challenge 
we experienced was the OPEC oil disturbances of the 1970s, which thundered 
through our economy and caused a lot of problems. But they were short-lived 
and the cheap oil fiesta was able to continue because the final great 
discoveries of the oil age came online in the 1980s, namely the North Sea 
and the Alaska North Slope. And that allowed us to go back to sleep for 
another two decades.

Does the Iraq war presage the kind of resource wars that you see in the 
future?

The Iraq war is not hard to understand. It wasn't an attempt to steal Iraq's 
oil. If that was the case, it would have been a stupid venture because we've 
spent hundreds of billions of dollars occupying the place, not to mention 
the lives lost. It was not a matter of stealing the oil; it was a matter of 
retaining access to it. It was an attempt to stabilize the region of the 
world that holds two-thirds of the remaining oil, namely, the Middle East.

We opened a police station in the Middle East, and Iraq just happened to be 
the best candidate for it. They had a troublesome dictator. They were 
geographically located between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So we went to Iraq to 
moderate and influence the behavior of the two countries --Iran and Saudi 
Arabia -- that are so important to us. We desperately wanted the oil 
supplies to continue coming out of them in a reliable way. So the Iraq 
venture was all about stabilizing the Middle East. It raises the obvious 
question: How long can the U.S. hope to occupy unfriendly nations? The 
answer is, not forever.

Why do you skewer Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who promotes 
the idea of a futuristic hypercar, which would get 100 miles per gallon?

I regard Lovins hypercar venture as a stupid distraction, if for no other 
reason that it tends to promote the idea that we can continue being a 
car-dependent society. Clearly we can't, no matter how good the gas mileage 
is. I wrote three other books about the fiasco of suburbia before I even got 
a bug up my ass about the energy issues.

What's wrong with trying to make a more efficient car?

I'm not against efficient cars. I'm against the idea that somebody in 
Amory's position would focus on cars at the expense of something else like 
promoting walkable communities. The New Urbanist movement, for example, was 
campaigning for a much more intelligent response to suburbia at around the 
same time. And the solutions that they were promoting made a lot more sense 
than underwriting the continuation of the suburban fiasco. I think that this 
was perhaps an unintended consequence of Lovins' venture. It shows the 
limits of our imagination.

Is your basic critique of renewable energy that wind, solar and biomass all 
depend, to some extent, on fossil fuels?

That's one critique. I'm not trying to militate against them. We are going 
to use them. But we're not going to run the interstate highways and Disney 
World on them. Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring 
tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar 
fuel. The point I would repeat is this: We don't know whether we can 
fabricate the components for these things absent a fossil-fuel economy.

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas 
themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely 
on them. For me, it's an issue of scale. As far as I can tell, we're much 
more likely to use these things on a very small neighborhood or town basis.

We're going to have to make tremendous readjustments in every aspect of how 
we live. Let me give you an example. One of the main characteristics of the 
suburbs is that everyone can lead an urban life in a rural setting. But land 
is simply not going to be available for suburban development anymore. So 
what we're going to see in the years ahead is the return of a much firmer 
distinction between what is urban and what is rural, between what's the town 
and what's the country. Because we're going to have to grow so much more of 
our food close to home, we're going to have to value rural land differently 
than we have for the past half century.

How will this affect our livelihoods?

We will no longer be a nation of public relations executives living 38 miles 
away from town. The future that I see tells me that the larger cities will 
be in big trouble and the action will be in the smaller cities and smaller 
towns. They will have resilience. It will be very important to live close to 
places that have viable agriculture, and the places where this is not 
possible are going to be in trouble.

The huge suburban metroplexes like New York and Chicago are not going to 
function very well. They're products of the oil age. They are oversupplied 
with skyscrapers and mega-structures that have poor prospects in a society 
with scarce energy. We will see a painful contraction in these places.

The Southwest is going to be real trouble. And the problem of contracting 
big cities will be real. I would also hasten to point out that many of them 
have already entered an advanced state of contraction: Detroit, St. Louis, 
Kansas City, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Louisville and Cincinnati. The list is 
very long of cities that have been in contraction for quite a bit of time. 
The difference, of course, is that they have been enjoying hyper-mega-growth 
in their suburbs, and that's going to stop.

What kind of reaction have you been getting when you say we're better off 
learning how to operate a horse-drawn plow than becoming a P.R. executive?

To put it mildly, a lot of people have trouble processing these ideas.

What if you put it not so mildly?

It tends to conflict with their picture of reality.

Do they take you seriously?

There is a good term for this and I hasten to point out that I did not 
invent it, although I couldn't tell you who did. It's really what's called 
"an outside context problem." It's so far from our normal realm of 
experience that we are collectively having a hard time processing it. In 
fact, we can't process it. Talking about these things tends to induce waves 
of denial, fear, ridicule.

But a great philosopher said new ideas are often greeted in three stages. 
First, they're ridiculed. Second, they're violently opposed. And finally 
they're accepted as self-evident.

What stage do you think that you're in?

I think we're in the ridicule stage, for sure. One thing that I'm predicting 
is that there will be a vigorous and futile defense of suburbia and all its 
entitlements, no matter what reality is telling us to do. And this will 
translate into a lot of political mischief. You can quote me: Americans will 
vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a 
McHouse and a McCar.

If there is such a massive threat to the American way of life, why are our 
government and civic institutions unable to foresee it and make any changes 
to address it?

