How will we get to the session???

[jGilder]

Here's a very interesting article from Rolling Stone magazine on what we might expect to happen when the World runs out of fossil fuels in a few years. My favorite quote from the article is, "Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future." Life as we know it could be changed in ways only science fiction writers would have imagined.

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
Rolling Stone Magazine
Posted Mar 24, 2005

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.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7203633

[susnfx]

Well, that certainly brightened up my day.

[dubhlinn]

Plenty of oil about..
Just a case of grabbing it..
Easy..

Slan,
D.

[Chang He]

Some of the concerns are warranted, but at the end there, the guy really betrays his political bias. If anything, I think the rugged individualists in the west and south will survive a catastrophe of that magnitude better than other areas of the country. The Midwest will definitely do all right, with all the farming, but I think the Northeast is seriously doomed. I agree the Southwest would be depopulated, and the Northwest might do all right too. And he forgets that even with our interactions localized, we would still need a lot of the services we need today. It is just that the "wealthy" would change from being the CEOs of IBM to the CEOs of large farms. Overall though, I don't think a lot of the changes would be unhealthy, if they could be accomplished smoothly.

[cowtime]

Hey, I'll have to go back to living just like my Grandparents. (no vehicle, other than real horsepower, grew all their own food, made their own clothes- in otherwords, completely self-sufficient)

It would definately be a bit of a change, but is do-able, although I'll have to clean out the root cellar. I can see where it would be a problem for most folks though.

Seriously, the majority of people will never even give this a second thought until face to face with the situation.

[Wormdiet]

Looks like my decision to buy a hybrid car this year may have been a case of "too little, too late."

This is both scary and professionally interesting - I will have my Econ and World History students read this as a graduation gift.

[Darwin]

Well, as long as my Exxon stock keeps going up...

[Jeff Stallard]

I've often wanted to find a flace where I could have a small garden. Nothing fancy, just a potato or two, some carrots, peas, some spices...just some basic things. If this helps me get that, that's fine.
If it kills television and movies, that's fine with me because there's too much money in television anyway.
If it forces shopping centers to move more toward basic needs, that's great because 90% of any shopping center is pointless fashion and fast food.
If it forces people to re-occupy cities, that's fine because I like the idea of walking to every store I need to visit.

In short....bring it on.

[jsluder]

Regarding the question in the subject line ("How will we get to the session???")...

If you believe the article, then the answer is obvious. You walk into the farmhouse kitchen.

[jGilder]

Regarding the question in the subject line ("How will we get to the session???")...

If you believe the article, then the answer is obvious. You walk into the farmhouse kitchen.

I hope I'm within walking distance from the pub.

As for the believability of the article; I woke up this morning to a news story and discussion about how the price of oil has risen sharply despite the US taking control of Iraq oil. They were speculating that the instability of the region that followed the war has a lot to do with it, but that even when the OPEC nations try to increase production they fail to meet the demands of the market for lack of resources. In other words -- you can fight over the pump and win, but it means nothing if the well runs dry.

[OutOfBreath]

I for one think the loss of cheap individual transportation could be a good thing. I commute 40 miles each way to work daily because I cannot find work close to my home and I refuse to live in the middle of the run-down, crime-ridden city and cannot afford to live in any of the close-in suburbs. At present, this means I must drive because there is no public transportation of any kind, nor even organized vanpools or park'n'rides. Every morning I get on the highway with several thousand other people in the same boat, er, car, er, different cars. I know for a fact that many of them are commuting even further than I, up to 80 miles each way.

Most of us, even if we were willing/able to form van-pools cannot do so because there is no public transportation even within the sprawling metroplex we are driving to - i.e. it's not possible to carpool to a central point and hop busses from there, because there are no busses except for the immediate downtown area.

There are train tracks all over this area, most of which languish unused but could be returned to service relatively quickly. There is an old train station within feasible walking distance of my home, and another within feasible walking distance of my office - neither is used because people won't ride trains - they'd rather sit in their cars and curse at their neighbors for an hour every morning and another hour every evening. If even one fifth of the people that are driving a commute similar to mine were willing to take a train commuterr service would easily be practical.

Unfortunately, gettting commuter service going means spending government money up front because the service has to be available before it can be used, and it won't be used until it's been available long enough to catch on and prove reliable. All the government dollars get spent building more and more multilane highways and that simply won't change until people just plain cannot afford to drive on those highways.

The absence of affordable individual transport would force people to support public transport. If I could ride a train to work I'd sell my car tomorrow and save several thousand dollars a year in depreciation, insurance, maintenance, and gas. As it is, I don't have any choice but to keep on driving and for myself and millions of others that situation will remain right up until the breaking point - said breaking point being the point at which it either becomes cheaper to live in the close-in suburbs or necessary to clean up the crime-ridden areas at the point of a gun.

