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Beloved brethren,
I receaved this message in email this norning and felt it must be shared.
with love in Christ, brother daniel
The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energypredicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument statesthat 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 U.S. 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.
In 2004,
however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the yearof 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. Half the homes in America are heated with gas.
To furthercomplicate 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq.
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.
A likely scenario is that the U.S. 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.
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."
Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny.
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 there-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. 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.
I receaved this message in email this norning and felt it must be shared.
with love in Christ, brother daniel
The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energypredicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument statesthat 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 U.S. 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.
In 2004,
however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the yearof 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. Half the homes in America are heated with gas.
To furthercomplicate 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq.
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.
A likely scenario is that the U.S. 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.
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."
Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny.
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 there-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. 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.
