Chicken Little

James Howard Kunstler argues, in a new book excerpted in Rolling Stone, that the imminent end of cheap oil will mean drastic, societywide upheaval and the end of life as we know it.

What are we to make of this? It would be reassuring if Kunstler seemed to be a quack -- if he were misreading the facts of the matter in some obviously wrong way, or if his extrapolation from those facts were clearly confused. But he doesn't seem to be a quack.

That's disturbing, because if Kunstler is right, then we're basically pooched.

The basic gist of his argument is: 1) the age of cheap oil is over, or about to be over; 2) no credible replacement seems to exist; 3) a description of what American society might look like if you take away the cheap oil on which we are dependent. It's not a pretty picture. Kunstler's foreboding tone is something like that of St. Augustine as he watched the fall of Rome:

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. ...

It will change everything about how we live. ... We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions. ... The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. ...

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 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. ...

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 automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. ... The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish.

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. ...

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. ...

That's all incredibly gloomy, but the thing that Kunstler is overlooking is ...

Help me out here people. He's got to be overlooking something, right?

The cliff we are blindly approaching can't be as precipitously high as he's making it seem. I mean, I agree with Kunstler's depiction of America's suburban sprawl as ill-conceived, auto-dependent, wasteful and corrosive of the necessary bonds of community. Our suburban infrastructure is, in a word, unsustainable -- but does that really mean it can't be sustained? OK, yes, technically, that's exactly what "unsustainable" means, but I still find this hard to fathom. I think of our automobile-driven suburban society and economy as something like the Soviet Union -- it's fundamentally unsound and built upon faulty premises, but yet, somehow, it expands, thrives and will stand forever. (What's that about the Soviet Union? OK, bad example.)

I would very much like to be able to dismiss everything Kunstler says here as alarmist exaggeration. I want him to be wrong about this. So I scramble to think of things that he is forgetting, things he is leaving out of the picture. (The first thing that comes to mind is America's military might, which could be mobilized to alter or forestall Kunstler's Long Emergency scenario. Somehow this isn't very reassuring.)

Kunstler must be wrong. Rolling Stone can't really believe the excerpt they've published -- after all, it predicts a world without Rolling Stone, or any of their advertisers. And those people taking up ARMs to buy McMansions in the new developments in Chester County can't all be fools, can they?

So help me out here. Rip apart Kunstler's gloomy prediction. Show me the flaws and gaps in his argument. Help me to ridicule him as a preposterous Chicken Little and reassure me that he's wrong -- that the sky isn't really falling.

Comments

[Simon St.Laurent]

For energy, maybe lots of nuclear plants and electric cars? I suspect people's opposition to nuclear will wane as the price of energy increases, though I don't think that's wise.

That still doesn't help with all the materials we create from oil, of course.

(There's also a theory that there's vastly more oil in the planet than we've been able to tap, and maybe someone can comment on that, but it's never sounded plausible to me.)

[j swift]

So, to paraphrase Al Swearingen, we are soon to be the target of an assfucking eh?

A little lesson from the Tragedy of the Commons coming home to roost.

[Gorkle]

Reports of our impending doom are a bit premature. We've been through a wave of crisis environmentalists some thirty years ago all of whom predicted massive famines that wouldn't even be enough to deplete the billions upon billions who had subjected even the Grand Canyon to overcrowding and clff shortages and the end of oil was to be in the 1990s at which point life would quickly devolve into a Mad Max sequel. Cataclysmic catastrophes aren't a pipe dream, mind you, but the seismic shifts will happen much more glacially, with a couple three real warm days that will send the glaciers flooding the valley and opening up dinosaur graves. Remember, we'll continue the sprawl long after it will have been clear that it was horribly counterproductive to sprawl anything. Kuntsler isn't wrong. It's just we're a fuck of a lot dumber than even he credits us.

[fidelio]

We aren't running out of fossil fuels. We're running out of easy fossil fuels. We still have coal, as well as the oil shales and oil sands of the western US and Canada. None of these are as easy to extract and process as plain old petroleum has been; all will require the development of expensive new technologies to produce the sorts of fuels and other materials that we need. They're all also less than ecologically desirable in one aspect or another of their extraction, processing, or use. Can you say acid rain, friends? It comes from burning high-sulfur coal. We may have not choice BUT to burn high-sulfur coal, though. The US has scads of it; one reason we're not mining and using our coal deposits at a rate similar to that of the early 20th century is that it stopped being cost-effective. It's still there, though--ready to be extracted.
There is also work being done on organic waste conversion processes; Changing World Techologies is a company that's working on the thermal conversion process for organic waste. Of course, this is not being subsidized and funded by the US Federal governemnt, despite its possibilities; it doesn't have the grain-farmer clout beind it, as gasohol and ethanol do. (To see what this process is about, check out this website: www.res-energy.com You'll note that this could be applied to urban waste streams as well; anything organic will do. We could end up strip-mining our landfills. The technology is in its infancy, but it's a possibility.

