by James Howard Kunstler
reviewed by Cheryl Hammond
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Sleepwalking into the future
We are walking off a cliff into “an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before.” James Howard Kunstler shows us a future of sharply decreasing supplies of oil and gas where everyday things we take as normal will cease to be part of our lives.
As we are reaching peak oil in this decade, the point at which we will have used up half the available oil on Earth, we are starting a downward slide toward a life Americans are unprepared for. Kunstler shows convincingly that it is not just a matter of exploring for more oil, as the world has been extensively mapped for oil, and no more major oil fields are to be found.
The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent the first oil shocks to the U.S. The opening of the oil pipeline from the North Slope fields of Alaska and a new generation of drilling platforms in the North Sea between Scotland and Norway enabled the world to postpone the reckoning date, and in fact created a glut of oil which lasted through the ‘80s and ‘90s. Americans lost all concern for availability of oil supplies, and now, in 2005, Americans have yet to understand how peak oil will affect the oil-intensive American way of life.
Americans who consider the issue at all are engaged in “magical thinking,” a belief that market economics will kick in and solve this “engineering problem” and create new technologies like the many miraculous technologies that were invented in the twentieth century. We are confusing energy with technology. “The oil endowment was an extraordinary and singular occurrence of geology, allowing us to use the stored energy of millions of years of sunlight. Once it’s gone, it will be gone forever.” Technology is just hardware. Technology is bound by the laws of thermodynamics that say you can’t get something for nothing and there is no such thing as perpetual motion.
Globalism cannot survive without plentiful, cheap oil. We have dismantled the U.S. manufacturing base under the misguided application of the notion of “comparative advantage,” which means that each locality has something it is good at producing and which together make up a macro economy of trading partners. However, ultra cheap transport has made slave wages the comparative advantage of poor countries while the developed countries have all the capital. Small American retailers and manufacturers have disappeared as Wal-Mart and other major corporations have become a pipeline from China of DVD players, clothing, and all the goods needed to fill the suburban homes of U.S. shoppers.
Without manufacturing, “the dirty secret of the American economy in the 1990s was that it was no longer about anything except the creation of suburban sprawl and the furnishing, accessorizing, and financing of it.” None of this can survive the loss of cheap oil.
How will our communities cope? “More than 80 percent of everything ever built in America was built after World War II, and most of it was designed solely to be used in connection with cars.” Can it be adaptively reused? There are three considerations:
1. How walkable is it? What seems like minutes in an air conditioned car will feel like the “Bataan death march” on foot in August.
2. Can it be heated?
3. Can the roof be kept in repair? Big box stores, already planned for only a 20 year life span, will be subject to quick deterioration.
Kunstler discusses the interstate highway system, which is surprisingly fragile. The ability to zip along at 70 mph requires a very well maintained surface. Slightly broken pavement deteriorates quickly. Our national trucking system cannot tolerate partial failure of the system. Cracked pavement leads to broken axles and dangerous 16-wheelers. Even in today’s relative well being, 18% of federal highways are in poor or mediocre condition. As energy prices increase and the middle class becomes more financially distressed, fewer Americans will have the means to drive and the will to maintain the largest public works system in the history of the world, the interstate highway system, will fall sharply.
The converging catastrophe of the book title is global climate change. It won’t even matter if the far-right skeptics were correct that human activities have had nothing to do with climate change, but that the incontrovertible global warming is just a natural climate cycle. The relevant questions is how will we survive the hardships with chaotically destabilized governments and less ability to take international action. Kunstler gives very interesting descriptions of climactic shifts in historical times, including the deforestation of England during the cooling of the Little Ice Age beginning from the 1500’s. The Gulf Stream Switch is the surprise result of global warming. As Arctic glaciers melt, the fresh water entering the northern Atlantic will disrupt the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe relatively warm. Europe could be looking at a very cold climate.
The food supply is the most worrisome part of oil and gas depletion. The Green Revolution, which allowed the population of the world to increase tremendously, is overwhelmingly about using fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels and not about plant genetics. The world population will have to somehow get back to a level, which can be supported by sun energy and not fossil energy. Farming in the American western plains was basically a failed experiment until mechanization and irrigation with fossil water prolonged it. It was only tried because land was given away free to the desperate. The prospects are dire for this region where counties in Nebraska are already the poorest in the nation and towns have been folding up for years.
The Long Emergency is well worth reading and thinking about. The period of oil powered growth in the U.S. and the world has been “normal” for such a short time. The transition to a future without oil will be difficult. The calls to get the oil from ever more sensitive locations are growing much louder. How will environmentalists fight against drilling in coastal waters, national parks, and anywhere with a drop of oil as mainstream America desperately tries to maintain an energy wasting lifestyle that ultimately has no future? .