Thursday, September 27th, 2007...9:31 am
America’s New Religion, Part II
Dubai, UAE
- Long emergency or long march back to the cave? You decide,
- Resurrection the mainline of American industrial power,
- Tarantulas and the Gila monsters in Las Vegas and more…
Joel Bowman, reporting from the sweltering Middle East…
Yesterday we brought you an essay by James Howard Kunstler. Mr. Kunstler is the author of the book, “The Long Emergency,” in which he predicted, as Eric pointed out yesterday, “the end of the privileged, energy-dependent American lifestyle.”
Predictably, yesterday’s essay touched a few raw nerves amongst Rude readers…just as it did when he delivered it in spoken form at the Agora Investment Conference in Canada a couple of months ago.
“I like your stuff,” writes A. Listener, “but don’t be so hard on us Blue Blood Americans -NASCAR can operate around the clock on Moonshine.”
Mr. Listener then goes on to ask, “So, did you walk to Kuwait [on your recent visit there]so as not to waste resources. And another thing, are you planning on moving into a cave soon? You know, to set a good example and save the environment.”
And this from a reader in Canada:
“Kunstler dodges the issue of nuclear power. There is enough uranium in Saskatchewan to power the US for two decades. Fusion power will come on-stream someday, and that IS technology.
“What do we really need then?” continues out Canadian friend. “More fusion power research funding. That millionaire [Google] audience was right, he’s a professional alarmist.”
It’s true that one doesn’t have to travel far these days to find someone flying the Luddite flag on the long march back into the cave. Before you decide whether or not Mr. Kunstler is one of them, take a look at Part II of his presentation, below.
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America’s New Religion, Part II
By James Howard Kunstler
Suburbia is going to fail. You can state that categorically: It’s going to fail in terms of investment and it’s going to fail in terms of utility. We’re not going to be able to use it; we’re not going to be able to make those trips from 38 miles outside of Minneapolis and Dallas.
The Europeans, by the way, they’re going to have plenty of problems too. They’re not going to be without problems, but they made a set of different choices. They didn’t destroy either their central cities or the idea that city life had value. Very important. They didn’t destroy their public transit and they didn’t destroy their local agriculture. We did all of those things and so the people in Minneapolis or 28 miles outside of Dallas or Orlando are going to be twiddling their thumbs, while the people in Barcelona and Dusseldorf are going to be going about their lives – more or less – more normally than we will.
We’re going to have to inhabit the land differently. That means cities that will have a different character from what we understand now a city to be. And it means a productive rural landscape that behaves differently. We’re going to have to get very serious about growing our own food closer to home or we’re going to starve. I heard a very interesting thing from a Pennsylvania farmer five months ago at a conference down there – a sustainable agriculture conference, talking about the ethanol program. And he said, “We really get what it’s all about, we’re going to take the last six inches of Midwestern topsoil and burn it in our gas tanks.” So that’s what that’s about.
We’re going to have to get very serious about growing our own food or we’re going to starve. And we have no idea how we’re going to arrange that. It’s going to be one of the most difficult parts of the problem. So get this: We’ve got enough retail. We don’t need any more Target Stores. There may be a few more twitchings of this phenomenon, but the national chain retail scene is going to tank. Wal-Mart will not be able to conduct the warehouse on wheels, the incessant circulations of 18-wheelers all around the US, when diesel fuel reaches a certain point.
Then there’s the whole question of our what are our trade relations with China and Asia are going to be like when the contest for the remaining oil left in other parts of the world becomes a more robust contest. Here’s a prediction I’ll make right now, which is really outside of the box. You’re aware, being in Western Canada, that there’s such a thing as the tar sands, and that we have a lot of expectations for the tar sands providing us with a lot of oil. Well guess what? The Canadians have made substantial contracts with China for the byproducts of the tar sands. So here’s what I predict: within five, seven years, the USA is going to invoke the Monroe Doctrine and tell the Chinese and the Canadians those contracts are void. And you now have to send the byproducts of the tar sands to us in the USA. And the Canadians are not going to be not very happy about that, and the Chinese are not going to be very happy. And I predict we will get far fewer plastic salad-shooters from China after that point.
