The following are my thoughts on this subject
based primarily on Kunstler's important book;
As I mention elsewhere, I intend to read 10 other
books on this subject with the hope that the final result
will be an opinion as free as possible from individual bias
Rod Anderson
James Howard Kunstler's 2005 book THE LONG EMERGENCY: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Atlantic Monthly Press: New York) is profoundly disturbing but terribly important. I agree with Kunstler that we are "sleepwalking into the future". If there is any hope of saving the world for our children and grandchildren, it is essential that we start mobilizing public opinion immediately. I urge everyone to read this book. I provide a very brief summary in this document -- but I urge you all to read Kunstler's book in its entirety (307 pages). Some parts are more important than others; but all of the book is worth reading
The problem, very briefly, is that we are likely passing the world oil production peak this very year (2005). We have used up 1 trillion of the 2 trillion barrels of oil that the Earth once had. At the current rate of world usage (27 billion barrels a year) and if we can extract all the remaining reserves, which seems unlikely, oil would last us 37 years - until 2042. That deadline will come sooner if we can't extract all the oil and if world annual oil consumption continues to increase for a while (which seems likely - particularly because of the exploding consumption in China). A more realistic deadline for running out of oil might therefore be somewhere between 2035 and 2040. In 2035, someone 42 to 45 today (like my son and daughter) will be trying to enjoy their retirement at ages 72 to 75 -- and kids 6 to 13 years old today (like my five grandsons) will be in mid-career at ages 36 to 43. So this is a very personal issue to me -- and, I expect, to some of you too. And, of course, the problems will start long before the last drop of oil is used up. As oil becomes scarce - and as production begins necessarily to decline -- the price will rise astronomically. This will be aggravated by the fact that cheap oil in the past ratcheted up the world's population from under 1 billion to 6-1/2 billion. It won't be easy for these 6-1/2 billion people, hyper-dependent on oil, to go back (in a mere 30 years or so) to the situation of under a billion people a century and a half ago living without oil. Suburban, car-centred lifestyles may no longer be affordable for many people. The globalized economy (which depends on transporting goods thousands of miles cheaply) will end. In addition, as Kunstler argues, we are likely to be "entering an era of titanic international military strife over resources." In short, we are facing, right now, the "end of the cheap fossil fuel era" -- though you wouldn't know it by looking at television ads for new cars. "This is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War II. The current world population of 6.5 billion has no hope whatsoever of sustaining itself at current levels"
The age of cheap oil (about a hundred years) is short in terms of the history of humankind but long enough for people to become so accustomed to it as "to consider it absolutely normative". We are not very good as a species at foreseeing events that have never happened before in our lifetimes. Even if there is good evidence, we tend to dismiss disasters as simply preposterous (or, at least, unnecessarily alarmist). Think of the wealthy Jewish families in the 1971 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis sipping wine in their garden and discussing the strange anti-Semitic happenings in Nazi Germany. They concluded it was simply too preposterous to actually happen there in Italy. We feel like shouting at the movie screen: "Take the next train to Paris, NOW!" But they stay put -- and eventually all of them are shipped to the gas ovens. As Kunstler says, "public discussion of this issue has been amazingly lame". It is not a matter of conspiracy. "Mostly, it is a matter of inertia, aggravated by collective delusion" -- what Erik Davis has called "consensus trance".
The main thing that could buy us a little time would be, as Kunstler says, to ramp up a Project Apollo-style program of nuclear power plant construction. We probably have 100 years of uranium reserves still in the earth (though I'm not sure at what assumed rate of usage) and these could be used to replace with nuclear-electricity things that are now running on oil. Kunstler thinks that the "hydrogen economy" is an illusion because of storage and transportation problems of the hydrogen (not to mention the expense of hydrogen fuel cells). But I wonder whether there is not a possibility of using zinc-air fuel cells (such as those developed by PowerZinc of California and Shanghai) -- which would seem to avoid the hydrogen storage and transportation dangers. If we did it soon enough we might be able to switch all transportation onto fuel-cells (charged by nuclear-generated electricity) and save our remaining oil for the petrochemical industry (including fertilizers, plastics, etc. on which our modern world is so dependent).
But one has to concede that this does not seem very likely. As Kunstler points out, "no new U.S. nuclear plants have begun commercial operation since 1996, and most date from the 1970s and 1980s." Here in Ontario, the present government has not planned any new nuclear facilities and is, in contrast, encouraging gas-fired generators -- although our natural gas is in serious depletion, its cost will skyrocket, and it will run out in the not too distant future. It takes about 10 years to get a nuclear plant built and if there was any hope of avoiding what Kunstler sees as the period of chaos between declining oil and its ultimate successor (if any) we'd have to start on a mammoth construction program almost immediately. That isn't going to happen without first raising public consciousness dramatically. The only way to keep the lights on "by mid-twenty-first century will be by using nuclear reactors to generate electricity."
There are some other possibilities -- but again they need almost immediate action. For example, the 'Set America Free' movement, is calling for an investment of $12 billion over the next 4 years to finance a conversion to hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, and flexible fuel vehicles, which they say, using existing technology, could reduce U.S. oil imports by 12 million barrels a day (see www.setamericafree.org/openletter.htm).
Thomas Friedman, author of the 2005 book The World Is Flat, argues for a "geo-green" strategy that recaptures American initiative by marrying geopolitics, energy policy, and environmentalism. Of course, any technologies developed in North America must be exported to the world at large if we are going to mitigate the approaching world crisis.
