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My last three books were concerned with the physical
arrangement of life in our nation, in particular suburban sprawl, the most
destructive development pattern the world has ever seen, and perhaps the
greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.
The world - and of course the US
- now faces an epochal predicament: the global oil production peak and the
arc of depletion that follows. We are unprepared for this crisis of
industrial civilization. We are sleepwalking into the future.
The global peak oil production event will change
everything about how we live. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It
will compel us to do things differently - whether we like it or not.
Nobody knows for sure when the absolute peak year of
global oil production will occur. You can only tell for sure in the
"rear-view mirror," seeing the data after the fact. The US oil
production peak in 1970 was not really recognized until the numbers came in
over the next couple of years. By 1973 it was pretty clear that US oil production was in decline - the numbers
were there for anyone to see, because the US oil industry was fairly
transparent. They had to report their production to regulatory agencies. And
low and behold American production was going down - despite the fact that we
were selling more cars and more suburban houses. Of course we had been making
up for falling production by increasing our oil imports.
1973 was the yea r of the Yom Kippur War. With
encouragement from the old Soviet Union, Syria and Egypt
ganged up on Israel and
after a rough start, Israel
kicked their asses. The Islamic world was very ticked off - especially at the
assistance that the US had
given Israel
in airlifted military equipment. So a lot of pressure was brought to bear on
the leaders of the Arab oil states to punish the US and we got the famous OPEC
embargo of 1973.
But it was more than that. The OPEC embargo was
effective precisely because it was now recognized by everybody that the US had passed
its all time oil production peak. We no longer had surplus capacity. We
weren't the swing producer anymore, OPEC was. We were pumping flat-out just
to stay in place, and depending on imports to make up for the rest.
That was a tectonic shift in world economics.
That's exactly when OPEC seized pricing control of
the oil markets. We had a very rough decade. 20 percent interest rates.
"Stagflation." High unemployment. Stock market in the toilet.
We had a second oil crisis in 1979 when the shah of Iran
was overthrown. The 1970s closed on a note of desperation. Everything we did
in America
was tied to oil and foreigners were jerking our economy around, and it led
the worst recession since the 1930s.
But we got over it and a lot of Americans drew the
false conclusion that the these oil crises were a
shuck and jive on the part of business and Arab oil sheiks.
How did we get over it? The oil crises of the 70s
prompted a frantic era of drilling, and the last great oil discoveries came
on line in the 1980s - chiefly the North Sea fields of England and Norway,
and the Alaska fields of the North Slope and
Prudhoe Bay. They literally saved the west's
ass for 20 years. In fact, so much oil flowed out of them that the markets
were glutted, and by the era of Bill Clinton, oil prices were headed down to
as low as $10 a barrel.
It was all an illusion. The North Sea and Alaska are now well
into depletion - they were drilled with the newest technology and - guess
what - we depleted them more efficiently! England is now becoming a new oil
importer again after a 20 year fiesta. The implications are very grim.
Now, some of the most knowledgeable geologists in
the world believe we have reached the global oil production peak. Unlike the US oil
industry, the foreign producers do not give out their production data so
transparently. We may never actually see any reliable figures. The global
production peak may only show up in the strange behavior
of the markets.
The global peak is liable to manifest as a
"bumpy plateau." Prices will wobble. Markets will wobble - as the
oil markets have been doing the past year. International friction will
increase, especially around the places where the oil is - and two-thirds of
the world's remaining oil is in the states around the Persian Gulf where,
every week, a half dozen US soldiers and many more Iraqis are getting blown
up, beheaded, or shot.
The "bumpy plateau" is where all kind of
market signals and political signals are telling you that "something is happening, Mr. Jones, but you don't know what it is."
We'll only know in the rear-view mirror.
As of the past 12 months, Saudi Arabia seems to have lost
the ability to function as 'swing producer.' The swing producer is the one
with a lot of excess supply, who can just open the valves and let more oil
out on the world markets, which inevitably drives the price down. Saudi Arabia
has kept saying they would produce a million more barrels a day, but there's
no evidence that they really have.
Well, the good news is that Saudi Arabia and OPEC can no longer
set the price of oil. The bad news is that nobody can. When there is no
production surplus in the world, that's a pretty good sign that the world is
at peak.
Princeton Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes
says that peak production will occur in 2005. We're there. Others, like Colin
Campbell, former chief geologist for Shell Oil, put it more conservatively as
between now and 2007. But by any measure of rational planning or
policy-making, these differences are insignificant.
The meaning of the oil peak and its enormous
implications are generally misunderstood even by those who have heard about
it - and this includes the mainstream corporate media and the Americans who
make plans or policy.
