Kunstler: The Long Emergency - the crash after Peak Oil Production -

[Guest guest]

Here's another one folks -- another article by an important author,

stating that we are coming to the end of the petroleum era.

This makes interesting reading combined with "Confessions of an Economic

Hit Man" by John Perkins which I just finished last night.

And with the article forecasting the crash of the dollar (due to Asians

loosing faith in our debt-saturated economy) within the next year, that

I read in yesterday's New York Times. (Altman: Buckle up for the

Dollar's Ride 3/27/05)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/business/yourmoney/27view.html?ex=1112158800&

en=7b524c41438ee9a4&ei=5070

 

Like the story of the brahmana who lost his caste by eating a forbidden

meal, but still remained hungry -- the western world, and the US in

particular finds itself in the same position. We commit all kinds of

lies and violence to obtain precious oil to maintain our luxurious

lifestlye. But in spite of the colossal amount of sin that we commit,

we will still lose the forbidden oil we are stealing, and then we are

destined to suffer deaths of starvation and violence related to scarcity.

 

Very sobering times, my friends.

 

A very good article. Don't you wonder when these articles will start

mentioning that the only real way to produce food without petroleum is

animal traction? And that the most "fuel efficient" (interms of feed

per volume of work) animal traction is ox power? I guess those

articles won't start to appear for another ten years...

 

And I wonder about ISKCON's leadership. Are they still building for

jet-set tourist meccas that will be inaccessible in 15 years? Are they

interested in protecting cows and training oxen so that we can make the

most of our preaching opportunities in the hard times to come?

 

Anyway, some interesting quotes here:

 

****************************

 

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American

life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial

fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved

through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy

Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we

wish for hard enough will come true...

 

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones

surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally

sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and

smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will

probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful

and tumultuous...

 

The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is

likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may

not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet...

 

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is

going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe

that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought

to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to

cultivate a religion of hope - that is, a deep and comprehensive belief

that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to

stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close

communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically)

with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and

to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being

merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear

singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole

hearts.

 

*************************

 

....And, to add one note of hope, I would say, "...And we will be singing

Hare Krsna."

 

your servant,

 

Hare Krsna dasi

 

*********************************

 

The Long Emergency

by James Howard Kunstler

The Rolling Stone

 

Thursday 24 March 2005

 

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

 

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars

a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago.

The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times

business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered

significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span

of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a

hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of

inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

 

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that

"people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may

challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and

especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We

are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

 

It has been very hard for Americans - lost in dark raptures of

nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring - to

make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the

terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the

terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the

future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

 

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It

is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and

natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern

life - not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating,

air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive

clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national

defense - you name it.

 

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering

global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the

argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to

start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its

dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production

peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

 

The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point

will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a

given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline.

It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the

top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total

endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a

lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is

much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer

quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A

substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

 

The United States passed its own oil peak - about 11 million barrels

a day - in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In

2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from

natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a

day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and

the ratio will continue to worsen.

 

The US peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic

power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting

the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s.

In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North

Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for

about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion.

Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to

insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.

 

Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a creamy

nougat center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great

oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been

no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of

America or any other place.

 

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best

estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between

now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and

India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its

reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production

despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their

predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time

global peak production.

 

It will change everything about how we live.

 

To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also

declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and

with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil

crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island

and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the US chose to make gas its

first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just

about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the

homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters,

gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed

through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have

to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker

ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few

exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals

have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for

terrorism.

 

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly

understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a

permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with

the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population

overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

 

We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed

conditions.

 

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American

life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial

fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved

through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy

Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we

wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought

to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from

fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

 

The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax.

We are not going to replace the US automobile and truck fleet with

vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of

fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural

gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would

be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants.

Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants

soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's

nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a

replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

 

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are

also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not

only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components

require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability

that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support

platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind

technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably

at a very local and small scale.

 

Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid

fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which

things are currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on

using oil and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the

biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels.

This is a net energy loser - you might as well just burn the inputs and

not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and

waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge

waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

 

Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant

supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological

drawbacks - as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming" gases and

many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury

poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the

only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime

conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor [!].

 

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may

indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems

and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years

to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the

price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite

supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic

fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.

 

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period

of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously,

geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has

already led to war and promises more international military conflict.

Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil

supplies, the US has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by,

in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not

just to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of

neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi

Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our

future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel

altogether confident about.

 

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the

world's second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's

surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the

imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk

into some of these places - the Middle East, former Soviet republics in

central Asia - and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to

contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I

doubt it. Nor can the US military occupy regions of the Eastern

Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil

infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A

likely scenario is that the US could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying

to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere,

having lost access to most of the world's remaining oil in the process.

 

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this

predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of

the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and

repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a

report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is

for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem

like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the

fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."

 

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other

arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a

special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a

society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our

towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had

the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in

America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest

misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic

destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will

defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

 

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made

the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips,

fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when

we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

 

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale

and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind

of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the

way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become

profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about

mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized

on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business

enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that

support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will

produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of

an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

 

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long

Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil-

and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food

closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American

economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on

agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real

estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no

doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult

questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The

relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has

destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most

places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and

improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more

labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the

re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be

composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to

relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of

disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with

those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But

their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may

simply seize that land.

 

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not

survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels"

won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain

stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be

interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in

the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured

goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of

energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

 

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements

for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will

probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory

system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much

lower - and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of

thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to

pharmaceuticals [!], are made out of oil. They will become increasingly

scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be

reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving

merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher

costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

 

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say

the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue,

our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more

delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as

traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree,

problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate

partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or

they quickly fall apart.

 

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be

ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004

mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then

there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few

decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its

knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining

gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced

air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars,

trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to

electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to

maintain than our highway network.

 

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones

surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally

sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and

smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will

probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful

and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and

St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further

to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being

oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of

declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have

long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of

necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities'

problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban

entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the

colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

 

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long

Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that

it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century.

I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become

significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as

well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air

conditioning.

 

I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different

reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence

as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide

with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent

encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of

individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the

defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

 

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems,

from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The

Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat

better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into

lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits

and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at

some level.

 

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency

is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not

believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be

brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will

have to cultivate a religion of hope - that is, a deep and comprehensive

belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive

side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close

communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically)

with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and

to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being

merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear

singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole

hearts.

 

Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler, and

reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc