It will change everything about how we live.

It will change everything about how we live.
by James Howard Kunstler
http://www.kunstler.com

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