In the meantime, look into getting your home fixed up for solar electrical generation. You'll notice you don't get a tax credit for that either...

[spygirl]

Well, on a small scale, he does underestimate the amount of energy we can -- as in currently have the technology to -- harvest from our own waste and wastefulness. Our local sewage treatment plant runs almost entirely on a generator powered by the gasses harvested from the primary treatment process; they've even been able to pull some useful gasses out of the closed landfills. But it was an investment in money and time to get to that point. And waste from 120,000 people is only about enough to power ... the sewage treatment plant. A vicious cycle, but at least it's a renewable resource, right?

Long term, I'm an optimist, and I genuinely believe that this sort of science will prevail and that with a proper, last-ditch desperate infusion of mounds of capital into sustainable fuel, the great minds of the earth (it ain't only America what gets fucked here, let's remember) will be able to come up with SOMETHING. Small amounts of sensible, sustainable conservation across the planet (like sewage, solar, wind, etc.) should prolong the inevitable and keep us going until then.

And while we're on the subject of bitching about the suburbs -- I live in one, and I like having a garage for my Vespa and some space for a barbecue and I don't care who knows it and it doesn't make me less of a progressive liberal, thankyouverymuch -- I think the single biggest thing that the (white collar business) world could do to make a difference is make the switch to telecommuting for the majority of employees, the majority of the time. The savings in electricity would, I admit, be mitigated by increased use in homes, but the drop in fuel and commute costs would more than make up for it. One dark server farm vs. a fully-lit six-story building? No contest. Obviously it's not feasible for all jobs, all the time, but at this point we really do need to move to the "every little bit" mentality and how.

[Jesurgislac]

People have been saying things like this for thirty years or so. And they've always, so far, been wrong.

But the reason they've always, so far, been wrong is not because they're wrong about how dependent the US is on cheap, plentiful fossil fuel, but because they've always taken the present-day estimates on availability of oil, and gone from there. And technology - the ability to extract oil cheaply and quickly - has always improved ahead of estimates.

He is wrong for the near future if there is a new discovery of some hitherto-unknown oilfields. He is wrong for the more-distant future if there is some method discovered of better-extracting petroleum from sources such as shale or coal. He is even indefinitely wrong if some future administration ploughs a massive investment into researching alternative-energy sources and encouraging their use.

So far, new oilfields and new processes have been developed/discovered on schedule to save us from ourselves. (No luck with investment in alternative energy, though.) Obviously, though, that can't continue indefinitely; there is only a finite amount of oil, and the US is burning it up. Eventually, it will have to be option three - new/renewable energy source - or it will be nothing at all.

[kevin]

He is assuming a lot. There are other energy sources besides fossil fuels. He assumes that oppositiont to nuclear power will dry up. he assumes that the need for wind, solar, and geo-thermal will not spur changes that make them more efficieint. he assumes that fossil fuels cannot be replaced by organix fuels. He assumes, basically, that things that are too cost prohibitive now are so cost prohibitive that they cannot be used as replacements when the time comes when that isn;t really the case. they aren;t widely used becasue fossil fuels are cheap -- but they aren't, as a general rule, so expensive that a modern economy could not be built upon them. Yes, there is going to be a slow down and a period of adjustment, but I doubt that a collapse on the scale he is talking about will happen in the West -- though the 3rd world could be in for some worse times.

[kevin]

Ugh, that should be opposition to nuclear fule will NOT dry up when faced with an energy crisis.

[Dave Lartigue]

Aren't you forgetting about Jesus coming back to save us?

[twig]

Australia's got a nifty idea with solar towers.

[Bruce Garrett]

I haven't read his book, just a few excerpts myself, but it seems he's facing the problem every science fiction writer faces when trying to predict the world of tomorrow. I have lots of books on my shelves bought when I was a teenager, where the characters reach for slide rules to solve problems. Few foresaw the personal computer, and look at how that one thing has changed society. I sat in a class in 1991 where the instructor said flatly that if we didn't learn CASE tools soon, by the year 2000 we would all be unemployable.

I'm 51. I lived through the first oil shortage. I remember 27 cent a gallon gasoline and four barrel carbs. If it went back to 27 cents a gallon I wouldn't want to go back to that old technology. It just doesn't work as well.

