James Wolcott points to a Rolling Stone article on the upcoming “long emergency” that our depletion of oil will mean. The piece is by James Howard Kunstler, of Geography of Nowhere fame, and it’s worth a read even if I think it raises more questions than its overly assured tone answers. I find it impressive when people can make predictions for the future that sound plausible, but a little suspicious when they start make one sure prediction after another… the South breaking into armed civil conflict? Maybe, but his evidence is pretty thin. It reads like each point would be treated at greater length in the book, so perhaps I should read it to get a fairer sense of his argument.
But to the argument at hand on the energy crisis, Kunstler claims that we’ve reached the peak of global oil production, which means that drastically higher prices, increased global conflict and massive lifestyle change lie ahead. Perhaps in the medium term, even. Some of the specifics are scary to contemplate. His predictions about China’s increasing belligerence over oil might not be too wild given that Germany was structurally in a similar position in the latter half of the 19th century and that competition over economic resources and dominance in no small way contributed to World War I.
But there are problems with Kunstler’s crisis talk, at least as far as I can make out. I wonder why increasing prices wouldn’t provide a market cue for readjusting the things he talks about (urban living instead of suburban, railroad instead of highway travel/transport, local agriculture instead of agribusiness). After all, the move to suburban living happened in the US in a very short timeframe, so I’m not sure why the reverse couldn’t also happen over two or three decades. Also, Kunstler predicts that rising oil costs will put an end to agribusiness and mean a return to feudal way of life for many. But why wouldn’t increased transportation costs simply mean that we spend more of our economic output on food? The more we spend of course, the more that local, artisanally grown produce, dairy and meat can compete with California, Plains States, and overseas product, but the situation wouldn’t mean that New Englanders would be living on turnips and storage potatoes in the winter. Sure it would be a step backward, but food now is quite cheap in historical terms, so this would be more a realignment than a return to pre-modern times.
Finally, to state the obvious, but Kunstler can’t be so sure that no solution will be found over the next century. It’s prudent not to count on one, and he’s right to attack the dreamy-eyed idea that wind farms and solar panels can replace all of our oil needs. And like I’ve written before, hydrogen cells don’t create energy out of nothing, but simply provide an atmospherically cleaner means of storing and using energy for automobiles. But cold fusion may work, or some other idea not in the pipeline now. That doesn’t absolve us of the need for more prudence (we’re shockingly wasteful as a society). But it means that we should take doomsday with a grain of salt.
Or is there some reason we should believe that Malthusian economics will return?
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