James Howard Kunstler's Driving Towards Disaster, Washington Post 25 May 08 offers a US frame for yesterday's post. Excerpts:Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned. I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used french fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system – or even a fraction of these things – in the future....
Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking [protests against high oil prices are now paralyzing Europe's trucking and fishing - Ed.] which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:
• The way we produce food.
• The way we conduct commerce and trade.
• The way we travel.
• The way we occupy the land.
• The way we acquire and spend capital.
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more....
These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation... the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years – inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.
Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.* This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades [that you get whatever you wish for, and that you will get it for free]....
[The current] presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament ....The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States.
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks – the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed – made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.
We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it – especially in the presidential campaign – shows how confused we are.
The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. Small airlines have already begun filing for bankruptcy protection. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it – by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.
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* A 1992 Time article about the Earth Summit is the source of this quotation: read the pleas for action on climate change, the blunt refusal of the rich nations. Warned about this 15 years back, we chose not to do anything. In the words of Pogo the cartoon character, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Ed.
See also: previous posts about peak everything, unMoney and localization, food security. The best we can hope for is the world that Marge Peircey, Ursula Le Guin, Wendell Berry, and now Kunstler, have been writing about for years. See the website and video for Kunstler's new book A World Made by Hand. The worst? Imagine a combination of Cali, Mexico City, Calcutta, Abidjan, Beijing, and Pittsburgh in the years of killer smog. Some cities are already there: Galeano, los prisioneros.
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