I think in the near term we may not need any breakthrough technologies, so much as refinements in existing ones, and how they are used. For example, the sailing ship may make a comeback, or sail technology used to augment fossil fuel technology, but with our better understanding of the earth's currents and weather, and better models of air dynamics who knows how much better we can make them. Steam may make a comeback on the rails...but with vastly more efficient designs. Some business practices like Just In Time inventory may go away.

The thing is it won't happen instantly. As fossil fuels get more expensive, people will look for other ways of doing things, and they'll find them. Human beings are real good at improvising. Well...not all of us...but enough of us that the rest of us can learn from the ones who are. Living patterns will change, the layout of cities and suburbs may change, the way goods and services are traded will change. But it needn't be a catastrophic upheaval. That's not to say it won't be one though.

If Kunstler's book is giving you bad dreams, check out one on the 1939 New York World's Fair. My hunch is that Kunstler's prediction that we're going to start running short of oil sometime soon is the only safe bet in the book.

The poor, who already have trouble heating their homes and feeding themselves, and those in trades dependent on oil, are going to need our help. But the rest of us I think will ride it out. Our lives will change. The world will look very different in the future. But it always does.

[Bruce Garrett]

One other thing. Kunstler makes this claim in the passage you've quoted that our lives are going to become "intensely local" Does he think that mass communication technology is going to go away because oil becomes more expensive? I strongly doubt that. We may not fly on business nearly as often, or maybe even ever again simply for a carefree holiday. But if he's thinking we're all going back to the pre-industrial local village centric world view during the transition, he's not thinking very clearly.

Also, his use of the phrase "long emergency" strikes me a bit like Y2K scare mongering. It's a transition that we'll have to make, but it doesn't at all have to be an emergency. It'll be a transition.

[Jim]

Fred, One of the things I think he overlooks is the development of alternative energy sources. Right now, residents along the New Jersey shoreline are debating the establishment of wind generator towers off shore. I have been a strong proponent of this sort of technology for a long time. If the relatively steady winds found at the water/land interface were harnessed to produce hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, we could produce a significant amount of useable energy.

What I see as the biggest challenge will be the shifting of our energy sources from fossil fuels to renewable sources. In the future, petroleum will be far more valuable as a base stock for plastics etc. than it will be as a fuel. And, yes, there will be major dislocations as we readjust. The love affair with the automobile will probably have to end, and that alone will fundamentally reshape the economic landscape.

[Marvin]

No jet plane travel? The rule of small communities and local economies? Everybody a farmer/gardener? Sure it's a nightmare for the rest of us, but for Wendell Berry it's utopia. I say, Bring it on!

[Mabus]

For rural and small-town Americans, automobiles are not a "love affair", but a necessity. We lack the financial means to produce a mass transit system on the scale needed. If (or when) the automobile goes, many of us will not only never leave our towns again, it will be all but impossible for us to get to work. I call that more than a "dislocation". For us, the automobile really is freedom.

As for the suburbs, though I recognize the problems of sprawl, it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to live in the city (other than to be close to one's workplace). I may not put the value on nature some people do, but I prefer to have a bit of green space around me rather than living in a steel-and-concrete tower. If it becomes impossible, I'll live with it--but the suburbs are a heck of a lot closer to normality, and I can see why people want them.

I'm frankly pessimistic about there being any real hope for renewable energy by the time we need it. I can't really say that I'm "prepared" for the end of fossil fuels--I'm too poor to prepare for anything--but I've been expecting it for some time. And what I expect is that the best we can hope for is a high-renaissance level of technology, for the rest of time. If we manage better than that...well, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

[Daddy-O]

I'm with Marvin. Bring it on.

I just finished two articles, in The New Yorker and in Mother Jones, both about global warming.

If we're, right now, about to run out of oil, it couldn't come a moment too soon.

All it means is a seismic shift in employment, markets and lifestyle, and it's a shift that, if it comes, will have been inevitable.

I live in a suburb, too. I can imagine turning my beautiful, lovingly-manicured and fertilized lawn into a vegetable patch for my family's consumption. I would do it gladly, without complaint, if that's where society leads us.

I'm out there taking care of it anyway, and if oil gets to be too expensive to bring crops to market or for me to GET to the market, then so be it. Stop worrying, Fred. This will never happen anytime soon. Kunstler's a panic. Fagedaboutit, ay.

[luke!]

I know it's rude to answer a question with a question, but I have one for you, Fred:

Why do you find the prospect of the society described by Kunstler so alarming?

Throughout most of human history, people have lived under the conditions he describes, and the process of (what we may in the future laughably refer to as) "national development" is not so complete that the lives of people in many countries today would be substantially altered by a "Long Emergency". Many places in the world have been completely bypassed by globalization and it is difficult to imagine them ever living in a way similar to ours.