Several studies have shown that those who commute more than twenty minutes to work by automobile have significantly more health problems and shorter life spans while those who commute the same time by train or bus do not suffer those problems.

If we ran out of (or very low on) gas tomorrow it would cause the rebirth of local neighborhood stores and services, and that in turn means that jobs would return closer to the communities where people live, shortening commutes all around. A severe enough shortage would eventually stop the rush to the cities, balancing the agriculture/industry/service sectors more geographically. That in turn would tend to decrease the severe polarization that has resulted in the political map of this country looking like three countries - with those living in the northeast and on the west coast having values entirely different than most of those living in the rest of the country.

In short, I believe that the automobile made the country what it is. Unfortunately, I don't like what it made us...

[Chang He]

I woke up this morning to a news story and discussion about how the price of oil has risen sharply despite the US taking control of Iraq oil.

Well the war wasn't about Iraqi oil anyway, because it has been common knowledge for years that the Iraqis weren't taking care of their oil fields. My (now ex-)girlfriend's dad works for Exxon and had been over there after the first war and he said they had some really bad engineers directing things. They were pumping refinery by-products down into the wells to increase pressure, which is a common cheap fix, but it was hurting their long-term production capabilities. And apparently also they were pumping it out too fast, which damages the rock structure, allowing pieces to collapse and seal off pockets of oil from the original well. His opinion was that the area was a mess and it would take a lot more money than it was worth to extend production too much longer.

Declining crude oil qualities -- and an increased "water cut" as well -- was likely the result of overpumping -- as high as 680,000 bbl/d, well above the field's estimated optimal production rate of 250,000 bbl/d-- as Iraq attempted to sell as much oil as possible in the months leading up to the March/April 2003 war. In addition, some analysts believe that poor reservoir management practices during the Saddam Hussein years --including reinjection of excess fuel oil (as much as 1.5 billion barrels by one estimate), refinery residue, and gas-stripped oil -- may have seriously, even permanently, damaged Kirkuk. Among other problems, fuel oil reinjection has increased oil viscosity at Kirkuk, making it more difficult and expensive to get the oil out of the ground.

[jGilder]

Well the war wasn't about Iraqi oil anyway,

I'm not sure that it wasn't -- it was definitely a big part of it, but not the only reason. I do think the US was hoping to break up OPEC once things were under control in Iraq, but I don't think that's going to happen now. We do know that the war hasn't helped matters regarding oil supplies, access to them and stability in the region. The department of energy information you provided corroborates some of what is said in the article. At the end of the day we might be looking ahead to some very difficult times now because of all this.

[IRTradRU?]

Just as information, the country who (currently) exports the most oil to the United States is a place called....


.... Canada.

[BillChin]

In my opinion, the article is alarmist with little credibility. There is oil to be found, it just depends on the price. Right now, the cost of owning an average automobile is about $8,000 a year, counting depreciation, insurance, repairs. Fuel is less than 20% of that, so it is no where near a tipping point. Triple the price again to $150 a barrel, and large numbers of people may actually change their habits. Triple the price, and a lot of places where oil is not worth drilling for, become economically viable.

What is most troubling to me is the attitude of many. I have young relatives who leave their 500 watt computers on all day and all night. Why? Because they "do not like" the two minutes it takes to boot up. No, they don't use power saver mode either. When I scold them about it, they laugh it off. When I joke about it, it has even less effect. The parents don't care enough to make a change, but do complain about huge electric bills.

The poll about daylight savings time and the majority opposition here also troubles me. Daylight savings time became popular during World War I as an energy saving measure. I don't know how much energy it saves, but if something so simple can help, why do so many oppose it? Ignorance? Or "I don't like it."

I mentioned compact fluorescent light bulbs as a pet cause of mine. Many still refuse to use them even though they consume 25% of the energy for the same light output. The reason, "I don't like them." Well, I don't like the halogen street lights either, but think the energy savings are well worth the trade off. I mentioned that Ott-Lite makes a low power consumption lightbulb, that delivers full spectrum light that most people prefer over incandescents, but that got brushed off as irrelevant.

A friend of mine recently bought a new car. It is a sedan with a V6 engine. "I like" the power, the friend coos. Choosing to have more power rather than better fuel economy of a V4 engine, even with gasoline nearing $3 a gallon for premium grades.

This "I don't like it" excuse can be used for everything. From the computers that run day and night, to energy hogging light bulbs, to the single passenger SUVs and overpowered sedans, and the huge sprawling homes. Again, for most Americans the price of energy has not reached the point where they are willing to make real changes in lifestyle. When it does, the invisible hand of the market will steer us clear of the "sky is falling" scenario described in the article.

Like I said, I do not see a moral right or wrong in energy saving. I do wish people would focus on what he/she can do, even if it is a small symbolic thing. This "I don't like it" excuse is just that, and it will be a sad one to give to the next generation.
+ Bill