James Howard Kunstler
The Long Emergency: The American Dream Meets Reality
Wednesday, January 25, 2006, 11:30 AM
Author of Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler's most recent book, The Long Emergency,
is a sobering account of the effects of the end of oil. He makes
a strong case that there is no other energy source on the horizon to
take its place. Kunstler envisions a "low energy" world that will
be radically different from today's society.Kunstler has been an outspoken critic of suburbia, urban development trends throughout the US, and the “American Way of Life”, and has been a leading proponent of The New Urbanism movement.
James Howard Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine.
Lecture Summary: How we won't survive much of anything in the 21st Century.
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, spoke at the First Congregational Church on Wed. 25 January. He delivered a barnburner on the challenges presented by what he calls "the global oil predicament."
The problem: World oil production is topping out at 84 million barrels per day, and will likely decrease a few percent per year from now on (that is, if you believe senior petroleum geologists). But demand is increasing. There is no viable replacement for oil, which is produced mainly in regions hostile to the United States. And climate is changing. The likely outcome: trouble.
Kunstler went through the various oil substitutes and shot each one of them down. You may disagree with some of his arguments, but the bottom line is that oil is a uniquely versatile, mobile, and dense fuel, unmatched by anything else we have.
More important than the nuts and bolts of this or that fuel is what Kunstler calls our impediment to rational thinking:
1) Our habit of wishing on a star; if we wish for it, it will come true.
2) Our national religion - not Christianity - but our belief in unearned riches.
Another problem; we confuse technology with energy. They're related but distinct. He illustrated this point with a recent talk he gave at the head-quarters of Google, which he described as "a bunch of skateboard rats with vending machines every 30 feet," believing that because they made millions of dollars moving pixels around on a screen, they could figure out anything. When he described our global oil predicament their response was, "But dude, we have technology!"
How's the media doing on this issue? Horribly according to Kunstler. He gave three examples.
One: a recent 60 Minutes show extolled the new source of oil (tar sands) we'll get from our friendly neighbor to the north. The program forgot to mention that peak production will be 3 million barrels a day, or about 15% of US oil use, that it will take the equivalent of two barrels of oil energy to deliver three barrels of oil, and that the refining energy will come from natural gas which is in a steeper decline than oil. Never mind the vast environmental damage.
Second example: David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, extolling the huge boom in suburban housing in the "outer asteroid belt" of Phoenix, where there is no water, where commuting will be prohibitively expensive, and there is no prospect for local food production.
Third: Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, talking about China as the world's next economic superpower when the country won't have the energy to run its factories, even if they walk in to central Asia and commandeer substantial, but finite, oil resources.
So what does the future look like to Kunstler? In a word, smaller. Or as he says, "we'll need to make other arrangements." We'll grow food differently. Our economies will be more local and regional than global. Dense communities will do better than sprawling ones. The car will play a diminished role in our lives. If we're smart, we'll get busy re-building our rail system (one gallon of diesel moves a ton of freight 59 miles in a truck, 202 miles in a train and 514 miles in a ship). There will be losers: the formerly middle class; industrial agriculture; Walmart; people and nations who make things for Walmart. There will be turbulence.
Kunstler is worried that a nation that is already too passive and clueless will respond to hard times by demanding to be pushed around by politicians ("Tell me what to do!"). He's worried that sprawl has created places not worth caring about. He's worried that mega stores have decimated a "merchant class" that used to be our civic backbone. He's worried that local and regional economies sacrificed to globalization will be difficult to re-build.
So suburbs will collapse, cities will wither, and we'll have to figure out which places really have a future. It's likely to be compact communities, with good public and freight transportation, a mild climate, and rich farmland. Sound familiar?
Finally Kunstler connected last season's series on "How Cities Learn" to "Oil and Water." Throughout his talk on the long emergency he wove in ideas about sprawl, about civic design and about the city as an organism being more that the sum of its parts. About the importance of place. About creating places at a human scale where you know where you are. About places that have a future. Places, perhaps, like Portland.
Read online articles by James Howard Kunstler, or check out his own website or blog:
The Long Emergency: What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
Rolling Stone Magazine
No Problemo! Delusions run deep in the easy-motoring economy.
Orion
Read online interviews with James Kunstler:
Global Public Media interview from August 2005
Chaos in the City: Architecture, Modernism and Peak Oil Production, Interview in Three Monkeys Online.