Not to be glib, but what is it about Kunstler's scenario that troubles you the most? Many aspects (intense localization, the deaths of car culture and consumer culture, the end of big box supply chains, globalization, and sweatshops, the ability to project war-making power across the world) seem to be pretty good things.

[hilzoy]

I think he's missing the possibility of cheap solar power. This in itself will produce lots of changes, I think, many of them good (e.g., much more decentralized energy production, and thus a lot less vulnerability in infrastructure. I think.) It's already a lot cheaper than it was a few years ago, and getting cheaper.

That said, I have wondered for years about cities like, say, Phoenix, whose entire existence is predicated on air conditioning. I can imagine events that would turn it into a sort of empty theme park.

[lightning]

luke! --

Because it means that a very large percentage of us in the so- called "civilized world" will die in the process. There simply isn't enough land for our whole population to live as subsistance farmers (your "most of human history")

[jdsalmon]

Kunstler's right about a coupla things, but his tone is WAAAYY overboard. He also overlooks the fact that we have a knack for developing technology to adapt to different things. I like this response:

...This is all stuff we know how to do now. We can rebuild it. We have the technology... or at least the ability to create the technologies. There are hundreds of examples on this site alone. And what we can do today is only the beginning. Yes, the situation is serious and the consequences of failure grave, but we're also growing more and more able to deal with that situation.

What we lack is the vision and the will. The vision we're starting to get -- every day a new plan for rebuilding some key sector of the global economy on new, radically more sustainable lines crosses my desk (take, for instance, Lester Brown's vision of a gas-electric hybrid/ wind power economy). The will is taking a little longer. But I don't think we'll get that will by promoting apocalyptic scenarios...

Hell, once we finaly get the tech of something like carbon nanotubes down, we could conceivably float a few solar panels out there and suck down ENDLESS amounts of solar energy.

[Luke Francl]

I think what he's missing is the lengths Americans will go to to keep what's ours.

Look forward to lots of pressure to build more coal-fired power plants, damn the CO2 emissions. Still, any new power plants will take 10 years to build.

I'm reading "The End of Oil" right now, which is significantly less alarmist than Kunstler, but the author says there's ten trillion dollars invested in our hydrocarbon-based infrastructure, worldwide. Replacing that with alternatives (nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, hydrogen, conservation, etc.) is an enormous undertaking. If we run out of oil before even starting, it will be a really bumpy ride.

My worry is if energy starts becoming expensive, America will focus its efforts on securing the last of it at low prices to keep our way of life going ("The American way of life is not negotiable") instead of investing in improving efficiency, where we can make huge gains very quickly, and moving to wind and solar power. Look at the way Congressional Democrats are demagoguing the high gas prices.

For those suggesting switching to alternative energy systems: check out the concept of "energy return on investment". Cheap oil gives an energy return on investment of 300 barrels for each 1 barrel spent. Ethanol and other biofuels have considerably lower EROI than oil, coal, or natural gas. There are no good replacements for gasoline as a transportation fuel, which is I think where Kunstler is drawing most of his ammo from. No matter how you cut it, I don't see how we can continue to use as much energy per-capita as we do now without a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion or a major building spree of nuclear fission reactors.

[lightning]

Fred --

Kunstler makes two basic errors:

1. Timescale. We are *not* going to wake up one fine morning and find that gas is $20 per gallon. There will be a transition period, probably 10 - 30 years, when the problem is obvious and we can look for solutions. Will we start soon enough to avoid disaster? I don't know, but I hope so.

2. There really are alternatives to oil and gas. My own favorite solutions are biodiesel and synthetic gasoline produced from solar power. There's also still a lot of room for energy conservation -- I see no technical barriers to a car with reasonable size and performance getting 90 miles per gallon, for example.

Whether the "Long Emergency" is a disaster or a damn nuisance depends on when we start, how much effort we're willing to put into it, and how fast the supplies disappear.

The reason that the Y2K crisis wasn't a disaster was that a lot of people busted their humps to make sure it wasn't a disaster. We can hope that this one will be the same.

[so]

so folks will start buying alternative energy contraptions instead of new gas grills or lawnmowers or whatever else people spend money on. I'm not too worried because people have a remarkable ability to adapt. We can and should think about how to encourage the millions of small decisions that will make the difference, and government does have a role to play in sponsoring research and establishing incentives. But doom and gloom scenarios tend to treat the challenge as having only one or a few solutions, when in reality there are millions of solutions, each varying slightly from the other. Some will conserve. Some will upgrade to new tech. Some will move. Some will change habits. Some will organize and lobby for public assistance or investment or subsidy. Millions of solutions.

