Kunstler not a happy camper after his book tour (Peak Oil)

[JohnyCanuck]

Here's a snip from the latest entry in his blog (June 12).


I've been on a long book publicity road trip around California, with a side trip to Seattle on Thursday, and it's hard not to feel hopeless about this country after being here. It probably doesn't help that my 10:30 red-eye flight has been delayed ("aircraft availability," the sign says) and I don't know whether I will make my morning connection in Washington for the final flight to upstate New York. My experience with United Airlines is that they (that is, the remaining skeleton crew) are a gang of lying fucks who will make up any excuse to disguise the fact that their company is a barely-functioning shell. As a matter of fact, there was not a single United employee in the entire P-7 terminal when I got here at 8:00 pm and I had to walk a half mile over to terminal P-8 to find a live gate agent. What you see in this miserable airport is simply the death of the airline industry. The airlines are the giant "canaries in the coal mine" of our imploding economy. They can't make any money, even running fully-loaded flights, with the price of jet fuel (which is little more than kerosene) not even very high yet. But I stray from my point.

Which is that what you see in California is a society with a tragic destiny. I was all over the Bay Area earlier in the week, from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to Berkeley and even down to Santa Cruz, and that was bad enough, But then I got down to Los Angeles on Friday and have been in a state of pathological reflex nausea ever since. Despite their lame attempts to rebuild a few pieces of the 2000-mile-long streetcar system that they gleefully destroyed in the 1950s, life here is all about cars and it will never not be about cars -- until the reality of our oil predicament falls on the hapless public like a hammer of God and the people of California die for their fucking cars in their fucking cars and over their fucking cars. I understand that the scene here is not qualitatively different from Dallas, Orlando, Atlanta, Northern Virginia, Miami, New Jersey and other cloacal hot-spots of the world's highest standard of living. But I digress again, sitting, as I am, on the floor of terminal P-7 because I cannot find a single electric outlet anywhere near a chair, and being fifty-six years old, with an artificial hip, this is not the most felicitous scheme for composing one's thoughts.

I was invited to give a talk at Google headquarters down in Mountain View last Tuesday. They sent somebody to fetch me (in a hybrid car, zowee!) from my hotel in San Francisco -- as if I had any choice about catching a train down, right? Google HQ was a glass office park pod tucked into an inscrutable tangle of off-ramps, berms, manzanita clumps, and curb-cuts. But inside, it was all tricked out like a kindergarten. They had pool tables, and inflatable yoga balls, and $6000 electronic vibrating massage lounge chairs, and snack stations deployed at twenty-five step intervals, with lucite bins filled with chocolate raisins and granola. The employees dressed like children. There were two motifs: "skateboard rat" and "10th grade nerd." I suppose quite a few of them were millionaires. Many of the work cubicles were literally modular children's playhouses. I gave my spiel about the global oil problem and the unlikelihood that "alternative energy" would even fractionally replace it, and quite a few of the Googlers became incensed.

"Yo, Dude, you're so, like, wrong! We've got, like, technology!"Yeah, well, they weren't interested in making a distinction between energy and technology (or, more precisely where Google is concerned, a massive web-based advertising scheme -- because it is finally clear that all this talk about "connectivity" just leads to more commercial shilling, shucking, jiving, and generally fucking with your headspace in the interstices of whatever purposeful activity one may be struggling to enact on the internet).

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary13.html

[stevedeshazer]

1. That was a great rant!

He nails it.

[G_j]

2. wow

it couldn't be much fun talking about this in America today.
I could see how the tour could be depressing.

[orwell]

3. Thanks for the Link JC

I live in Cali in the county above Napa - very rural but also in a complete state of denial.

I know exactly of what he speaks. My bro works in SV for Sun. The place is a congested madhouse where a small 1200 sq ft house in a decent neighborhood goes for over 750K.

The whole place runs on cheap fuel, a megalopolis in search of the next "big thing". Everyone in Cali, including here in the land that time forgot, thinks that some whiz bang solution will suddenly appear. There is zero mention of the fact that even if we find a solution to the energy problem, global warming is hanging over us like the sword of Damocles.

Denial isn't just a river in Egypt, it runs right through the center of technology's heartland.

[acmejack]

4. Thanx for the link

His book is some good reading (depressing, too) that is well worth the investment in time. I am so frustrated by the attitudes of people in regard to this issue. I have been finding idle occupation in counting the suvs when I waiting for the bus. It is a depressingly high ratio of behemoths to cars.

[rinsd]

5. What an asshole.....

....seriously.

He does the whole self righteous condescending schtick and then wonders why people aren't listening.

[glitch]

6. he's also pushing nuclear as the solution.

at least he was on aar ring of fire last week. Which reminds me, I need to send them an email recommending they interview Amory Lovins and Paul Hawkens again.

edit: although he's right about our auto-obsession and the lack of outlets in airports.

[0rganism]

8. How does he recommend dealing with the waste problem?

Is he going to leave that one up to "technology"?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. I suppose that successfully dealing with the waste problem is as likely

as finding a way to produce enough hydrogen to fuel cars without requiring as much energy to make the hydrogen as the hydrogen would generate.