So we’re going to have to reconstruct local networks of economic interdependency. I don’t pretend to know how we’re going to do it, but circumstances will compel us to do it. One of the main justifications for the American way of life, particularly suburbia, as expressed by people like David Brookson, The New York Times, and Joel Kotkin, and Peter Huber at Forbes magazine, is that it’s okay because people like it. But the future is not going to be about what we like; it’s going to be about what circumstances require us to do, and how they require and compel us to live.
We’re going to have to learn to make things again. But in my corner of the country, the upper Hudson and Mohawk Valley, we’ve successfully dismantled about three quarters of the factories that existed there. It is now a de-industrialized zone that looks like the former Soviet Union. But we’re going to have to make things again and we have no idea how we’re going to do it.
Schooling: we’re going to have to do that differently because we’ll also discover the great tragedy of making that decision to centralize every school district in America to save on administrative costs. And now we’re going to find that we cannot bus all the kids around on this umbilicus of yellow school busses every morning. That’s going to be a problem…I think what you’ll see is whatever replaces this as this goes down will come out of the home-schooling movement, not necessarily the Christian home-schooling movement; it may well be very secular. But as those things aggregate, that’s what will replace the failure of the suburban schools system.
Railroads: This is terribly important. We have a railroad system that the Bolivians would be ashamed of. Now get this: there isn’t a more important project in America for reducing our oil consumption across the board than repairing and restoring the passenger railroad system in North America. The infrastructure is lying out there rusting in the rain. It would put scores of thousands of people to work at meaningful jobs at all levels from labor to management. It’s something we already know how to do. We don’t have to reinvent anything. And the fact that we’re not talking about it shows how un-serious we are, how un-serious we are about our problems. Because this is something we could start doing tomorrow.
But no one’s talking about it on the Democratic side of the spectrum, and no one’s talking about it on the Conservative and Republican side of the spectrum, or even in the middle. What are we talking about? We’re talking about gay marriage. That’s occupying our head space. So if there are any of you out there who consider yourselves Democratic, progressive people, start including railroads in your discourse, and if you are Conservatives, start putting that into your discourse. The railroads are terribly, terribly important. And the reason is self-evident: Moving people and things around by truck is the least efficient means of transport. It is the most oil-, and gasoline-, and diesel-fuel-consumptive way. We’re going to have to get back to doing it differently.
“The long emergency” is going to produce a lot of economic losers and they’re going to be very pissed off. Because they we’re told by their leaders that the American way of life was non-negotiable. And I think that what you’re going to see is the rise of a new group of people called the “formerly middle class.” The “repoed,” the dispossessed, the people who made those unfortunate mortgage contracts. I think we under-appreciate the potential for disorder that this is going to bring…
A lot of people working as marketing directors for The Gap right now- those vocational niches might disappear. And they might find themselves incongruently working in agriculture, “Oh wow! I never thought this would happen when I got my MFA, my MA in business administration!”…What are the social relations going to be between the people who maintain wealth in good productive land, and the people who have been repoed out of their McHouses 28 miles outside of Minneapolis? We have no idea yet. It’s liable to cause a lot of problems.
What’s a city going to be like? Well, you’ll see that places that do not occupy important sites, like Denver, or places that occupy sites that are ecologically disadvantaged, like Phoenix, are going to dry up and blow away. And the good news is that in Las Vegas, the excitement will be over for everybody but the tarantulas and the Gila monsters.
Whenever I speak at a university, the college kids always, always, always, they’re very demoralized. The cognitive dissonance is so deep. And they always say, “Oh can’t you give us solutions? Can’t you give us hope?” And I have to tell them, “I’m not a hope dispenser.”
