What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas
to guzzle?
By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
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.
f 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.