Which is not to say that our society couldn't be doing more right now. Of course we could. But there is no nightmare scenario as far as energy resources. Now, ecological collapse is another matter. That's the real nightmare scenario.

[Protagoras]

I am inclined to agree with those earlier in the thread that Kunstler probably underestimates technology. I would however introduce the cautionary note that for technology to continue to save us as it has so far requires the smooth self-correcting processes of capitalism to be working well, and our present administration seems to be shifting ever further away from capitalism and toward cronyism. So there may very well be great difficulties with the adjustment in America, if the trend toward cronyism is allowed to continue; economies based on cronyism tend not to be very adaptable.

[Bruce in South Florida]

Anybody out there read Dune? Seriously. The power oil has over us, and the power owned by those who control it, is one of the main themes of the series. The answer in the novels was the creation of a synthetic form of the spice. Hopefully we'll come up with a synthetic alternative to oil (as lightning points out, it's already in the works).

[chris Borthwick]

There will be waypoints along the road to hell. For example, you Americans will presumably have to pass through a period when you have to pay as much for your petrol as everybody else in the world already does. In Australia, for example, we pay 80c (USD) per litre to your 50c, and the Brits pay $US1.50. And they're doing just fine. It's a yank thing. If your industry goes bottom up, who cares? It's not as if you exported anything solid any more.

Actually, Max Max III was way cool.

[jonno]

The Road Warrior was much better than MM III. Although Master Blaster was pretty cool. Tina Turner--well, not so much.

I think what Kunstler's getting at is not that there won't be life after cheap oil, it's that American society will not take kindly to the end of cheap oil and all that means to the fabled "American Dream" entitlement. This angst will leave us vulnerable to demagoguery and other political foolishness, which will only make the transition much more difficult. If you read his site (www.kunstler.com), he takes pains to point out just how foolish and reactionary people can be about their cheap oil lifestyles.

[R. Mildred]

Futurists are generally always wrong, because they are limited by the realities of now and can't prophesise the reality of tomorrow.

but on a less happy note, even a short term energy crisis of the kind he talks of is all that will be needed to turn 1930's germanyamerica into 1937's germanyamerica, os while there's a decent chance that something will come through (they can process waste products, like chicken bones, into oil atm, just not on a huge scale currently, not mention that renewables will be made feasible on a large scale at somepoint, the EU wants to get away from reliance on OPEC and bunch of tinpot islamafundamentalism countries for it's energy, america cna't be bothered to do somehting so rational atm) the crisis is all that is needed to make stuff in america much much worse than it is today, socially.

So the end isn't nigh, but we're still pretty screwed

[A Texan in Germany]

I see it as more of a question as to whether Americans will gradually and gracefully move into a more European standard of living - good education and health care, smaller living space and cars, less driving, more expensive energe overall which motivates conservation - or if we'll go kicking and screaming and not come out as well as we could have.

After living in rural, conservative (for Germany) Bavaria, I've decided that their standard of living is not bad, but they certainly live a lot smaller than we do. Upper middle class families driving Golfs and Corollas - the gas hogs like the BMW 7-series are for the truly well-to-do. 2,000 sq ft houses are considered to be large - unless part is a separate apartment being rented out. There are more multi-family dwellings in my small village than I had expected there to be.

Unfortunately, as fuel prices go up, so do airfares, making it less likely that other Americans will be able to come over and see for themselves that life with $6/gallon gas and strict environmental laws is not bad at all.

You just start thinking of Passats as very large family cars and walk to your town's Gasthaus for beer, bratwurst and talking to your neighbors instead of packing the kids up to go the huge chain restaurant at the shopping center 10 miles (and 30 minutes) away. You put down almost as much in deposit on a case of drinks than you actually paid for the contents, so everyone is careful to put the bottles back. Beer made from a strictly set list of natural ingredients is cheaper than manufactured soft drinks. You get irritated when stuff from the grocery store has more plastic surrounding it than strictly necessary, because now you're going to have to take your plastics bin to your town's sort facility that much earlier. You're careful about sorting your trash, because you can be fined for carelessly sending it all to the dump, but after the first few months, it becomes a reflex. You have a three-section trash bin in your kitchen, along with a smaller refrigerator. You buy food more often because it doesn't contain many of the chemicals that keep "fresh" food in the US "fresh" longer. You can't shop on Sunday, so you go find something else to do, like go hiking. You plan your shopping trips more carefully, because many things close at 6 and they all close by 8, and, oh, yeah, gas is $6/gallon.

