James Howard Kunstler
Our world as it stands these days is on it’s way down, just as the production of the oil it’s leveraged begins to tank. The way the world reorganizes itself will be spectacularly different – more local, more sustainable, and yes harder – resembling somewhat the world of earlier epochs.
Oil dependency and suburbanism are the premier tenets of our culture today, in America and throughout the world. As globally, the oil production looks to have reached it’s peak (and if it hasn’t already, it will soon), out way of life will quickly meet its end. But we don’t want that, and nearsighted populations refuse to acknowledge the crises that approach.
The extent of suffering in our country will certainly depend on how tenaciously we attempt to cling to obsolete habits, customs, and assumptions – for instance, how fiercely Americans decide to fight to maintain suburban lifestyles that simple cannot be rationalized any longer. ??3??
In procuring tremendous quantities of oil to lead out gluttonous lives for the last century and a half, in burning that oil, and generally doing nothing without being motivated by greed and power, humans have trashed the earth immeasurably. Oil is solar energy collected over billions of years, and in a century and a half we have used up about half of it. The rest will be spectacularly hard to extract from the earth – we’ve already picked the low crop of petroleum. We are in deep shit.
bq, To move beyond the world oil production peak means that never again will all the nations of the earth combined extract as much oil from the ground as we did at peak, no matter what happens on the demand side. This has extraordinary implication for oil-based industrial civilization, which is predicated on constant and regular expansion of everything – population, gross domestic product, sales, revenue, housing starts, you name it. 24
The best information we have is that we will have passed the point of world peak oil production sometime between the years 2000 and 2008. 25
So what, there is still half the oil left in the world my mom says. But not only has consumption of oil increased exponentially since the early twentieth century, but the last half of world oil is in the most remote locations, and it is hardest to extract. Like I said, there isn’t any more low hanging fruit.
According to Hubbert’s model, and assuming at least current levels of world petroleum consumption at 27 billion barrels a year (and not withstanding a still hugely expanding world population and the continued rapid industrialization of China), then the world has only about 37 years of oil left, in the ideal case that every last drop is pumped out. 49
I’ve heard talk of depletion, and who thinks that oil is actually going to last forever – but at this rate, I’m 55 by the time there is absolutely nothing left. And I’m just a kid. Kunstler is sure out lives are going to radically change, and soon. The predictions for the extinction of oil back him up well.
At peak and just beyond, there is a massive potential for system failures of all kinds; social, economic, and political. Peak is quite literally a tipping point. Beyond peak, things unravel and the center does not hold. Beyond peak, all bets are off about civilization’s future. 65
Peak oil is undoubtedly, at least according to studies cited here, coming fast. Or it’s already happened. It’s impossible to know due to the politics of oil, only in hindsight will we be able to see that less and less oil is being pumped and sold year by year, which will cause tremendous instability in the oil market, which essentially will amplify because everything out society is built on takes oil to run.
At the current rate of growth in demand, China alone, of all the world’s nations, will consume 100 percent of current;y available world [oil] exports in ten years – assuming no growth in demand elsewhere in the world and assuming no falloff in global production. 84
But we can’t assume either of those two conditions – peak is forecast to be reached any month now, and to deny that the world population is growing at a more phenomenal rate then it ever has before would be foolish. We would all be best to just assume now that oil is all gone, and get our shit together, then put off the exhaustion of oil as we have up until now and continue our commutes and current lifestyle.
Kunstler talks at length as to why none of the new forms of energy generation could be suitable for our suburban oil happy economy. Most of them just aren’t as convenient as oil, take phenomenal amounts of energy and are less efficient, or themselves rely on an economy based on cheap oil. Huh. That sucks. What ever happened to cold nuclear fusion?
We’ve poured so much money into suburbia and its accessories that we cannot now allow ourselves to imagine giving it up. And the paradoxical bundle of ideas that combines the liberating nature of endless motoring with entitlement to a settled home in the rural landscape (the American Dream) still exerts awful pressures on our capacity to dream of other living arrangements. 116
Alas, nothing is more subject to losing value by going out of date then something that is valued solely for being up-to-date. 122
Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operate highly complex systems at gigantic scales. Renewable energy sources are not compatible with those systems and scales. Renewables will not be able to take the place of oil and gas in running those systems. The systems themselves will have to go. 131
The very idea that we possess any control over the process [of oil depletion] seems to me further evidence of the delusion gripping our late industrial culture – the fatuous certainty that technology will save us from the diminishing returns of technology. 149
I’ve always felt like our society is something concrete, and fairly well build – but that it wasn’t built on anything. A big castle on a weak foundation, something substantial built on top of something weak and cheap, or maybe even nothing at all. Kunstler’s book made me realize that what everything was really built on was oil. But my general idea was right, and it looks like it wouldn’t take much at all to disrupt the foundation of society, bringing down all the wonders built upon it. Things these days are just too much – overbuilt. Everything is ridiculous.
