The Long Emergency, new book by James Kunstler

[realFedUp]

Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/14/kunstler/print.html
(requires subscription)

After the oil is gone
Say goodbye to your suburban house, yoke up that horse, and stand by to repel pirates! Author James Howard Kunstler talks about the dire world of his new book, "The Long Emergency."

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katharine Mieszkowski

May 14, 2005 | Suburbs will collapse into slums. Farmhand will be a more viable career choice than public relations executive. And avoiding starvation will replace avoiding boredom as the national pastime.

Those are just a few of the predictions that James Howard Kunstler makes in his new book. "The Long Emergency" paints a dystopic view of the United States in the wake of what Kunstler dubs the "cheap oil fiesta."
It's a future the author insists is not apocalyptic. Calling it the end of the world be too easy.

No, Kunstler believes the human race will survive as we slip down the other side of Hubbert's Oil Peak. But the high standard of living we've built by gorging on cheap oil will not. America, as a political entity, will be history too.

When will the doom begin? It already has. "There have been no significant discoveries of new oil since 2002," Kunstler says. And the Saudis have screwed up their super-giant Ghawar oil field, long a fossil-fuel font for the U.S. "They have damaged it by pumping enormous amounts of salt water into it; in fact, the field itself may be entering depletion," he says.

A former journalist turned novelist turned social critic, Kunstler is best known for his book excoriating the suburbs, "Geography of Nowhere."
Now he foresees the end of the entire artifice of American life, from the suburbs to the interstate highway to Wal-Mart and the global supply chain that supports it.

In Kunstler's world, a teenager will be better off learning how to yoke up a horse-drawn buggy than how to change the oil in a car. Woodshop will be more important than computer literacy. Among Kunstler's predictions:
The South will devolve into agricultural feudalism and the Pacific Northwest will be beset by a plague of pirates from Asia. Forget about sleek hydrogen-powered cars coming to the rescue. For that matter, quit tilting your hopes toward wind power.

[Coastie for Truth]

1. Read it - A More Optimistic Appraisal is

"Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak" by Kenneth S. Deffeyes

[realFedUp]

2. yeah, this is a bit depressing....

unless you long for pioneer days...

[Coastie for Truth]

3. KUNSTLER'S PROBLEM IS, IN ENGINEER TALK

is that you want sort residence time in your industrial processes -- and that drives you to "Big" equipment, very high temperatures, and very high pressures --- like a petroleum refinery or a steel mill.

As we run out of petroleum - we are going to go to "biological"/"enzyme" processes - at room temperature and atmosphere pressure - like drug manufacture, brewing, vintnering, etc.

There's a lot of good "biological"/"enzyme" work being done at our mid-western "Big Ten" engineering schools.

Also, I grew up in a pedestrian friendly urban neighborhood - where my elementary school, my junior high school, and my high school, as well as my grandparents' homes and "neighborhood shopping" were all within about 1.6 miles, transit was within two blocks, and I even took mass transit to college.

Now that the kids are grown (last one got engaged yesterday :toast:) we are living in a high rise condo, in a pedestrian friendly transit village, and have a Corolla and a Prius - less then 10,000 miles per year total.

So, I can sign on Deffeyes and intelligent conservation (think smarter, worker smarter).

[Vitruvius]

10. 'short residence times'

Minor spelling correction for benefit of non-engineers.

Again, for non-engineers, the idea is: if you have to spend -- say -- 3 times as much on your equipment to crank up the heat and/or pressure and cut the residence time to -- say 10% -- of what it was, one can push thru 10 times as much product; you then have cut the capital equipment cost per unit of product output by 3.3 times, and you make out like a bandit.

The idea with biological/enzyme processes is to build lots of inexpensive room-temperature vats and put the technological sophistication into bio-engineering the microbes that do the work.

The three reasons biological/enzyme processes haven't taken off (YET) are:

1.) Fossil fuel energy is still comparatively cheap,
2.) Bio-processes require different kinds of expertise than traditional pressure-and-cook processes; there isn't yet a big enough talent pool of technologists who know this stuff -- and --
3.) With bio-processes, you have to keep things clean & sterile; a lot of factories are dirty (or filthy), which is OK right now because the high temps & pressures of traditional processes kill everything...

Note that both 2.) and 3.) require people with different expertises and different mind-sets; learning new things & changing the way you do things is difficult for most people.

But -- fossil fuels will only get more expensive, and bio-processes are getting better and better; we may reach the crossover point sooner than most people think; once bio-processes are cheaper, the switch will be AMAZINGLY fast; less than a decade from start to finish.

[Kire]

4. take some paxil

and read it again

maybe this will help:

[megatherium]

5. isn't that the BP logo flower?

Actually, BP isn't all bad. They're a leading manufacturer of solar photovoltaic panels.

[megatherium]

6. Deffeyes is a terrific writer and very informative. nt

[kliljedahl]

7. Want to get really depressed?

Get "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009231TG/qid%3D1116434252/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-0499579-2398516


Keith’s Barbeque Central

[struggle4progress]

8. kick

[Kire]

11. kick

again

[InformedSource]

9. A lot of us hippies saw this coming and years ago. . .

. . . and never really believed that we stood a chance of creating a peace and love culture. We thought it was worth a shot but were sure that the society would collapse soon for the very reasons Kunstler presents. We thought sharing, communalism, non-materialism were last ditch hopes. We had hoped to steal the baby boom generation (all those kids who flashed us V signs from the back seats of their parents' station wagons) away from the consumer culture by offering them things the dominant culture (The "Establishment") could not give them: free love and instant mind expansion with drugs.

Well, we failed to grab the boomer babies. The plan didn't work and good drugs opened the gateway to bad drugs, and society kept going along its same old self destructive paths. That was 35 years ago and society is still here, still doing the same things. I am astonished to have reached the age of 60 without the social catastrophe we had seen coming happening. Kunstler's book explains how we were able to stave it off so that now, if it starts happening, I'm into early stage old age and not ready for it, not like I was when I was younger and fatalistic and willing to take whatever came my way.

The thing that doesn't get mentioned much in the discussions of The Long Emergency is that he, like many other thinkers, thinks that the social reordering can't happen without a major human "die off" (Kunstler uses the kinder, gentler term "die back"). Neither he nor I believe that Americans will be excluded from the die back.

When times like what's coming at us happen, the brutes and violent killers, the sociopaths with antisocial personality disorder, have the advantage because they won't hesitate to take what they need while those with shreds of common decency will hesitate ... and die.

I had foolishly hoped that things would hold together long enough for me to have a few years of retirement before slipping off my mortal coil, but now that is not looking likely;