I was around back in the 90s at the ascent of political correctness. And I saw that whole interesting phenomenon. I went to the conference at Yale about the future of the American city, and one by one, all the academics got up and said, “The solution to the future of the American city is to give the poor self esteem.” So I got up when it was my turn, and I said, “We should give the poor cocaine because it makes you feel great about yourself without accomplishing anything. You can get something for nothing.” Even at the highest level of academia they believed it was possible to get something for nothing.
So what I tell the college kids is also valuable for you: You have to be the generators of hope. And the way you generate hope is by demonstrating that you’re capable of understanding what reality is sending to you, what the new circumstances are. You generate hope by demonstrating to yourself that you’re competent of meeting these challenges, of changing your behavior of adopting, and that you’re brave and spiritually capable of adsorbing a certain amount of shock and hardship and necessity to behave differently, and that’s how you generate hope.
And I hope that this group of people before me will be able to find and generate new hope around the idea of investment, because we’re going to need that desperately. Because the old idea of what investment was and what investment instruments were is going to be very deeply challenged. And I want you to go forth and find a new paradigm and a bunch of new models for that that are going to work for us so that we can do things like the things that we have to do, so that we can rebuild the railroads systems, so that we can occupy the terrain differently and rebuild our smaller towns, smaller cities, and manage the contraction of the large cities, and do all the things that are necessary.
Go forth and do good work. Thank you.
[Joel's Note: If you enjoy some fiery contrarian rhetoric (and the vastly profitable insights that it often spawns) you would do well to get your hands on a set of the presentations from Agora’s Investment Symposium. We’ve got the whole shebang on CD if you’re interested. All you have to do is click right here: Order The Agora Investment Symposium Complete CD Set.
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Rude Endnote: For the record, we flew to Kuwait on our recent trip there. And we’ll be continuing to fly all over the world as often and as far as our few pennies will take us. We’ll also continue using our laptop to send you your daily Rudes.
Your comments, por favor, to the address below.
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Rude Awakening
6 Comments
September 27th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Concerning Kunstler’s New Religion (and all other most enjoyable writers on this and related sites): Apocalyptic expectations have been produced for ages, by all manner of people, based on all sorts of things, like visions, revelations, entrails of birds, tea leaves, maybe some science or empirical evidence, but they are always delusional and always turn out to be false. The Second Coming is a case in point, forecast just about every year since the year 20 (if we believe the orthodox version of religious history)–always forecast, never happens.
That, I think, is the basic theme of a lot of Kunstler’s writing (and also of Agora, Rude Awakening, Whiskey and Gunpowder): writers always waiting for some future pleasure at the correctness of their predictions, while agonizing over the delay in their gratifications.
Kunstler assures us that the sky is falling, the world is coming to an end, our sinful ways are about to be destroyed. On what empirical and logical basis does he assure us that there cannot and will not be a replacement for oil? That we do not now have a replacement does not mean that there cannot or will not be a replacement: discoveries and inventions are made all the time. Just a week or so ago, a cancer researcher accidentally discovered that salt water burns when subjected to low-level radio frequencies. Who knows what next week will bring. And why the wailing over suburbia and cities? Only if we expect things to remain just as they are can one say that that will not happen. Things change. People adjust.
Most of the world’s people will not be affected by peak oil, for they have always farmed without machines. Only in America will Kunstler’s predictions perhaps occur. And surely it would be good to see some of the numerous disgustingly fat and bloated tubs of lard currently in the country having to walk and exercise and not eating and drinking all that junk food.
September 27th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Fusion may be just around the corner:
Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
It has been funded:
Bussard Reactor Funded
I have inside info that is very reliable and multiply confirmed that validates the above story. I am not at liberty to say more. Expect a public announcement from the Navy in the coming weeks.
The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and Boron 11 which does not.
The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.
If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame. A much better investment that CO2 sequestration.
BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.
September 27th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Dayahka wrote: “Apocalyptic expectations have been produced for ages, by all manner of people, based on all sorts of things, like visions, revelations, entrails of birds, tea leaves, maybe some science or empirical evidence, but they are always delusional and always turn out to be false.”
Just because there are survivors does not mean these expectations are false. What it does mean is that it remaining a survivor will take either lots more effort/luck.