Russia, with its decrepit infrastructure, imploded industrial economy, tattered social safety net, and demoralized citizenry, is the prototype for the fate of industrial societies of the Long Emergency. 170
The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose. William James, quoted on p. 185
The American economy has historically been about moving incrementally away from natural patterns of living off solar energy to artificial patterns of living subsidized by cheap fossil fuel. Through the tumultuous twentieth century to now, the American economy has moved insidiously from the sustainable to the terminal, from the solar flow to the nonrenewable stock, from the authentic to the virtual, and from the actual to the abstract. 190
We’ve built all of this society, spawned a spectacular number of humans, doubled the human population a few times over since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And now all we have is something built on nothing, something build for nothing. Discounting of course the spectacular wrongs done to our natural environment.
I tend to be convinced easily of whatever I’m reading, and hopefully the magic of science can pull us out of this bind for oil we’ve gotten into, but if oil does run out, with nothing to take its place, we are screwed. We have run up an immense debt to nature, and somehow we are going to have to pay it back after losing out on our jobs. As soon as the oil is gone, there won’t be the time for science, not to mention the means.
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. It resembled the efficiency of cancer. 222
Kunstler looks down very much on efficiency. the more efficient something is, the less diverse, the less natural it also must be. Efficiency is just a faster way to create entropy, or to change something orderly (world oil reserves) into something disorderly and dirty, like modern society.
A hundred years ago, just before the introduction of the fossil fuel based technologies, more then 30 percent of the American population was engaged in farming. Now the figure is 1.6 percent. The issue is not moral, academic, or aesthetic. Rather it’s a matter of those ratios being made possible only because cheap oil and automation made up for so much human labor. 241
The few remaining farmers in my part of the state don’t even cultivate gardens for their own households. They get their food from the supermarket, like everyone else. Their ecological relationship to the land has been rendered minimal and abstract by technology. 242
When I look down at my feet, I don’t see the ground. I see the floor of my house, and I know that the ground is down there under a floor or down and a concrete slab. But metaphorically, if society today looked down at the ground it couldn’t see it. Not as the ground really is. All we can see is something like the view out the window – and because we never leave our metaphorical house, how do we know what’s really out there? How do we have any sense of the reality beyond our virtual culture?
Suburbia has a tragic destiny. More than half the U.S. population lives in it. THe economy of recent decades is based largely on the building and servicing of it. And the whole system will not operate without liberal and reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas. Suburbia is going to lose its value catastrophically as it loses its utility. 248
The effect of all this [the conglomeration of schools] on the students, though was always secondary to the administrative benefits, and the purpose of school somehow got lost, so that, paradoxically, even the richest suburban high schools with Olympic swimming pools, food courts, and hectares of playing fields produced alienated students dogged by anomie, depression, and a pervasive anxiety about their future roles in a consumer society. 273
What Kunstler says about education resonates well with me, me just finishing up my high school education and having severe doubts about the value of college. School has done a great job of teaching me to sit still, but a much worse job of being able to focus. I’ve learned a lot, but always felt that since I changed learning environments when I was about 12, going from a very open and progressive, goal driven classroom to a hierarchal, overly structured grade driven one school has taught me very little.
I took a calculus class last year, my junior year, passed the AP test, and haven’t used an ounce of what I’ve learned since. I’ve actually forgotten most of it. I’ve used all the skills I learned early on in middle school, where I mostly learned how to teach myself how to do my own things, to get out of doing all the rote tasks in high school, and spending my time in other ways.
Grade driven education just doesn’t work for me. What significance does a 4.0 hold to me? Absolutely none. I know plenty of bimbos with no sense whatsoever, who think that graduating with honors and sitting on the NHS council will get them a good education and enfin a good life. I just can’t believe it. I’ve never had a 4.0, and in the last two years I’ve hardly had any sense of what grades I’ve been getting in my classes. I do know however, how well I’ve been doing. Great in some classes, not so how in others. The funniest thing is, the amount I’ve learned doesn’t so often agree with the grade I’m given.
Maybe thats just another manifestation of our delusional society. Maybe school just doesn’t quite work for me. Or on another level, maybe I just don’t work in this society – it could just not be for me. I try to bike everywhere I can, when my sister needs a ride somewhere and my parents make me take her, I feel wrong driving frivolously. Why can’t she bike like me? Why doesn’t everyone want to move out into the country and live alone, husbanding the land for nourishment? Why can’t anyone see what sure seems to be happening, and why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?
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