The Long Emergency - (or the impending energy crisis)
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blue
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 Posted: 04/16/05 - 14:55 Post subject: The Long Emergency - (or the impending energy crisis)
The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER wrote: |
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.
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..kinda makes me reconsider the kind of business i want to start when i'm done college.
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blue
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Posted: 04/16/05 - 17:12 Post subject:
..15 views and not a single comment?
what do you guys make of this?
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copteacher
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Posted: 04/16/05 - 17:26 Post subject:
wait until Monday. But it has been discussed before
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Noley
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Posted: 04/16/05 - 23:29 Post subject:
You know...I'm really interested in this topic, but need the cliffnoted version. Can someone summarize this for me and post it.   
Realz.
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akern
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Posted: 04/16/05 - 23:32 Post subject:
| nolefan85 wrote: | You know...I'm really interested in this topic, but need the cliffnoted version. Can someone summarize this for me and post it.
Realz. |
We're running out of gas. It's all America's fault.
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MechEngDropout
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Posted: 04/17/05 - 01:08 Post subject:
I was going to reply but I read this right before I had to leave for work.
I agree with almost every bit of it. I think we're in for a major change in the way we operate on a daily basis, and it will be much more widespread than most people think. If you really look at it, you can trace almost every single thing in your home to a petroleum product. It may be through transportation, manufacturing, or electricity, but the connection is there. What happens when there's no more?
I think we should start building nuclear power plants now so that we will at least have dependable, affordable electricity for more than 40 or 50 years.
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TOsteve
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Posted: 04/17/05 - 08:27 Post subject:
| akern wrote: |
We're running out of gas. It's all America's fault. |
Akern didn't read the article either.
The cliff notes version would actually be:
The entire world is set-up to depend on a fossil fuel (ie oil) based energy supply. Every aspect of our way of life depends on cheap oil. Alternative energy sources that now exist are dependant on oil for processing/implementation and we are probably running out of time to develop these technologies before oil becomes ridiculously expensive. Nuclear power has some potential however uranium is of finite supply and the technology for nuclear power generation has advanced very little since the 1970's.
The only real forseeable outcome is a complete shift in our existing social and ecconomic structure. This transition period will be painful and dangerous. The transition period is not as far away as some have originally predicted as the emergence of India and China throw all the calculations out the window. Many predictions were made about what this transition period might look like, especially for the US.
My take on the article:
I agree with the core message of what is being said. This is the largest socio-ecconomic problem facing humanity today. What bugs me is that when you talk about it with the average person they look at you like you're some kind of tree hugging fanatic. I place most of the blame for the public's perception of this problem on the corporate controlled media. The media has been blatantly self-seeking and recklessly irresponsible in the way they've presented this information to the public. The only thing that will prepare the industrialized world for this impending crisis is for public perception to change.
Its probably too late to insure that future generations will enjoy the same decadent lifestyle that we enjoy now - but its not too late to make changes that will soften the blow. Try to put other biases aside and think about what you value in life. Do you put your right to live you life however you want above taking responsibility for the consequences your lifestyle has on future generations? Do the things you value matter in a world where the ecconomic prosperity of the West has been removed?
These are questions that I've been asking myself more and more lately and as I reflect there are still many things that need to change. Thanks for posting the article Blue. 
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blue
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Posted: 04/17/05 - 11:38 Post subject:
yeah that's a big thing - the whole public perception. my friend has been saying for a year that he's actually going to try to enjoy life as possible for the next few years before we really screw things up. and i sort've thought it was a bit extreme...
but now it's kind've like you want to take more preventive measures.
as my dad says "we had an energy crisis in the 50's and again in the 70's, we were fine. we won't run out of oil in our lifetime" and it's like "gee dad, isn't that a bit short sighted and selfish?" but he's saying we'll for sure have a replacement fuel by then - gee, i suppose we should've cured cancer by now too...
my city recently approved a sprawling new subdivision - 30,000 people i think by the time it's completed (should take 20-30years or so).... and it's a joke - first we've been trying so hard to start getting people back into the core area, into our downtown - so what do we do we sprawl!
but the downtown thing aside, it's so socially irresponsible to go ahead with it. they need to think that in 20 years the world will be different, and driving across the city when gas is friggin three times the price it is now - it's not going to be good for anyone.
i dunno. now i try to think of more steps i can take to help clean up my end of it. part of the problem is society is so rush rush right now, and it would be hard for everyone to just start taking the bus - lord knows we don't have the extra time it takes to take the bus (in my city - driving is faster anywhere you go)...
we're stuck pretty good right now. not really sure where it's going to go.
