The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
by James Howard Kunstler
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Book Summary Information
Author: James Howard KunstlerAfterword: James Howard Kunstler
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-03-02
ISBN: 0802142494
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
Book Review: Industrial civilization depends on oil -- soon to be history
Summary: 4 Stars
Kunstler's thesis has three main themes:
1) World petroleum production is in terminal decline.
2) All activities and products necessary to maintain global industrial society depend absolutely on petroleum.
3) The consequent collapse of industrialism will result in total societal collapse on a civilization-wide scale.
After the introductory chapter "Sleepwalking into the future", theme #1 is taken up in "Modernity and the fossil fuels dilemma". The key concept of peak oil production is introduced. The rest of the chapter is a primarily historical treatment of the rise of oil culture and the culture of rampant American postwar consumerism. Here Kunstler touches several sub-themes that recur thoughout the book: corporate misdirection, government collusion, and public apathy.
Because Kunstler's book is neither endnoted nor footnoted, and there is no index or bibliography, the reader must decide for himself the veracity of the hypothesis of global peak oil production. I imagine that most readers will open the book with their own preconceived notions in this area, depending mostly on their position on either side of the ideological divide, and that's why Kunstler doesn't spend much space on it. What little space he does spend is on the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf area, still the largest proven reserves. Specifically, the Ghawar fields and the seawater injection and "bottle brush" drilling techniques the Saudis have had to employ to maintain production. He describes what he calls the "bumpy plateau", in which supply and demand signals become unstable and unreliable as indicators of economic activity. He argues that we currently inhabit just such a time, and so arguments over how close we are to the peak are necessarily confused and meaningless.
Furthermore, different petroleum-producing areas will peak at different times. The continental US (perhaps Alaska as well) has already peaked. The Middle East is expected to peak last, which at first sounds good, but this actually only exacerbates the danger, because this is precisely where the most volatile political regimes reign. Even more, the physical infrastructure for delivering petroleum and natural gas is being severely taxed by rising demand and shifting foci of production -- such as the Caspian and the Arctic (perhaps also South China Sea and the Malvinas Basin). As the world petroleum market totters, this infrastructure becomes ever more vulnerable to terrorist or military action, and political upheaval such is at this moment taking place in North Africa and the Near/Middle East.
Theme #2 is the main theme of the book, and Kunstler returns to it constantly, though from many different perspectives. EVERYTHING that industrial civilization does, requires, and produces depends absolutely on access to petroleum. Most importantly, food and water production and distribution. Kunstler debunks the common misconception that "alternative energy" technologies can serve as the salvation of civilization, because for their development and operation they also depend upon an underlying petroleum infrastructure.
A necessary collorary to theme #2 is the fact of the gigantic scale of global industrial civilization, and this also serves as a primary explanation for the rescue-by-alternative-fuel fantasy. The sheer size of the industries supplying the global industrial machine beggar description. Any new energy technology imagined to replace it must scale to gigantic proportions. None do, except possibly, as Kunstler notes, nuclear fission -- and even here, it's just buying time until the final collapse.
When evaluating energy technologies, another important distinction to be made is that between activities requiring petroleum, and those that can be served by electricity. Hydrocarbon energy and electric energy are two very different beasts! The way our transportation infrastructure is currently arranged (thanks to the automakers, oil companies, and rubber-tire industry), petroleum is absolutely necessary for all transportation needs. Aha! you say, we have electric and hybrid cars, don't we? And fuel cells even! And then I refer you to the preceding paragraph regarding the gigantic scale of modern society. It is unlikely in the extreme that any significant fraction of our petroleum transportation system can be substituted with electric vehicles. All the news reports and corporate propaganda you see on the Sunday morning news shows -- just more feel-good platitudes designed to convince the motoring public (everybody) they can merrily continue their spendthrift ways, to the betterment of corporate profits.
The place where themes #1 and #2 intersect is the observation that while industrial civilization relies on petroleum, AMERICAN industrial civilization relies on CHEAP petroleum, far more than all other areas of the developed world (with the possible exception of the U.K.). This is mainly because of American Suburbia, which is utterly contingent upon the transport of people and materials over vast distances for daily activities. Secondarily, the culture of wanton consumerism that holds sway over the large and growing American population is to blame for our utter dependence on inexpensive petroleum. When a gallon of gas costs ten bucks, head for the hills! because what happens next will make the civil upheavals of the sixties look like a Girl Scout picnic. Just imagine what will happen here when the cost hikes of petroleum feedstock and market distribution networks propogate throughout the US economy. Does anyone remember from their history books the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany or Argentina in the 1970s? Well, Americans are not Germans nor Argentines -- they will not tolerate hyperinflation even so much as did the people of those two countries. Mass violence seems the order of that day.
