[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: [GreenAllianceUSA] Post-Peak Oil America

[Paul Etxeberri]

>Please read. We all need a dose of stark reality every once in 
>awhile. Nevada is mentioned.

Pax, P Etx

>
>
>Source:
>http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7203633?
>pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7
>
>
>The Long Emergency
>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.
>
>...
>
>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.
>
>...
>
>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.
>
>...
>
>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.
>
>...
>
>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 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.
>
>(Posted Mar 24, 2005)
>
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>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand