Friday, August 6, 2004

Readers of this site are well aware of the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. With the price of crude oil nearing $45/barrel, even the most oblivious of citizens are starting to worry. Why are both of our political candidates for President so quiet on this subject. There is plenty of evidence that Bush-Cheney are very aware of this problem, so they are continuing with business as usual--Lie about everything. ... But what is Kerry's problem?

The following article is reposted from Jim Kunstler's weblog.

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Fossil Fuel Depletion & John Kerry

Jim Kunstler

I get a steady stream of e-mails criticizing this blog for being excessively pessimistic in general, and in particular for not offering constructive ideas, solutions and remedies. So perhaps these horse lattitudes of summer are a good time to review the things we can do to prepare for a very different way of life in the post cheap oil world.
 
The salient features of that world will be turbulence, economic systems failure, and falling standards of living. The greatest imperatives for Americans will be the reconstruction of local communities and economic networks of interdependency and  the re-establishment of local agriculture.
 
As the century advances, life will get increasingly local as the giant scale of enterprise falters in everything from the manufacture and retail of goods to food production to government. Many of my friends worry about the rise of a "Big Brother" type of despotic national government. I believe that the federal government will become increasingly impotent and irrelevant. Many of our state governments are already near insolvency and management paralysis. Local politics and local government will be everything. There will be a wide variation in the quality of it from region to region.
 
A lot of jobs and vocational niches are going to vanish. If you are a young person, check all your career assumptions at the door. Start thinking about things you can do that will be really useful in the decades ahead. There will be far fewer positions in marketing, public relations, and TV game show hosting. There will be many more jobs in small-scale farming and gardening, in repairing things of all kinds, in the non-bureaucratic aspects of health care, local transport, local energy production (especially small hydro), and basic education. Large scale complex systems like the canned entertainment industry will decline and communities will have to furnish their own music and theater.
 
I've proposed before that the US economy decades from now will revolve around agriculture. This idea is almost always greeted by derisive laughter. But the current system of mega-farms run on massive oil and natural gas "inputs" is extremely fragile. It will be one of the first systems to fall apart in world of higher-priced and less reliably available energy, and when it goes down people are really going to suffer. The process of re-organizing farming on a small, local basis obviously implies enormous difficulty. Much of our prime farmland, especially adjacent to towns and cities, has been paved over. Those of you out there who think that the free market automatically fixes problems like this might put your free market minds to the task of figuring out how to accomplish the epochal task of reallocating land.
 
In world of greater resource scarcity, the salvage of existing material is going to be a huge business. The commercial highway strips and the Big Box pods of today may be the mines of tomorrow. The human race is resilient and resourceful and one of the tasks that we are really good at is sorting useful objects. A lot of the retail of the future will consist of recycled second-hand goods, some of it expertly refurbished. To some extent, America will become Yard Sale Nation. We will look back at the 20th century as the Age of Manufacture. There will be a lot of work for people in many levels and layers of this activity: the scroungers, the fixers, the wholesalers, the brokers, the sellers.
 
Life in the decades ahead will not be about going places so much as staying where you are. How and where Americans live will undergo an enormous transformation. The suburbs will surely not survive the end of cheap oil and natural gas, but the big cities are going to be in trouble too. I doubt, for instance, that skyscrapers will be usable twenty-five years from now. Indeed anything over seven stories is liable to be a problem. Unless we undertake a massive program of building nuclear generating plants, the electric grid is going to be very unreliable. The action is going to return to America's small cities and towns. We are probably going to have to junk all our current zoning and building codes in order to get the towns back in working condition. The increment of development will be the single building lot. All the complex modular construction systems that we've contrived in recent decades will probably not be available anymore and we will be back to building in masonry and wood, using traditional techniques. Construction will be much more labor intensive and that labor will be a lot cheaper than it is now.
 