You only have to go five or ten miles from your home to be surrounded by trees or picturesque farm land. Even if you live in Munich. Most places, just leaving the town limit puts you in farm country. Only downside: Bavarian farmers use actual dung to fertilize ("dungen") their fields and it smells for about a week or two at the beginning of spring. But the price and availability of oil has little to do with the price and availability of fertilizer.

I wish there were a good way to promote that sort of future to the folks back home, to show them that it's not deprivation - it's just not "living large."

[chris bond]

Energy Efficency.
Biofuels.
Replacement Fuels.
Winning the Oil Endgame

"Over a few decades, starting now, a vibrant U.S. economy(then others) can completely phase out oil. This will save a net $70 billion a year, revitalize key industries and rural America, create a million jobs, and enhance security.
Here’s the roadmap— independent, peer-reviewed, co-sponsored by the Pentagon— for the transition beyond oil, led by business for profit."

Read the book. PDF is free there.

The Rocky Mountain Institute, which did this study, has a long history of working on energy efficiency. Here is an example of their work with Texas Instruments - lower cost and lower energy use.

[cjmr's husband]

Just to agree with everyone else here:

Basically he misses out on Ingenuity. There is no reason to assume that lack of gasoline will destroy even our culture (although we still need oil for chemistry); the only thing we have to fear is loss of our FUVs.

I seem to recall reading this month about a genetically-engineered bacteria that produces hydrogen from sewage -- and no one can tell me that rocket fuel can't make a car go as fast as mineral slime. The only thing thats missing is for Big Oil to realize that they can get just as much profit from selling H2 as C6H14 -- and that Big Oil Services (I'm talking to you, Mr. Cheney) can make a fortune building high-tech plants and refitting gas stations.

In short, we can easily produce the technology to break the oil addiction, we only lack the will.

(And attitude. I completely fail to see why anyone thinks a big truck is cooler than my Mini Cooper: small, fast, nothing handles better, and 32mpg!)

[Edward Liu]

Howdy,

Did anybody see that Scientific American Frontiers show about the future of the automobile? Apparently, Iceland is currently the technical leader in hydrogen production because they have way more geothermal energy than they need for their population, and are now using it to produce hydrogen cheaply and cleanly. They also talked about almost-ready-for-prime-time ways to store hydrogen safely for transport and fueling a vehicle, and how there's already a hydrogen filling station in Reykjavik for a bunch of experimental cars on their roads.

I can envision a future where Iceland moves from being a curiosity to the new power broker of the world, flush with cash as they export their hydrogen to a demanding world. Unfortunately, to get there, we'll have to convince a lot of people that you can't dig your way out of a problem you created by digging too much.

-- Ed

[SadieB.]

I know this isn't what you asked for, but I wanted to share with you a gnostic version of the Noah myth that I read in the Nag Hammadi Library. I think we all know the conventional story, the one that made the cut and got put in the Bible -- God chose Noah to survive the flood because he was the only righteous man. Well, the gnostic version is much creepier. According to their story, God tried to tell everyone about the flood, He wouldn't shut up about it, and Noah was the only one who listened.

Just a little something to keep in mind!

[MightyQuinn]

As people have pointed out here, Kunstler does make too little of human ingenuity. And as a book review in The New Republic point out, Kunstler’s misanthropy makes it easier to dismiss him outright. That being said, since having read the Rolling Stone article a few weeks ago, it’s practically been keeping me up at night. Like Brandon, I tell myself, “He can’t be right.” But what if he is? Just because people have predicted an end of oil before and been wrong doesn’t mean that this time he can’t be right, just like the old adage about the stopped clock.

What’s surprising is that Kunstler’s article addressed (and dismissed) may of the solutions that have been offered here (to be sure, his retorts aren’t very in-depth, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t get more of a discussion in the 320-page book). Biomass energy? The biomass will take too much petroleum-based fertilizer to make it worthwhile. Solar? It would expend huge amounts of energy to create the panels, which we presumably wouldn’t do until a point when energy was at a premium. Wind turbines? Where do you put them all?

All this says nothing of the unrest that would ensue. Think you can just plant vegetables in your suburban backyard and get by? Where are you going to get fertilizer? Artificial fertilizer will be a thing of the past, and last I checked, there were few cows in the suburbs. And what happens when the guy down the street with the NRA sticker on his car shows up with a shotgun?

Ultimately, I have no doubt that we could find an energy replacement. The problem is that it will take massive amounts of energy to find that replacement. The real risk then becomes that we get caught with our pants down? As Kunstler concedes, sure, there’s still a lot of oil left – but it might be the case that we use up all the accessible oil before we realize it, and the second-half of harder-to-obtain oil never gets drilled because we don’t have the energy available to do so.