You will now be enlightened: The dirty secret of the American economy for 
more than a decade now is that it is largely based on the continued creation 
of suburban sprawl and all its accessories and furnishings. And if you 
remove that from our economy there isn't a whole lot left besides hair 
cutting, Colonel Sanders' chicken, and open-heart surgery.

So it would take down the American economy?

If we had to actually reform the way that we live, or let go of some of it, 
the losses would be politically untenable. No politician, whether it is the 
gallant John Kerry or George W. Bush, will go near the issue. They know that 
if the suburban-sprawl economy is challenged there isn't a whole lot left 
behind it.

But we're going to have to let those things go, whether we like it or not. 
Just don't expect to be led through this in an orderly way. The key to 
understanding what we face is turbulence. We're going through big changes 
attended by a lot of turbulence, disorder and hardship.

The reason that I called this book "The Long Emergency" is precisely because 
it describes an interval of trouble. I'm not saying that the world is coming 
to an end. I'm saying we're going to pass through a period of history that's 
going to be very difficult. There's a distinction between calling something 
the apocalypse and calling something an epochal discontinuity.

But won't the political landscape change in reaction? If the lights aren't 
coming on because natural gas is scarce, don't you think that a lot of the 
barriers to, say, nuclear power, will drop pretty quickly?

They will shift the political landscape, and the shift will include a great 
deal of turbulence and mischief. That's precisely why the quixotic attempt 
to defend suburbia will probably produce a lot of political trouble. 
Politically, we will try to save it. We will try to take measures, whether 
that means engaging in more overseas adventures.

What I don't understand is why you're so confident that any political change 
will be futile.

I think that we've overshot our window of opportunity to have an orderly 
transition.

It's too late to invest heavily in nuclear energy?

No, we may do that. If we want to keep the lights on after 2020, we may have 
to seriously consider building more nuclear power plants. But even under the 
best circumstances, it would take five or 10 years to get them built.

Here is my talk show question: What do you think people should do?

People have to ask themselves about where they're living, whether that place 
has a viable future. If I was living in the Atlanta suburbs, I would give 
serious consideration to relocating, ditto Las Vegas or Tucson. If I was a 
young person, I would rethink my expectations to make public relations my 
career, or indeed have a corporate future at all. If I was a local 
politician, I would think very seriously about stopping the sprawl-approval 
system in my town. And I would turn my attention to local self-sufficiency. 
The bottom line is this: All these things point to the fact that we're going 
to have to live a lot more locally and profoundly in the years ahead.

The end of the cheap oil fiesta is going to destroy the suburbs and create a 
simpler, community-based future?

Let me draw a parallel for you. A lot of people point out that the kind of 
predictions I've made about the post-oil world seem to resemble the 
Pentecostal Christian scenario about apocalypse. It happens that I'm not a 
born-again Christian. My view of the future is no more a matter of 
anti-suburban religion than it is a matter of being a Christian. It was 
simply self-evident that the American way of life was moving into a kind of 
terminal stage, whether you liked it or not. And I think that there will be 
a lot of benefits for us.

What are the benefits?

I think that we will return to many social relations and social enactments 
that we lost and that were of great value to us, such as working closely 
with other people on things that really matter to us.

Like farming, so we can eat?

I'm not saying everybody is going to be a farmer. In the book, I think that 
I went to great pains to say that we were going to have to reconstruct whole 
networks of local economic relations and interdependences.

As opposed to the globalized situation we have now?

Yeah. People are working for large entities that they don't care about and 
that don't care about them. I think that people will be working on things 
that will tend to be more meaningful, that will tend to have meaning for 
their neighbors and the places that they live.

One of the great tragedies of the Wal-Mart fiasco has been the destruction 
of the social and economic roles of businesses in communities. Those roles 
were pretty complex and created deep webs of culture that we've allowed to 
be systematically dismantled and destroyed. We're going to get some of them 
back.

I also think we will cease to be a nation of TV zombies who are merely 
entertaining ourselves to avoid being bored.

So, much as we may resist, there will be upsides?

Yes. It's possible to boil them down to the idea that we will not be living 
in the kind of narcissistic isolation that was so pervasive in recent 
decades. Geopolitically, the world is going to be a larger place. But our 
individual worlds may become smaller places. American life will be much more 
about staying where you are than about ceaseless and endless and pointless 
mobility.

And that will resonate. We're afflicted by so many places that are simply 
not worth caring about anymore. This is having a tremendous effect on us. 
It's corroding our spirits. And, if pressed, I would have to say that it's 
led directly to the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing and 
if you wish upon a star your dreams come true.

Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that 
it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a 
powerful generator of anxiety and depression. If we happen to let it go, we 
won't miss it that much. Very few people are going to feel nostalgic about 
the parking lot between the Chuck E. Cheeses and the Kmart.

Why do you think we resist this transition?

I think the notion behind your question is that we've become so accustomed 
to leisure and comfort that we're afraid to let them go and enter a world of 
less comfort and greater toil. I myself am a fairly cheerful person. I made 
certain choices years ago that have led me to lead a rewarding and 
purposeful life. At 56 years old, I've already outlived Babe Ruth and 
Mozart. I've enjoyed the cheap oil fiesta. I barely made a living until I 
was over 40 years old as a professional writer. I've experienced a moderate 
amount of hardship myself. And I'm not afraid of it. But I also feel 
fortunate.

Fortunate for what?

I feel fortunate that I enjoyed the blandishments of modernity. I had hip 
replacement and root canal. I was able to travel on airplanes. I was able to 
take cheap food for granted. I went to the movies. I enjoyed rock 'n' roll. 
And now I'm ready to move on.



-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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