Currently I’m reading the book “The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History” by David Hackett Fischer. In it he details four of these episodes, in which the world did not end, but massive starvation for the poor was unavoidable.
Of course, some of the poor survived, but in some cases it was due to killing/eating their own children/parents, or worse yet, digging them up from their graves. Unfortunately, thanks to embalming, we will lack that opportunity.
September 27th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
A couple of years ago, the pundits and optimists crowed about how people are buying into housing in order to prepare for retirement, and how people are getting second and third mortgages because they were off buying the large entertainment centers, SUVs and luxury vacations.
Curiously enough, most of the people I knew who were mortgaging themselves to the hilt were doing so because they could no longer make ends meet on jobs that paid less in real terms every year, could no longer afford the cars even on $0 down installment payments, and so believed all the drivel about mortgages being a “safe” means of extracting money, largely because that’s what they were being told by most of the investment world.
Reality - while oil prices have risen in the US in particular due to the decline of the dollar (which tracks the rise of inflation), nominative wages have risen only slightly and real wages have been dropping steadily for the last forty years.
Put another way - the decline not only is not in the future, but its been a hidden reality for several years; it’s just that the disconnect between the fiction being sold to most people (look, the DJIA has just hit another high) and the reality that most people face has grown so great that its no longer possible to paper it over.
Oil is being nationalized globally. Conservatives in particular moan about the mean, crazy socialists like Chavez, but the reality here is that most oil producing governments worldwide understand that the oil companies do not in general have the host country’s best interests at heart. When oil was relatively cheap (and seemingly plentiful) the benefits that the Exxons and BPs brought (the investment in infrastructure, the establishment of trading systems, and so forth) more than outweighed the losses, especially if the bribes were large enough.
When oil becomes a strategic advantage, when a country’s resource assets drop to a certain point, even the most greedy, venally corrupt government official will start getting nervous about the rabble outside the door, and there is evidence from nearly every point on the planet that the tank is now half empty.
Kunstler is perhaps an extremist, but most of the conflicts that are heating up now are ultimately about the control of oil. The relationship between the US and Canada, long one of the most stable, is now becoming increasingly testy because of the thawing polar ice caps and the question of territoriality of polar ice fields.
China’s economy continues to heat, drawing more oil for itself, and as bungled economic and foreign policy is now causing the not so subtle disintegration of the dollar, to the extent that the number of countries that are calling for a redomination of oil prices in Euros has risen dramatically - why buy US dollars to purchase oil when those dollars are inflating at 2-3% per MONTH?
Put this way, even if we do have fifty years of reserves left globally, the reality that the US is now facing is that the cost of that oil is going to become too prohibitive for the economy to function.
If you’re part of the privileged 1%, you will have all of the oil that you need, your kids will be able to go to college, you will have the best health care, you’ll still be able to travel around the globe.
If you’re part of the remaining 99%, your world is already shrinking, your options are diminishing, the jobs available will continue to shrink because there’s no manufacturing base left to build on (and comparatively little demand from the rest of the world), because American products are increasingly seen as being shoddy and dangerous (Mattel toys anyone? Even if the products came from China, it was the Americans who accepted the inferior products because they were cheap to manufacture, and to the rest of the worlds it’s the Americans who are culpable here).
Globally, energy return on investment (EROI) has been dropping dramatically; technology can slow this descent for a little while, but it can’t stop it. Fusion is as far out of reach today as it was in the 1930s; at best, even with the most efficient computers controlling magnetic flux, the most recent fusion reactor (ITER) still required more input power than it produced, and it had a stability on the order of seconds before the containment fluxes destabilized.
Nuclear fission systems may continue to provide power to the grid (I don’t believe the lights will go out any time soon), but even there it will take significant investment in new facilities and it will be insufficient to power the transportation sector. Similar arguments can be made for other technologies; the biggest possible exception of which being coal.