We should also improve our railroad network, now in embarrassing disarray. "The trains could be powered with electricity produced by nuclear power plants" -- though Kunstler is skeptical that we'll move quickly enough for this to happen.
Fusion energy will surely happen some day. The whole universe runs on fusion; why can't humankind figure it out? We surely will. But the ITER project estimates that a commercializable design won't be completed until about 2050. That's too late.
Of course, wind power, solar power, bio mass, etc. and improved conservation should all be exploited -- but many of us know that the total effect of these will be too small to change the outcome significantly.
Kunstler dismisses coal rather quickly. Tom Campbell argues that there's 300 years of coal left and with clean coal technology it can supply the feedstock for the chemical industry as oil phases out. Of course, any burning of coal (whether clean or not) produces greenhouse gas emissions -- though feedstock use would not have to involve burning.
In addition to immediate action on nuclear power generation, fuel-cells, hybrid cars, and re-vamped railways, we will need a "comprehensive downscaling, rescaling, downsizing, and relocalizing of all our activities". Suburbia will have to be scrapped. Food will have to be grown locally. We will have to live in walkable communities. In this Kunstler is in line with arguments also made by David Korten in The Post-Corporate World. Kunstler argues that "the downscaling of America is the single most important task facing the American people." "The scale of all human enterprises will contract with the energy supply." And, as for globalization, Kunstler argues that "The destructive practices known as 'free-market globalism' were engendered by our run-up to and arrival at the world oil production peak.... The moment that the world recognizes the passing of the oil production peak as a reality, globalism will be dead both in theory and practice." It simply will no longer be economical to ship some slightly cheaper part 12,000 miles from Asia to a chain store in Ontario. "Nations, and even more likely regions within nations, [will] have to fall back on their own resources, and sink or swim." Life will become "intensely and increasingly local."
Kunstler calls this a "dangerous fantasy". It's true that the oil peak phenomenon has been "discounted to about zero among conventional economists, who assume that 'market signals' about oil supplies will inevitably trigger innovation" and solve the problem. "Corporate executives fall victim to their own propaganda as much as the general public." The problem is simply: there isn't time. "Nobody is prepared for the sinkhole that awaits us down the road."
"The denial about global peak in the United States is already fierce, as investments in car-dependent, oil-addicted infrastructure are greater [there] than in any other nation" and Dick Cheney has famously said: "The American way of life is not negotiable" -- meaning, nobody's about to make changes any time soon to prepare for a dramatically different future.
Kunstler says that he's between the "cornucopians" ('we'll discover something') and the "die-off" crowd ('the industrial age is terminal and presages the imminent extinction of the human race'). But I note that the die-off crowd's website (www.dieoff.com) begins with a telling Thomas Hardy quote: "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." As long as we deny the problem, we're never going to solve it. I'm reminded of a short story by Isaac Asimov in which there is a binary star system with a planet on one of the stars. For inhabitants of that planet there are two suns and at least one of them is always in the sky - except every 6,000 years when there's an alignment such that night appears on the far side of the planet. There have been ancient myths about this "night" but modern people dismiss these myths as ancient fairy tales. Then some scientists predict that indeed such an alignment is just about to happen. Their warnings are laughingly dismissed (just as President Carter's warnings of our oil dependency were laughed at) -- 'just an attempt to destabilize the stock market'. Of course, the alignment does happen and everyone goes crazy and sets fire to all their buildings, so unprepared are they for the terrifying experience of darkness. The dismissal of the scientists' warnings seems very much like our current position on oil. We all know that oil reserves are limited but surely something else will be discovered and anyway that's far into the future, isn't it? Wrong!
The problem is, the difficulties begin long before we run out. As Kunstler says, "Peak is quite literally a tipping point. Beyond peak, things unravel and the center does not hold. Beyond peak, all bets are off about civilization's future." We'll be beyond peak by the end of this year (2005). Long before we actually run out, oil prices will skyrocket and there will be a serious danger of military conflicts over resources. "At peak, the human race will have generated a population that cannot survive on less than the amount of oil generated at the peak - and after peak, the supply of oil will decline remorselessly". That means starting now.
It's true that up to reading a Kunstler article (which had been circulated by a friend, Tom Campbell) my main worry had been the higher than acceptable risk (according to the NRC 2002 report to Congress) that within the next 50 years melting polar ice would cause the Gulf Stream to shut down rapidly (over a 3-year period) and 90% of Europe would starve to death. However, Richard Alley (who chaired the NRC committee which produced the report) believes that it is possible, with a little more research, to stabilize the planet in its present equilibrium state (with the Gulf Stream running). I initially thought (I now believe wrongly) that this "short emergency' was more dangerous because there was no advance warning before the Gulf Stream shut down whereas with the "Long Emergency" we'd surely have time to react as oil prices skyrocketed and oil began to run out. I now believe that might have been the situation 20 years ago - when we might have been able to plan leisurely for ways to cope with the oil production peak once we reached it. But now that we are already there and about to slide down the other side (with our 6-1/2 billion world population and oil demand in China and India exploding) and still in denial that there's any problem, the likelihood of our getting organized to make the massive changes necessary seems dangerously remote -- unless public awareness can be quickly and dramatically raised.
I I don't believe this is unnecessarily alarmist. The alarm is necessary because the decline in oil production is about to happen, starting now. But we are all in denial. Kunstler believes that "the fossil fuel efflorescence was a one-shot deal for the human race." "It is extremely important that we make an effort to understand what is about to happen to us." Please read the book and see what you think about this. Action has to begin with awareness.
Rod Anderson (August 31, 2005)