Kunstler: The Long Emergency

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http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633

 

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

 

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a

barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The

next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times

business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered

significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span

of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred

points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation.

Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

 

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that

" people cannot stand too much reality. " What you're about to read may

challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and

especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are

in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

 

It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop

infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make

sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of

everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist

attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call

this coming time the Long Emergency.

 

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.

 

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering

global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the

argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to

start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its

dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production

peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

 

The term " global oil-production peak " means that a turning point will

come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a

given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline.

It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the

top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total

endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a

lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is

much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer

quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A

substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

 

The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a

day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004

it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from

natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a

day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and

the ratio will continue to worsen.

 

The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic

power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting

the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s.

In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North

Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for

about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion.

Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to

insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.

 

Some " cornucopians " claim that the Earth has something like a creamy

nougat center of " abiotic " oil that will naturally replenish the great

oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no

replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of

America or any other place.

 

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates

of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and

2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India

shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves,

and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite

promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their

predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time

global peak production.

 

It will change everything about how we live.

 

To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining,

at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the

potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of

the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and

Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its

first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just

about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the

homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas

isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a

vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be

compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships

and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in

America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met

furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.

 

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly

understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a

permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with

the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population

overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

 

We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

 

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life

the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction

of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the

reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket

syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for

hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know

better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels

to their putative replacements.

 

The widely touted " hydrogen economy " is a particularly cruel hoax. We

are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with

vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of

fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural

gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be

electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart

from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon

enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature

as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a

replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

 

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with " renewables " are

also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only

the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require

substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that

they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support

platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind

technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably

at a very local and small scale.

 

Virtually all " biomass " schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels

cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are

currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil

and gas " inputs " (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops

that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net

energy loser -- you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother

with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil

by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream

produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

 

Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant

supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological

drawbacks -- as a contributor to greenhouse " global warming " gases and

many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury

poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the

only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime

conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

 

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed

have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and

eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get

a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price

may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We

are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the

way, than we were in the 1970s.

 

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of

potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously,

geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has

already led to war and promises more international military conflict.

Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil

supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by,

in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just

to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of

neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi

Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future

prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel

altogether confident about.

 

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world's

second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging

industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we

are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of

these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia

-- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for

this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can

the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely,

or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one

distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the

U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced

to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of

the world's remaining oil in the process.

 

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this

predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of

the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and

repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a

report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is

for real and states plainly that " the world has never faced a problem

like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the

fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. "

 

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other

arrangements for the way we live in the United States. 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

psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our

drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

 

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the

ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food

shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to

stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

 

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. The relentless

subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the

contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The

process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational.

Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it

has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a

native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of

the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on

the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into

quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for

food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain

fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

 

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive

far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's " warehouse on wheels " won't be

such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores'

12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by

military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that

have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because

they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and

all the disorders that go with it.

 

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 selling of things will have to be reorganized

at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise

shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for

the things we buy and far fewer choices.

 

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the

least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our

roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate

than the public realizes. If the " level of service " (as traffic

engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems

multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial

failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they

quickly fall apart.

 

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed

of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned

railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be

no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from

now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially,

is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may

not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads

are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they

can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed

infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway

network.

 

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. The process will be painful and

tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St.

Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to

fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being

oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of

declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have

long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of

necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities'

problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban

entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the

colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

 

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long

Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it

prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I

predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become

significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as

well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air

conditioning.

 

I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I

think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the

grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the

delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded

behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of

individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the

defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

 

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems,

from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The

Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat

better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness,

anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of

our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

 

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. The survivors will have to

cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief

that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to

stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close

communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically)

with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and

to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being

merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear

singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole

hearts.

 

Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler, and

reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

(Posted Mar 24, 2005)