Coal will likely end up becoming a dominant power source in North America within the next half century. However, the EROI on coal liquification is still far below that of even sour crude - this isn’t economics but physics. Similarly the EROI on contemporary biofuels (especially ethanol) is not great, and it has the added drawback of forcing increasing competition for land use with agriculture.
I’m not sure where any of this falls into being a religion, unless its “the religion of science”. The conditions for crises may take a while to occur and happen relatively unnoticed, but when enough stressors reach a critical point, the crisis itself can be rapid and brutal.
When you’re driving a car, the performance of that car changes subtly whether you have a full tank or a nearly empty tank, but its usually not that obvious. However, when there is no longer enough fuel in the tank, then the car isn’t going anywhere, and you are forced from your anticipated routines (driving to work) and are instead reliant upon your own two feet and a gas can.
The questions that Kunstler raises are simple prudence. If a crisis was to knock out your available power for an extended period, could you survive? Do you have back up skills that you can barter for food or goods? Can you produce your own food if you need to? Are you close enough to a municipal center that you can get there under your own power in a reasonable period of time? Do you own a decent bladed weapon (a gun is useful only until the bullets run out, then it’s only a not terribly effective club)?
These may seem like absurd questions (even alarmist!) but they are good thought exercises. I live on a large island (Vancouver Island) and these questions have been asked by emergency planners and city managers all over the island because the possibility does exist that Victoria and the rest of the communities could get cut off from the mainland for any number of reasons from bad storms or earthquakes destroying critical ports to the potential of hostile military action.
The findings from these exercises revealed that Vancouver Island probably could become self-sustaining, but that would only happen after nearly a decade of starvation and political strife - and that in a relatively calm, civilized country like Canada.
If Kunstler is wrong, then heeding his warnings would still insure that in the event of some emergency there were preparations - life insurance - in place to minimize the effects of the disruption. If, as I believe, Kunstler is on track with regard to much of his thesis, then by preparing for that you’ll be much more likely to survive the political unrest that will likely come from a rapid shift downward in local EROI.
September 28th, 2007 at 12:14 am
Kunstler’s logic is proving itself out. My daughter lives in California and a couple of years ago I visited for a little over a month. After a few weeks I got to know the neighbors, how the local economy worked and in general what it would be like to move there.
I could not fathom the spread between what people earned and what they spent on housing! At that time I did not know about “suprime loans” CDO’s ect. but I did tell her landlord that the whole system was going to tank because everyone was running on credit it seemed. No one payed cash for a car or a vacation or even furniture unless they were over 50.
He agreed with me. He said anyone under 40 did not seem to realize what a recession was, or even what you actually end up paying for something when you borrow instead of saving and pay cash.
My daughter pointed out the illegal aliens who gathered every morning by the shopping malls waiting for someone to come around and offer jobs. At the hospital where she works, she is a RN, seven out of eleven babies she delivered were children of illegal imigrants in one month. This was in Napa California.
No one wants the poor buggers there and no one wants them to leave too badly either it seems. I could not believe the government would tolerate what is going on. They have created a whole class of “off the books” people who work for subsistance wages, pay no taxes, have no rights a kind of shadow workforce much like I assume slaves would have been used during the hey day of the Roman Empire.
It was a status symbol to drive a BMW or Landrover. I asked one neighbor why he did not buy American, he could not answer the question.
I live in Alberta Canada and the same mania is taking hold here now. People are paying retarded prices for houses, living on credit cards ect. There is one thing wrong with their logic. They think that even if the U.S. economy tanks China will still buy oil. China feeds off the U.S. and if things go bad China is back to where they were 10 years ago.
Dave
September 28th, 2007 at 11:48 am
To steal from Jared Diamond - What did the man who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island say? “Don’t worry, we have not proved that there not trees somewhere else on the island” or was it “Don’t worry, technology will soon make the use of wood obsolete”
I don’t agree with Kunstler’s total collapse theory. I think prices will rise and people will adjust. Priorities will be set. Alternatives that are too expensive right now, will become affordable.
The big question is what will happen to political stability of those oil producing countries (Mexico, Iran, etc) as their reserves run out and what effect will that have on us?
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