So, while Kunstler is alarmist, this is not something we should dismiss outright. Others are concerned about this too (see also http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,,1464050,00.html). The real lesson here is that we need national policy that will address these potential problems now, but it’s the one thing we’re not going to get with a national government that is in deep with energy companies who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

[Rafe]

I've been reading his stuff for a long time, and I think it's useful to remember that he's eager to be right. It's not as though he bemoans the loss of American society as it currently exists, he looks forward to its demolition because he absolutely loathes it.

The first step to solving the problems he predicts is recognizing that they exist, and that seems to be happening. His alarmist articles are a useful part of the feedback mechanism that will wake people up to incipient problems.

[cjmr's husband]

Re: backyard vegetables --

I wonder how much our oil consumption would go down if everyone dug up their lawns and grew cabbage instead of acreage-wasting grass. Less diesel for trucks, considerably less gas (and two-stroke oil!) for mowers, vegetables (done properly) don't need as agressive fertilizing as non-native grass...

Not that I want to; I hate gardening, and I don't particularly like cabbage. But at least I use an electric mower...

[John]

As for the suburbs, though I recognize the problems of sprawl, it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to live in the city (other than to be close to one's workplace).

Whuh? I mean, seriously, whuh? I imagine that Mabus has never lived in a city, and possibly never been to a city. Living in a city, you can get to places without a car. There's stuff to do - bars and restaurants and so forth. And there are people around. And so forth. I can understand how living in a city wouldn't be for everyone, but I find it astonishing that someone couldn't even comprehend the attractions of a city. I mean, I prefer cities, but I can at least grasp why someone would prefer to live in a suburb.

Also, the idea that most people living in cities live in steel-and-concrete towers is silly. Not every city is Manhattan.

[Charlie Tangora]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

Basically, they've figured out how to reproduce the process by which fossil fuels are created, only do it in hours instead of eons. There's a plant in Carthage right now that's producing crude oil from such interesting things as plastic bottles, chicken guts, and raw sewage. (Although sewage isn't very high-yield, it seems...)

It costs a bit more than oil from the ground still, but it shouldn't for much longer.

The problem isn't going to be getting the carbon we put in the air, it's going to be what do we do about all that carbon once it's there...

[Seth Gordon]

Kunstler says the age of cheap oil is about to end. What about natural gas? If I remember correctly, there's a lot of relatively untapped natural-gas capacity. The MBTA recently bought a whole bunch of buses that run on compressed natural gas (you can get cars that run on it as well, but that doesn't seem to be as popular).

The downside, of course, is that the most promising new sources of natural gas come from our good friends, Iran and China.

I agree with what John says above about the advantages of living in a city.

I also agree with what lightning says about about timescale. A longer timescale also gives companies producing more energy-efficient widgets time to raise capital, invest in the necessary research, and then market their products to consumers who are just starting to notice how high their gas bills are getting. (Not that I think The Free Market is going to solve the energy crunch all by itself, but I'll take help wherever I can get it.)

Re the backyard vegetables issue, see

[cjmr's husband]

Yeah, that's how many vegetables I grow, too. None.

[Jim]

Someone recently pointed out that coal only became an important source of fuel in England when it had been cleared down to the nubs and the firewood ran out. Same thing had happened in Germany - look at old pictures of cities and compare them to modern pictures - the woods have all grown back. That was one precondition for the Industrial Revolution; a shortage triggered a huge period of growth.

[JRoth]

The focus of comments has shifted a bit, but I want to respond to some of the crisis-dismissers upthread, the ones saying, "enviros have predicted disaster for 30 years and been wrong." Two things:

First, part of the reason some of those disasters have been averted is that those folks were listened to. Jimmy Carter's conservation efforts resulted in 150% of the productivity for 80% of the energy input. Of course, I don't have to tell you which direction THIS admin's taken us on such measures....

Second, the prediction that this is based on - the "peak oil" concept - is identical to that made in 1955 about US oil production peaking around 1970. And that guy (don't recall his name) was laughed out of the room by people using the exact arguments being used here. But he was right. Not Gulf drilling, not the Alaskan pipeline (neither of which was really foreseen in 1955) have changed the prediction. We are, in fact, looking at the same circumstance globally.

As for the question of whether the result would be a Long Emergency or just a small inflation at the pump, think about the prospect of less oil being produced every year. Right now, we're pumping more every year, and prices have been rising steadily for half a decade. What happens when production goes the other way, and we start competing with 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians who want their piece of the pie, dammit.