The world does not have to run out of oil or natural
gas for severe instabilities, network breakdowns, and systems failures to
occur. All that is necessary is for world production capacity to reach its
absolute limit - a point at which no increased production is possible and the
long arc of depletion commences, with oil production then falling by a few
percentages steadily every year thereafter. That's the global oil peak: the
end of absolute increased production and beginning of absolute declining
production.
And, of course, as global oil production begins to
steadily decline, year after year, the world population is only going to keep
growing - at least for a while - and demand for oil will remain very robust. The
demand line of the graph will pass the production line, and in doing so will
set in motion all kinds of problems in the systems we rely on for daily life.
One huge implication of the oil peak is that
industrial societies will never again enjoy the 2 to 7 percent annual
economic growth that has been considered healthy for over 100 years. This
amounts to the industrialized nations of the world finding themselves
in a permanent depression.
Long before the oil actually depletes we will endure
world-shaking political disturbances and economic disruptions. We will see globalism-in-reverse. Globalism
was never an 'ism,' by the way. It was not a belief system. It was a
manifestation of the 20-year-final-blowout of cheap oil. Like all economic
distortions, it produced economic perversions. It allowed gigantic, predatory
organisms like WalMart to spawn and reproduce at
the expense of more cellular fine-grained economic communities.
The end of globalism will
be hastened by international competition over the world's richest
oil-producing regions.
We are already seeing the first military adventures
over oil as the US
attempts to pacify the Middle East in order
to assure future supplies. This is by no means a project we can feel
confident about. The Iraq
war has only been the overture to more desperate contests ahead. Bear in mind
that the most rapidly industrializing nation in the world, China, is geographically closer to Caspian
Region and the Middle East than we are. The
Chinese can walk into these regions, and someday they just might.
In any case, and apart from the likelihood of
military mischief, as the world passes the petroleum peak the global oil
markets will destabilize and the industrial nations will have enormous
problems with both price and supply. The effect on currencies and
international finance will, of course, be equally severe.
Some of you may be aware that the US faces an imminent crisis with
natural gas, at least as threatening as the problems
we face over oil. By natural gas I mean methane, the stuff we run our
furnaces and kitchen stoves on.
Over the past two decades - in response to the OPEC embargoes of the 70s and
the Chernobyl and Three
Mile Island emergencies of the 80s -- we have so excessively
shifted our electric power generation to dependence on natural gas that no
amount of drilling can keep up with current demand. The situation is very
ominous now.
The United States,
indeed North America, including Canada
and Mexico,
is technically way past peak production in natural gas and there is a special
problem with gas that you don't have with oil: you tend to get your gas from
the continent you are on. It comes out of the ground and is distributed
around the continent in a pipeline network.
If you have to get your natural gas from another
continent, it has to be compressed at low temperature, transported in special
ships with pressurized tanks, and delivered to special terminals where it is
re-gasified. All this is tremendously more
expensive than what we do now. Moreover, there are very few natural gas port
terminals in the US
and nobody wants them built anywhere near them because they are dangerous. They
can blow up.
We have been making up for our shortfall in gas in
recent years by buying a lot of gas from Canada. The NAFTA treaty compels
them to sell us their gas, and they are technically in depletion too. They're
not happy about this.
About half the houses in America
are heated with natural gas. Nobody know what we are
going to do when the depletion arc gets steeper.
Oh, another problem with gas. The wells run dry just like this (snap!). Unlike
oil wells, which go from gusher to steady stream to declining stream, gas
wells either put out gas or they stop. And there's no warning when they are
close to running out. Because, the gas is coming out of the ground under its
own pressure. As the gas wells of North America
continue to deplete, we will have little warning
Right here I am compelled to inform you that the
prospects for alternative fuels are poor. We suffer from a kind of Jiminy
Cricket syndrome in this country. We believe that if you wish for something,
it will come true. Right now a lot of people - including people who ought to
know better - are wishing for some miracle technology to save our collective
ass.
There is not going to be a hydrogen economy. The
hydrogen economy is a fantasy. It is not going to happen. We may be able to
run a very few things on hydrogen - but we are not going to replace the
entire US
automobile fleet with hydrogen fuel cell cars.
"Getting hydrogen
" Transport
Nor will we replace the current car fleet with
electric cars or natural gas cars. We're just going to use cars a lot less. Fewer
trips. Cars will be a diminished presence in our lives.