One may question the postulate of global petroleum depletion, but one may not question the postulate of the end of inexpensive energy. No matter how one slices it, no alternative technology will ever be as inexpensive as simply pumping crude out of the ground and piping it off to a refinery. Additionally, what matters far more than the gross supply of petroleum is supply RELATIVE TO DEMAND. And we all know that with the industrialization of China and India and the rest of SE Asia, future demand is only going to explode. Ergo, the basis of the modern global economy is soon to be undermined (pun intended).
This bring us to theme #3. Kunstler takes what he considers to be a moderate view, near the middle of the spectrum between:
the CORNUCOPIANS (technology will save us and, indeed, permit consumerism and suburbia to expand to ever-greater heights) and
the DOOMSAYERS: (the artificial petroleum-based extension of the planet's carrying capacity will collapse, and with it, civilization if not the species itself. This is meant literally: out-of-control climate change, sea level rise, famine, plague, pestilence)
though Kunstler says he leans towards the doomsayers. He notes the possibility of total collapse of society if not civilization itself, even of the possible rise of some species-consuming plague. Though, he posits as most probable the breakup of the nation-state into regional or even city-size political entities, to the chagrin of the global corporations which will probably find some way to carry on in the new arrangement. The place where Kunstler is at his most pessemistic regards the fantasy that alternative energy or some other miraculous new technology will ride to our rescue. He seems quite certain that we've already driven over the cliff and there's nothing that can avert the coming "Long Emergency".
The one sure thing is that after the oil peak economic activity will almost entirely revolve around food production on a local scale -- as it has for all of human civilization in the millennia before Big Oil. One should remember that as recently as one-third of the way through the 20th century, the majority of the population labored in agriculture. It is easy to forget that our postindustrial "information society/economy" is a very recent development; but American memories grow ever shorter. More, the store of knowledge humans have accumulated over millennia regarding food production methods not dependent upon hydrocarbon-fueled machines and hydrocarbon-based fertilizers, drugs, and pesticides is now all but lost. When the end of the petroleum era comes, no longer will humans be able to feed themselves using the now-lost technologies upon which civilization itself was founded -- animal, wind, and water power, and natural knowledge of soil, water, weather and climate, crops and animals. Knowledge not readily replaced.
The most disturbing undercurrent running throughout Kunstler's narrative is, I believe, that we ourselves know better than all this and yet we go on "Sleepwalking in the future". We, each of us, are living in our own little blissful bubbles of consumer contentment -- yet willfully oblivious to and/or heedless of the gathering dangers to our society and our planet. This is, of course, my interpretation, but it seems one that Kunstler is trying to impart to the reader without actually saying in so many words.
Why is this? Again, my opinion, but I believe two dynamics are at work here in a push-pull fashion:
1) As they say, our citizenry has become fat, dumb, and happy. Literally. Fat from the efforts of Big Agra and Madison Avenue. Dumb from the internet, facebook, talk radio, TV/MTV, sports, and Hollywood. Happy? Tell me who is, really? Thing is, we drive 12 miles to the mall and go shopping and think we are. Then we realize we aren't. So we watch QVC or browse the web, then back to the mall! Repeat cycle.
One thing more: Fat + dumb + happy = lazy. And lazy people don't think because thinking for ourselves is such hard work! Isn't that why we have so much media and corporate propaganda these days? Just what we cannot have if we are to work our way out of this predicament.
2) The profit motive, which powers our turbo-capitalistic culture. This produces all the root causes of our predicament, and is aided by dynamic #1 above. The relentless self-interested pursuit of profit (and the luxuries it affords) spurs the corporate propaganda that furthers dynamic #1, corrupts our public officials (by lobbying) who are supposed to be serving the public good, and promotes the rapacious extraction and waste of planetary resources.
There was a historian I read some time ago, I can't recall whom, that wrote the Earth's petroleum bonanza (which we are now exploiting for our inane hedonistic purposes) took the planet tens of millions of years to produce. Certainly in less than half a century, it will be exhausted. That will forecast the end of large-scale human civilization, and then we will have no means whatsoever of ever leaving this planet as a species. In the time it will take for the Earth to regenerate its petroleum reserves (another tens of millions of years), it is a statistical certainty that a planet-killing asteroid will impact the Earth and utterly snuff out the human species. In other words, if we blow it now, we've blown it for good!
But don't feel too bad -- the dinosaurs didn't see it coming, either.
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Summary of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
A controversial hit that sparked debate among businessmen, environmentalists, and bloggers, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is an eye-opening look at the unprecedented challenges we face in the years ahead, as oil runs out and the global systems built on it are forced to change radically.
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