Change You Won't Believe (James Kunster)

[Tace]

James Kunstler -- World News Trust

Dec. 15, 2008 -- The peak oil story has not been nullified by the scramble to unload every asset for cash -- including whomping gobs of oil contracts -- during this desperate season of bank liquidation. The main implication of the peak oil story is that we won't be able to generate the kind of economic growth that defined our way of life for decades because the primary energy resources needed for it will be contracting.

Just as global oil production peaked, our economy evolved into a morbid hypertrophy, and the chief manifestation of it was the suburban sprawl-building fiesta that has now climaxed in the real estate bust. By the early 21st century, when so much American manufacturing had been swapped out to Asia, there was no business left except sprawl-building -- a manifold tragedy which wrecked the banks that financed it, and left the ordinary people mortgaged to it with ruinous liabilities.

That economy is now in its death throes. The "normality" it represents to so many Americans is gone and can't be brought back, no matter how wistfully we watch it recede. Even so, it was obviously not good for the country. The terrain of North America has been left scarred by unlovable objects and baleful futureless vistas that, from now on, will shed whatever pecuniary value they once had. It represents the physical counterpart to the financial mess that has been left to the young generations to clean up -- and the job will take a very long time.

We have to, so to speak, get to place mentally where we can face the kinds of change that are now necessary and unavoidable. We're not there yet. It's not clear whether the elected new national leadership knows just how severe the required changes will really be. Surely the public would be shocked to grasp what's in store. Probably the worst thing we can do now would be to mount a campaign to stay where we are, lost in raptures of happy motoring and blue-light-special shopping.

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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/wnt-reports/commentary/change-you-won-t-believe-james-kunster.html

[rrneck]

1. Now, there's a question that's

larger than I can answer.

The new narrative has to be about a managed contraction -- and by "managed" I mean a way that does not produce civil violence, starvation, and public health disasters.

That "managed contraction" will have to be global. I'm all for the peaceful cohabitation of lions and lambs, but we have done what Danny Devito once said in the movie Other People's Money and bought into a "growing share of a shrinking market".

By supporting an economy so committed to oil, and tasking a burdensomely expensive military to secure it, not only have we created a fair bit of animosity all over the world we have supported a trend that leads the entire planet over a cliff. Unfortunately, since we have abdicated our moral authority in favor of consumption, we're going to have a hard time convincing the rest of the world the party is over and we may well have secured our own doom. (Insert Roman Empire analogy here).

How do we "contract our economy" and defend ourselves against the billions of people who will be, to say the least, a little irritated that they got to the party just before the keg ran dry?

[tama]

2. I wish I had answer

but I don't. So best not to worrie about what others do or don't and concentrate on behaving as well as one can given the circumstances.

[Tace]

3. Good Question

Kunstler's call for increased immigration enforcement is an example of one step he suggests.