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The big
Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston last week – but before we get
to the substance of that, a few words about where we were. It is hard
to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the
malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico.
And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district,
even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston’s convention center.
Luckily, we didn’t have to enter the convention center itself across the street -- a baleful megastructure the size of three aircraft carriers,
adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to counter Houston’s gym-sock-like
climate. And when I say “street” you understand we are
talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside parking, which is the norm for this town. The
effect is that every street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the
expense of pedestrians – but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway
because in ninety percent of Houston’s
so-called downtown of glass towers there are no shops or restaurants at the
ground-floor level, only blank walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps,
and landscaping fantasias. We were informed that in parts of downtown
there existed a network of air-conditioned underground corridors with
shopping, but that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office
workers straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the
convention center. The rest of district was
devoted to surface parking.
It has often been stated that Houston’s ghastly development pattern
comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really proves is
that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical American
boneheaded zoning with no zoning – as long as your don’t give a
shit how people feel in their daily environments.
The convention center itself, though,
demonstrated something beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness was a metaphor for the fatal
grandiosity at the heart of contemporary life in American today, the utter
disregard for a scale of human activity consistent with what the planet has
to offer within its ecological limits – and of course the oil issue was
at the center of that story.
Oh, one final thing about Houston
life per se. Judging by the local items in the daily newspaper, the
so-called city enjoys a level of mayhem that makes Baghdad
look like a Sussex
garden party. Sample headlines: “10 Charged in Burglary
Spree,” “Pit Bull Shot Dead After Pony Attack,”
“Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death,” “Two Killed in
Home Invasion.” One particularly insane story told of a man who shot
and stabbed a visiting friend who “dissed”
his dog. We didn’t see any of that action around the convention center's Hilton Americas, where the ASPO conference
actually took place, but the news didn’t exactly make you want to
venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway, you couldn’t buy a stick of
gum within a mile walk of the place, and the thought of traipsing past all
those surface parking lots in 90-degree heat was like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.
It was a sublime coincidence of fate and history that
throughout the ASPO conference, the price of a barrel of oil surged up
through the high eighty-dollars range and briefly
touched $90-a-barrel on Friday (just as the stock market was tanking by
360-odd points). It was also interesting that as all this action was
unfolding, MSNBC was running an interview with Senator Larry Craig (R.
Idaho), lately accused of soliciting sex from a policeman in an airport
toilet. Apparently what the nation really wants to know about is the
Senator’s self-described “wide stance” in bathroom
technique. Perhaps when Craig is finally forced from his senate seat,
he can get a job as a “personal toilet coach,” and become the
pioneer in a whole new realm of self-improvement science, teaching others how
to assume the manly “wide stance” and become more effective
leaders.
So, while the price of oil ratcheted up hour by hour, the
ASPO conference members heard from an impressive range of experts who have
been leading the public conversation on the Peak Oil story – with no
help from the mainstream media or the political sector. Among them were
Robert Hirsch, co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report, commissioned
by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the consternation of its
sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain terms that it was heading for
a catastrophic set of disruptions in “normal” American life if we
heedlessly continued energy business-as-usual. Hirsch went a little
further now, two years on, than he had in his famous report, predicting a
future of “oil export withholding,” panicked markets, and allocation
disturbances that would make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age.
Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil
industry, who has worked tirelessly to lift public awareness of Peak Oil,
also raised the specter of shortages, telling the
audience that market allocation problems in the near future would almost
certainly induce “hoarding behavior”
among the public that would cripple the economy, lead to enforced rationing,
and shock the nation. Simmons compared the current public mood over energy
issues to a “fog of war.” He also repeated his oft-stated
opinion that the drilling rigs and other equipment used around the world to
pump oil out of the ground are so uniformly old and decrepit that they pose a
problem every bit as dire as peak oil itself. In the meantime, he said,
to offset climbing prices, the developed nations have lately dipped so deeply
into their accumulated stocks of crude and “refined product” that
some countries may breach what is called their “minimum operating levels.”
Offstage, he told me, “We’re too preoccupied trying to figure out
the exact date of the peak. Meanwhile, we’ll drain the gasoline
pool and it will be gone forever.”
The other most significant contribution came from Texas
geologist Jeffrey Brown who presented a full-blown version of his theory that
world export rates from the countries with oil to sell are liable to decline
so much more sharply than their actual production decline rates that the
world would be thrust into an oil export crisis within the next five years
– and that this export crisis would turn out to be the defining
condition of the Peak Oil story.
There were plenty of other fruitful contributions on
subjects ranging from the future of the airline industry to reviving passenger
rail service, to the question of nuclear power. And there was one real
clunker presentation by a shill from the Toyota
corporation, designed to blow green smoke up the audience’s ass about
the future of happy motoring (Toyota’s
products will save it from Peak Oil).
For coverage of the particulars, visit TheOilDrum.com, the nation's
best energy discussion website.
If there were reporters from the mainstream media present
at this event, I didn’t run into of them. They are apparently
uninterested in the fate of industrial economies, at least as long as Senator
Larry Craig is out there on the frontiers of toilet coaching science, and
Britney Spears is still sparring with K-Fed, and Diddy
is beating people up in nightclubs, and people are murdering their friends
for dissing their dogs.
By :
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
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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