I'm not dismissing technology, and I'm a huge biodiesel/urban advocate myself (who would love to join you, Texan). But let's not blithely reassure ourselves that the boffins will save us all. We're not preparing for the end of oil - we're doing close to the opposite. How does the Grasshopper and the Ant go, again?

[mossyback]

When you consider Kunstler’s forecast also think about another forecast that is at the top of the news, Social Security. What Bush calls crisis is only one of three scenarios on the trusties report. The low cost scenario doesn't project much of a problem and we have plenty of time to adjust. I'm not saying we should always believe the optimistic projection. I say make many small changes driven by many small events. The drop off in new oil discoveries is the current early warning on oil prices. It takes over ten years to bring a new oil field into production so we have a fair idea about where we’ll be in 2015. In ten years most of today’s SUVs will be worn out and scrapped. The current trend on fuel price will prevent the purchase of a lot of new ones.

I live in rural Oregon. People out here actually haul stuff in their pickup trucks. When gas is cheap the second car is a Suburban. When fuel prices went up in the seventies the second cars were VW bugs and Honda Civics. Civics are popular again. Shippers like moving their freight in trucks because there are thousands of independent truckers are competing for the business. Truckers have been able to offer much more flexible service for a small price premium. Rail uses far less fuel. As fuel cost rises we won’t ship lumber and frozen beans in trucks. We’ll plan ahead and ship by rail. Fresh strawberries will stay on trucks. I love fresh strawberries and I get two batches of them out of my garden every summer. I’ll pay more for them when they come up from California and Mexico, but if my $2 a week luxury goes to $8 I’ll be fine. The best part of expensive petrochemicals is more organic produce. Organic yields are lower but not catastrophically lower.

[Jeff G.]

Ahem.. ahem....

It is 1:10 PM on Friday..

*nudge nudge*

[Dan Lewis]

Limits to Growth was (and is, updated for its 30th anniversary) a famous example of this kind of argument. I think the biggest problem for arguments like this is that questions of future growth rate in resources are empirical, not mathematical.

We subsidize our oil industry to the tune of billions a year. It's hard to say what would happen if the oil dried up and we committed those resources elsewhere. What if we continued to prop up the dead-end industry? Maybe we are already doing so?

I, for one, welcome our new renewable energy overlords. I think it's really sad that the prez's "energy plan" fails to bow to the inevitable.

[Seth Gordon]

OK, let's try that garden link again.

See also this Surowieki column about how changes in oil prices affect the general economy. (Short answer: less than you'd think.)

[EliB]

Another effect of scarce oil that I haven't seen mentioned: much of our current technology is extremely dependent on cheap synthetic plastics. Plastic may not account for a lot of oil consumption (Wikipedia article says 4%) but if oil prices go way up, manufacturing will have to change drastically.

And... fairly or not, the "human ingenuity will always save us" argument always reminds me of The Space Merchants, one of the best science-fiction satires ever, written in 1953. It takes place at a time when most Americans sleep in the stairwells of office buildings and shower with salt water, and we're still proud of our great standard of living. The narrator - an advertising executive whose job is to convince people to emigrate to the nearly uninhabitable planet Venus, because we need the resources there - complains about "those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way 'plundering' our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab."

[Carlos]

Fred, it's a serious question, and deserves a serious answer.

Suppose US transport costs -- the cost of moving a ton per mile -- were to increase ten-fold, due to scarce oil. What era in history would this represent?

Turns out that it would take us back to the dark ages... of 1890.

The agricultural input section of his argument is perhaps better founded; however, I should note that yields have increased in the postwar era in the US not mainly through fertilizer inputs, but through pesticide use. Also petroleum derived, of course, but in terms of tonnage much less.

[Bruce Garrett]

"I seem to recall reading this month about a genetically-engineered bacteria that produces hydrogen from sewage..."

Science-Fiction writer Hal Clement used that concept in his novel "Needle" back in 1950. I've always wondered about the practicality of it.

And of course, there would be the problem of how such a genetically engineered bacteria would behave if it got into the wild. Which, face it, it would sooner or later...

[mossyback]

Carlos,

We won't go back to 1890. State of the art was coal fired piston steam engines. Coal fired steam turbines took over at little later on. So maybe 1920;-) These steam turbines are still used in coal fired electric generation.

My main point is we have a number of modes in transportation and agriculture. One dimension the cost vary one is energy use. A 10x increase in oil prices will bring the energy cost of rail to about 30% over current energy cost of trucks. Products that are less time dependant will travel by rail.

I’m retired on a fixed income, but I spend a few dollars more for organic dairy products and produce. Look in your neighborhood grocery store took get a rough idea of how much more expensive lower energy groceries are now.

Regards mossyback