Not to mention the political problem that kicks in when car ownership and
driving becomes incrementally a more elite activity. The mass motoring
society worked because it was so profoundly democratic. Practically anybody
in America
could participate, from the lowliest shlub mopping
the floor at Pizza Hut to Bill Gates. What happens when it is no longer so
democratic? And what is the tipping point at which it becomes a matter of
political resentment: 12 percent? 23 percent? 38 percent?
Wind power and solar electric will not produce
significant amounts of power within the context of the way we live now.
Ethanol and bio-deisel are
a joke. They require more energy to produce than they give back. You know how
you get ethanol: you produce massive amounts of corn using huge oil and gas
'inputs' of fertilizer and pesticide and then you use a lot more energy to
turn the corn into ethanol. It's a joke.
No combination of alternative fuel systems currently
known will allow us to run what we are running, the way we're running it, or
even a substantial fraction of it.
The future is therefore telling us very loudly that
we will have to change the way we live in this country. The implications are
clear: we will have to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do.
The downscaling of America is a tremendous and
inescapable project. It is the master ecological project of our time. We will
have to do it whether we like it or not. We are not prepared.
Downscaling America doesn't mean we become a
lesser people. It means that the scale at which we conduct the work of
American daily life will have to be adjusted to fit the requirements of a
post-globalist, post-cheap-oil age.
We are going to have to live a lot more locally and
a lot more intensively on that local level. Industrial agriculture, as
represented by the Archer Daniels Midland / soda pop and cheez
doodle model of doing things, will not survive the end of the cheap oil
economy.
The implication of this is enormous. Successful human ecologies in the near
future will have to be supported by intensively farmed agricultural
hinterlands. Places that can't do this will fail. Say goodbye to Phoenix and Las
Vegas.
I'm not optimistic about most of our big cities. They
are going to have to contract severely. They achieved their current scale
during the most exuberant years of the cheap oil fiesta, and they will have
enormous problems remaining viable afterward.
Any mega-structure, whether it is a skyscraper or a landscraper
- buildings that depend on huge amounts of natural gas and electricity - may
not be usable a decade or two in the future.
What goes for the scale of places will be equally
true for the scale of social organization. All large-scale enterprises,
including many types of corporations and governments will function very
poorly in the post-cheap oil world. Do not make assumptions based on things
like national chain retail continuing to exist as it has.
Wal Mart is
finished. [More below]
Many of my friends and colleagues live in fear of
the federal government turning into Big Brother tyranny. I'm skeptical Once the permanent global energy crisis really
gets underway, the federal government will be lucky if it can answer the
phones. Same thing for Microsoft or even the Hannaford supermarket chain.
All indications are that American life will have to
be reconstituted along the lines of traditional towns, villages, and cities
much reduced in their current scale. These will be the most successful places
once we are gripped by the profound challenge of a permanent reduced energy
supply.
The land development industry as we have known it is going to vanish in the
years ahead. The production home-builders, as they like to call themselves. The
strip mall developers. The fried food shack developers. Say goodbye to all
that.
We are entering a period of economic hardship and
declining incomes. The increment of new development will be very small,
probably the individual building lot.
The suburbs as are going to tank spectacularly. We
are going to see an unprecedented loss of equity value and, of course, basic
usefulness. We are going to see an amazing distress sale of properties, with
few buyers. We're going to see a fight over the table scraps of the 20th
century. We'll be lucky if the immense failure of suburbia doesn't result in
an extreme political orgy of grievance and scapegoating.
The action in the years ahead will be in renovating
existing towns and villages, and connecting them with regions of productive
agriculture. Where the big cities are concerned, there is simply no
historical precedent for the downscaling they will require. The possibilities
for social and political distress ought to be obvious, though. The process is
liable to be painful and disorderly.
The post cheap oil future will be much more about
staying where you are than about being mobile. And, unless we rebuild a US passenger
railroad network,a lot of
people will not be going anywhere. Today, we have a passenger railroad system
that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of.
Don't make too many plans to design parking
structures. The post cheap oil world is not going to be about parking,
either.
But it will be about the design and assembly and
reconstituting of places that are worth caring about and worth being in. When
you have to stay where you are and live locally, you will pay a lot more
attention to the quality of your surroundings, especially if you are not
moving through the landscape at 50 miles-per-hour.
Some regions of the country will do better than
others. The sunbelt will suffer in exact proportion to the degree that it
prospered artificially during the cheap oil blowout
of the late 20th century. I predict that the Southwest will become substantially
depopulated, since they will be short of water as well as gasoline and
natural gas. 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 combine with the
delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism.
All regions of the nation will be affected by the
vicissitudes of this Long Emergency, but I think 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.
