| maybe he goes too far, maybe not.
either way, its a good article.
D
*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.
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