Huge central schools that rely on yellow fleets of school buses will be obsolete. Education will have to be re-scaled, re-housed in smaller and more local buildings, and compressed into fewer years. To some degree, education will be a much more elite activity. I believe that American social life will become much more rigidly hierarchical. Whether that is a good or bad thing is surely debatable, but I think it will happen, especially with so much of the population reduced to what amounts to agricultural peasantry.
 
The biggest question about these massive changes is how much disorder will attend them, both in the US, politically, and around the world, as nations jockey to contest resources. For a while, there may be plenty of jobs in the military. But eventually that enterprise, if you can call it that, will exhaust itself. We already know what happens to a modern army of Hummers and Black Hawk helicopters when the fuel depots run short.
 
The downscaling of America is our agenda for survivial in the 21st century. It implies a lot of difficult adjustments and even hardship, but if you want to fill your heart and mind with hopefulness, think along these lines. Think about living locally in a just community, being useful to your fellow citizens, and being a good neighbor.

Enter the Hero! Not

Writing as a registered Democrat, I'm sorry to say that a worse maunder of platitudes than John Kerry's acceptance speech has not been uttered by another presidential candidate in my lifetime. The emptiness of it was actually thrilling after the opening inanity of the "reporting for duty" line -- you began to wonder with each sentence whether he could top the previous one for vapidity and banality.

My dad did the things that a boy remembers. He gave me my first model airplane, my first baseball mitt and my first bicycle.

To dissect it further as oratory would only be cruel -- and depressing! -- except to make these two points. First, the narcissism it displayed was impressive: Kerry's lavish thanking of the crowd and his family, as though he had won an acadamy award rather than a daunting nomination in a dark time; the shameless grandiosity of his self-conscious annointment to greatness. Second, perhaps a quibble, that his vocal rhythms eerily resemble Richard Nixon's, for instance the tendency to speak through his applause lines. Mostly, though, I was dogged throughout the speech by the dismaying thought that George W. Bush will wipe up the floor with this guy.
 
The party that wants to stand for everything and everybody ends up standing for nothing. The internal contradictions of the Democratic party today are so gross that it may not survive beyond this election. It pretends to be liberal, but it's thoroughly corporatist. It trumpets "diversity" but squashes independent thinking (the essence of political correctness). It's anti-war but pro-military.

And our energy plan for a stronger America will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future -- so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Given my preoccupations, this is the line that galls me the most, since it indicates so starkly how clueless Kerry is about this country's foremost challenge. The truth is that nothing on earth will allow Americans to continue living the way we have the past fifty years. We're not going to become "energy independent" -- certainly not before the hardships of the global oil peak kick in. We're not going to retrofit the US car fleet and all its accessory services to a fuel other than gasoline -- certainly not hydrogen, if that's what Kerry is thinking. We'll be lucky if the economic meltdown of suburbia doesn't tear this nation apart. In short, Kerry is blowing smoke up America's ass.
 
The Republican right really needs to be taught a harsh lesson. They've sold the United States to a claque of corporate swine. WalMart. Archer Daniels Midland. Enron. The Republicans have acted like a predatory company using the tactics of hostile takeover to plunder the assets of a valuable aquisition (the United States). The Republicans ought to be judged and punished for it.
 
Kerry shows no awareness of what this country is up against. The party that produced him has become a kindergarten of whiners, lost in a bawl of childish peeving. It has no recognition of its opponent's real errors and misfeasances, because the Democrats are so intolerant of independent thought that they've allowed the Republicans to do their thinking for them for twenty years.
 
Want a real opposition platform? Okay, here it is:

• Do everything possible to prepare this country for a lower energy future.
  
• Begin at once to plan a new generation of nuclear generation plants.
  
• Begin at once the rehabilitation of the national railroads.
  
• End all government subsidies for suburban development.
  
• End support for corporate agriculture and shift it to small scale farmers.
  
• Assign the US military to close the border with Mexico.
  
• Reform the immigration laws to reduce the flow of all newcomers.
  
• Prepare for an era of asymmetrical warfare.
  
• Join other civilized nations in the effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.