Illustration by Steve Brodner
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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.
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 geo-economics 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 backend 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.