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And so it’s back to the Kardashians for the US of ADD. As of
Sunday The New York Times kicked Ukraine off its front page, a sure
sign that the establishment (let’s revive that useful word) is
sensitive to the growing ridicule over its claims of national interest in
that floundering, bedraggled crypto-nation. The Kardashians sound enough like
one of the central Asian ethnic groups battling over the Crimea lo these many
centuries — Circassians, Meskhetian
Turkmen, Tatars, Karachay-Cherkessians — so
the sore-beset American public must be content that they’re getting the
news-of-the-world. Perhaps one of those groups was once led by a Great Kanye.
Secretary of State John Kerry has shut his
pie-hole, too, for the moment, as it becomes more obvious that Ukraine
happens to be Russia’s headache (and neighbor). The playbook of great
nations is going obsolete in this new era of great nations having, by
necessity, to become smaller broken-up nations. It could easily happen in the
USA too as our grandiose Deep State descends further
into incompetence, irrelevance, buffoonery, and practical bankruptcy.
Theories abound about what drives this crisis
and all the credible stories revolve around the question of natural gas. I go
a little further, actually, and say that the specter of declining energy
sources worldwide is behind this particular eruption of disorder in one sad
corner of the globe and that we’re sure to see more symptoms of that
same basic problem in one country after another from here on, moving from the
political margins to the centers. The world is out of cheap oil and gas and,
at the same time, out of capital to produce the non-cheap oil and gas. So
what’s going on is a scramble between desperate producers and
populations worried about shivering in the dark. The Ukraine is just a
threadbare carpet-runner between them.
Contributing to our own country’s
excessive vanity in the arena of nations is the mistaken belief that we have
so much shale gas of our own that we barely know what to do with it. This is
certainly the view, for instance, of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who
complained last week about bureaucratic barriers to the building of new
natural gas export terminals, with the idea that we could easily take over
the European gas market from Russia. Boehner is out of his mind. Does he not
know that the early big American shale gas plays (Barnett in Texas,
Haynesville in Louisiana, Fayettville
in Arkansas) are already winding down after just ten years of production?
That’s on top of the growing austerity in available capital for the
so-far-unprofitable shale gas industry. That’s on top
of the scarcity of capital for building new liquid natural gas terminals and
ditto the fleet of specialized refrigerated tanker ships required to
haul the stuff across the ocean. File under “not going to
happen.”
Even the idea that we will have enough
natural gas for our own needs in the USA beyond the short term ought to be
viewed with skepticism. What happens, for instance, when we finally realize
that it costs more to frack it out of the ground
than people can pay for it? I’ll tell you exactly what will happen: the
gas will remain underground bound up in its “tight rock,”
possibly forever, and a lot of Americans will freeze to death.
The most amazing part of the current story is
that US political leaders are so ignorant of the facts. They apparently look
only to the public relations officers in the oil-and-gas industries and no
further. Does Barack Obama still believe, as he said in 2011, that we have a
hundred years of shale gas?” That was just something that a flack from the Chesapeake Corporation told to some White
House aide over a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy Domaine d’Auvenay Les Bonnes-Mares
Grand Cru. Government officials believe similar fairy tales about shale oil
from the Bakken in North Dakota — a way
overhyped resource play likely to pass its own peak at the end of this year.
If you travel around the upper Hudson
Valley, north of Albany, where I live, you would see towns and landscapes
every bit as desolate as a former Soviet republic. In fact, our towns look
infinitely worse than the street-views of Ukraine’s population centers.
Ours were built of glue and vinyl, with most of the work completed thirty
years ago so that it’s all delaminating under a yellow-gray patina of
auto emissions. Inside these miserable structures, American citizens with no
prospects and no hope huddle around electric space heaters. They have no idea
how they’re going to pay the bill for that come
April. They already spent the money on tattoos and heroin.
New Features this week at
kunstler.com:
Jim’s Garden Report, 2013
Jim’s New Paintings,
2011-2013
Published as an E-book for the
first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author
Bargain Price $3.99
Amazon Kindle …or
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