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Noley
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Posted: 04/17/05 - 12:12 Post subject:
Thanks for the cliffnotes and condensing this a bit.
You ask:
| Quote: | | Do you put your right to live you life however you want above taking responsibility for the consequences your lifestyle has on future generations? |
I'm positive that I live my life how I want to and how it benefits me, before I think of the environment like this or what's to be with our future generations. Don't misconstrue my intentions though, for I do care about what happens. However, when you're in the "now" and things go on as usual, you don't think along these terms (conservation, cutting back, etc.). I mean, my job is 20+ miles away, I have three children to haul around, I don't have much choice right now as to where I live...therefore I still will drive a minivan that consumes 16+ gallons of gas a week and biking it to work is not going to happen for me (which is very honorable that people do this). The only thing I can remotely do to change this is to one day buy a vehicle the takes less fuel than my minivan that will get better gas milege.
So my question...
What are we to do? I read this report and it's very interesting. But what does Average Joe America do? Stop buying gas guzzling god awful ugly Hummers? This does seem to be something that we all should be aware of, but I don't know what I should do to make a change.
In the meantime...I'll continue to gripe about the raise in gas prices that are killing me!!
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cherylpf
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Posted: 04/18/05 - 14:29 Post subject:
My roommate and I were just talking about this last night, and like Steve says, she reacted like I was crazy when I was telling her how little gas is left in the world...we are all living in oblivion.
I read a book by that guy (Kunstler) in college all about urban and suburban sprawl and America's dependence on cars. It was eye opening.
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cherylpf
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Posted: 04/18/05 - 15:00 Post subject:
Sorry, I replied before without fully reading. I really like this article. He explains peak oil and its consequences (as he believes them to be anyway, sounds fairly plausible) in terms that I can understand. I would really be interested in sources that support or disagree with this if anyone could find any. I'm looking.
Meanwhile, This hits home, literally. Houston is just suburban sprawl to the max
| Quote: | 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.
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and this is an eye-opening thought:
| Quote: | | 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. |
Just an aside, his book I read in college was "The Geography of Nowhere" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671888250/qid=1113850856/sr=5-2/ref=cm_lm_asin/102-8449281-1969745?v=glance
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Gogirlgo
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Posted: 04/18/05 - 15:09 Post subject:
When last I mentioned resource issues on RR, I was told not to worry about it b/c "by then, a solution will be thought up." I was chastised for not having a little more faith in my fellow man's ability to come up with solutions.
So apparently "by then" is more like "next Tuesday." Anyone come up with a solution yet?
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cherylpf
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Posted: 04/18/05 - 15:23 Post subject:
Further complicating this issue is that the current administration (as Kunstler mentioned) isn't addressing the shortage. In this article posted on yahoo today Bush talks about his plans....to try to lower gas prices. Why? Why don't we work towards being less dependent on gas, not complicating the problem.
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MechEngDropout
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Posted: 04/18/05 - 15:39 Post subject:
| cherylpf wrote: | | Further complicating this issue is that the current administration (as Kunstler mentioned) isn't addressing the shortage. In this article posted on yahoo today Bush talks about his plans....to try to lower gas prices. Why? Why don't we work towards being less dependent on gas, not complicating the problem. |
I think if anything, gas prices should be increased. If you fight to keep the gas prices the same, there will be no need to change.
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AlaninTX
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Posted: 04/18/05 - 19:54 Post subject:
I have said it before, and I will say it again. Go read Hubert's "Peak Oil Theory." Google those words. Demand has crossed exploration, we are now living on proven reserves, and if you think things are bad now wait until, oh, say, 2011.
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