There is a fair chance that the nation will
disaggregate into autonomous regions before the 21st century is over, as a
practical matter if not officially. Life will be very local.
These challenges are immense. We will have to
rebuild local networks of economic and social relations that we allowed to be
systematically dismantled over the past fifty years. In the process, our
communities may be able to reconstitute themselves.
The economy of the mid 21st century may center on agriculture. Not information. Not the digital
manipulation of pictures, not services like selling cheeseburgers and
entertaining tourists. Farming. Food production. The transition to this will
be traumatic, given the destructive land-use practices of our time, and the
staggering loss of knowledge. We will be lucky if we can feed ourselves.
The age of the 3000-mile-caesar salad will soon be
over. Food production based on massive petroleum inputs, on intensive
irrigation, on gigantic factory farms in just a few parts of the nation, and
dependent on cheap trucking will not continue. We will have to produce at
least some of our food closer to home. We will have to do it with fewer
fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides on smaller-scaled farms. Farming
will have to be much more labor-intensive than it
is now. We will see the return of an entire vanished social class - the homegrown American farm laboring
class.
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We are going to have to reorganize everyday commerce
in this nation from the ground up. The whole system of continental-scale big
box discount and chain store shopping is headed for extinction, and sooner
than you might think. It will go down fast and hard. Americans will be
astonished when it happens.
Operations like WalMart
have enjoyed economies of scale that were attained because of very special
and anomalous historical circumstances: a half century of relative peace
between great powers. And cheap oil - absolutely reliable supplies of it,
since the OPEC disruptions of the 1970s.
WalMart and its imitators will not survive the oil
market disruptions to come. Not even for a little while. WalMart
will not survive when its merchandise supply chains to Asia
are interrupted by military contests over oil or internal conflict in the
nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods. WalMart's "warehouse on wheels" will not be
able to operate in a non-cheap oil economy
It will only take mild-to-moderate disruptions in
the supply and price of gas to put WalMart and all
operations like it out of business. And it will happen. As that occurs, America will
have to make other arrangements for the distribution and sale of ordinary
products.
It will have to be reorganized at the regional and
the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter
distances at multiple increments and probably by multiple modes of transport.
It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy, and
fewer choices of things. We are not going to rebuild the cheap oil
manufacturing facilities of the 20th century.
We will have to recreate the lost infrastructures of
local and regional commerce, and it will have to be multi-layered. These were
the people that WalMart systematically put out of
business over the last thirty years. The wholesalers, the jobbers, the
small-retailers. They were economic participants in their communities; they
made decisions that had to take the needs of their communities into account. they were employers who employed their neighbors.
They were a substantial part of the middle-class of every community in
America and all of them together played civic roles in our communities as the
caretakers of institutions - the people who sat on the library boards, and
the hospital boards, and bought the balls and bats and uniforms for the
little league teams.
We got rid of them in order to save nine bucks on a
hair dryer. We threw away uncountable millions of dollars worth of civic
amenity in order to shop at the Big Box discount stores. That was some
bargain.
This will all change. The future is telling us to
prepare to do business locally again. It will not be a hyper-turbo-consumer
economy. That will be over with. But we will still make things, and buy and
sell things.
A lot of the knowledge needed to do local retail has
been lost, because in the past the ownership of local retail businesses was
often done by families. The knowledge and skills for doing it was transmitted
from one generation to the next. It will not be so easy to get that back. But
we have to do it.
Education is another system that will probably have
to change. Our centralized schools are too big and too dependent on fleets of
buses. Children will have to live closer to the schools they attend. School
will have to be reorganized on a neighborhood
basis, at a much smaller scale, in smaller buildings -- and they will not
look like medium security prisons.
The psychology of previous investment is a huge
obstacle to the reform of education. We poured fifty years of our national
wealth into gigantic sprawling centralized schools - but that investment
itself does not guarantee that these schools will be able to function in a
future that works very differently.
In the years ahead college will no longer be just
another "consumer product." Fewer people will go to them. They will
probably revert to their former status as elite institutions, whether we like
it or not. Many of them will close altogether.
Change is coming whether we like it or not; whether
we are prepared for it or not. If we don't begin right away to make better
choices then we will face political, social, and economic disorders that will
shake this nation to its foundation.
I hope you will go back to your offices and
classrooms and workplaces with these ideas in mind and think about what your
roles will be in this challenging future. Good luck. Prepare for a different America, perhaps a better America. And prepare
to be good neighbors.
By :
James Howard Kunstler
http://www.kunstler.com/
James
Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling
Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His
latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over
oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides,
Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You
can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork, information about his
other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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