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The peak oil story has not been
nullified by the scramble to unload every asset for cash -- including whomping gobs of oil contracts -- during this desperate
season of bank liquidation. The main implication of the peak oil story is
that we won't be able to generate the kind of economic growth that defined
our way of life for decades because the primary energy resources needed for it will be contracting.
Just as global oil production peaked, our economy evolved into a
morbid hypertrophy, and the chief manifestation of it was the suburban
sprawl-building fiesta that has now climaxed in the real estate bust. By the
early 21st century, when so much American manufacturing had been swapped out
to Asia, there was no business left except
sprawl-building -- a manifold tragedy which wrecked the banks that financed
it, and left the ordinary people mortgaged to it with ruinous liabilities.
That economy is now in its death
throes. The "normality" it represents to so many Americans is gone
and can't be brought back, no matter how wistfully we watch it recede. Even
so, it was obviously not good for the country. The terrain of North America has been left scarred by unlovable
objects and baleful futureless vistas that, from now on, will shed whatever
pecuniary value they once had. It represents the physical counterpart to the
financial mess that has been left to the young generations to clean up -- and
the job will take a very long time.
We have to, so to speak, get to place
mentally where we can face the kinds of change that are now necessary and
unavoidable. We're not there yet. It's not clear whether the elected new
national leadership knows just how severe the required changes will really
be. Surely the public would be shocked to grasp what's in store. Probably the
worst thing we can do now would be to mount a campaign to stay where we are,
lost in raptures of happy motoring and blue-light-special shopping.
The economy we're evolving into
will be un-global, necessarily local and regional, and austere. It won't
support even our current population. This being the case, the political
fallout is also liable to be severe. For one thing, we'll have to put aside
our sentimental fantasies about immigration. This is almost impossible to
imagine, since that narrative is especially potent among the Democratic Party
members who are coming in to run things. A tough immigration policy is
exactly the kind of difficult change we have to face. This is no longer the
19th century. The narrative has to change.
The new narrative has to be about a
managed contraction -- and by "managed" I mean a way that does not
produce civil violence, starvation, and public health disasters. One of the
telltale signs to look for will be whether the Obama administration bandies
around the word "growth." If you hear them use it, it will indicate
that they don't understand the kind of change we face.
It is hugely ironic that the US automobile
industry is collapsing at this very moment, and the ongoing debate about
whether to "rescue" it or not is an obvious kabuki theater exercise because this industry is hopeless. It is
headed into bankruptcy with one hundred percent certainty. The only thing in
question is whether the news of its death will spoil the Christmas of those
who draw a paycheck from it, or those whose hopes
for an easy retirement are vested in it. But American political-economy being
very Santa Claus oriented for recent generations, the gesture will be made. A
single leaky little lifeboat will be lowered and the chiefs of the Big Three
will be invited to go for a brief little row, and then they will sink, glug,
glug, glug, while the rusty old Titanic of the car industry slides diagonally
into the deep behind them, against a sickening greenish-orange sunset
backdrop of the morbid economy.
A key concept of the economy to come is
that size matters -- everything organized at the giant scale will suffer
dysfunction and failure. Giant companies, giant governments, giant
institutions will all get into trouble. This, unfortunately, doesn't bode so
well for the Obama team and it is salient reason why they must not mount a
campaign to keep things the way they are and support enterprises that have to
be let go, including many of the government's own operations. The best thing
Mr. Obama can do is act as a wise counselor
companion-in-chief to a people who now have to leave a lot behind in order to
move forward into a plausible future. He seems well-suited to this task in
sensibility and intelligence. The task will surely include a degree of pretense that he is holding some familiar things together
and propping up some touchstones of the comfortable life. But the truth is we
are all going to the same unfamiliar new territory.
The economy we're moving into will have
to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent
with energy resource reality. I'm convinced that farming will come much
closer to the center of economic life, as the death
of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America -- as
opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now. Reorganizing
the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task
fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one
of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is
completely unprepared for this kind of change. We still think that "the
path to success" is based on getting a college degree certifying people
for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the
approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke -- like
those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air
between Everest-size skyscrapers.
The crucial element in the
transformation underway will be emotion. The American experience for a few
generations has produced an adult population with very childish instincts,
increasingly worse each decade. For instance, the desperate power fantasies
among the younger tattooed lumpenproles -- those
with next-to-zero real economic power -- suggest a certain unappetizing
playing-out of resource competition when the supply of Cheez
Doodles and Pepsi starts to dwindle. But even the heretofore gainfully
employed middle classes are pretty lost in fantasies at least of comfort an convenience. For years now, I have wondered how their
sense of grievance and resentment will be expressed when the supermarket
shelves run bare and the cardboard signs get taped over the local gas pump
and the cable TV gets cut off for non-payment. You wonder,
to put it bluntly, how far gone we really are.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
My
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James
Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling
Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His
latest nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes
that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent
future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler
foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the
depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil,
military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans
will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You
can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You can get more
from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork,
information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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