If I were Energy Czarina, I'd mega-fund both lines of inquiry.

[musette_sf]

7. agreed

I heard him on Ring of Fire a couple of weeks ago and thought the same thing. even Bobby Jr was weary of his negativity and naysaying by the end of the interview, at which point Kuntsler went off the deep end, babbling about our future being "shoulder to shoulder, in the fields with the working animals".

not that I don't agree with some of the basic premises of Peak Oil, but Kuntsler's vision of sustainable agriculture after Peak Oil is just a little too Pieter Brueghel The Elder-esque for me.

[megatherium]

10. but you have to admit, he is foul-mouthed in a witty kind of way.

I haven't read his book, but my impression is he has no technical expertise on what he is writing about. He's way too extreme in his conclusions. Hard times are coming, but I don't think the middle class is going to be reduced to working in the fields.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

16. Sounds like you missed the point and have chosen to....

...attack the messenger.

[rinsd]

19. If the messenger overrides his own point....

...than what exactly is the point.

[brokensymmetry]

9. Excellent rant!

I've read his book...and, I'm sorry to say this...I believe he's right. Not just sorta kinda in a way maybe right. Rather, he is correct in the carved-in-stone truth for the ages kind of way.

If you think Kunstler is negative, read "Overshoot". It's been in print for 20 years or so - and, bottom line, we're looking at the likely death of 4 billion people over the next 50 years or so. Maybe in less time than that. I doubt that we in America will entirely escape the events.

We have a problem. And, so far, most people won't even consider the possibility.

[JohnyCanuck]

11. Civilizations have risen and fallen all through history,

and frequently their collapse coincided with an overshoot of an important resource base. I think it would be a mistake to assume we have to be different because we are so much more knowledgeable about matters of science and technology than were the ancient Greeks, Romans, Babylonians etc.

We might be much smarter in some ways, but in other ways we haven't progressed at all. We know how to put a man on the moon and how to make atom bombs, supersonic stealth fighters and ICBMs, but we are still making only stumbling steps at learning how to get along with each other, live cooperatively on the planet and share what we have without resorting to fighting and killing each other.

In spite of all we hear about global warming and now, increasingly, peak oil as well in the corporate media, few politicians could likely get elected today on a platform that included serious planning for peak oil, (i.e. reorganizing the transportation infrastructure, our system of agriculture and our economies to run on a basis of steadily decreasing instead of steadily increasing energy inputs).

The way I see it playing out, if human nature follows a typical pattern, peak oil will be ignored or downplayed until its effects become undeniable and our western economies are grinding to a halt or very severely impacted due to the rising energy prices. At that point whatever cushion we might have had to move somewhat smoothly into a new, less energy intensive system without a massive dislocation and upheaval of society will have slipped by and we'll just use our superior scientific brain power to kill each other more efficiently as it becomes a desperate every man for himself game of grabbing what you can while there is still something left to grab (we can see the first stages of this in the Middle East and Central Asia today).

The long road down: decline and the deindustrial future

by John Michael Greer

<snip>

It's unfashionable to suggest that we have anything to learn from the past. Quite possibly this is because history holds up an unflattering mirror to our follies. Those who recall the 1929 stock market bubble, for example, can find every detail repeated in the tech market frenzy of the late 1990s. The same claims that a "new economy" and new technology made the business cycle obsolete, the same proliferation of investment vehicles (investment trusts then, mutual funds today), the same airy confidence that stock values would go up forever and fundamentals didn't matter: fast forward seventy years, and the follies of 1929 replayed in 1999, cheered on by economists who, of all people, should have known better.

The rise and fall of civilizations offers the same embarrassment on a grander scale. We know beyond the slightest doubt what happens to societies that outrun their resource base: they go under. Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World (1992) documents dozens of past cultures that ended up in history's wrecking yard for exactly this reason. One highly relevant example is the ancient Maya, who flourished on the Yucatan Peninsula of Central America while Europe struggled through the Dark Ages.

Like modern industrial society, the Maya built their civilization on a nonrenewable resource base. In their case it was the fertility of fragile tropical soils, which couldn't support intensive corn farming forever. On that shaky foundation they built an extraordinary civilization with fine art, architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and a calendar more accurate than the one we use today. None of that counted when the crops began to fail. Mayan civilization disintegrated, cities were abandoned to the jungle, and the population of the Mayan heartland dropped by 90%.

The parallels go deeper, for the Maya had other options. They could have switched from corn to more sustainable crops such as ramon nuts, or borrowed intensive wetland farming methods from their neighbors to the north. Neither of these happened, because corn farming was central to Maya political ideology. The power of the ahauob or "divine lords" who ruled Maya city-states depended on control of the corn crop, so switching crops or farming systems was unthinkable. Instead, Maya elites responded to crisis by launching wars to seize fields and corn from other city-states, making their decline and fall far more brutal than it had to be.

http://www.energybulletin.net/4624.html

[tavalon]

13. No, we won't escape

In fact, I think it will take our whole society down, unless there is still some of the spunk and willpower and just plain luck that got us through the depression.

Worldwide, I think 4 billion will be about how many of us will be removed.

When I think of me and mine, I get a bit scared, but when I can back off and think about Gaia (the world as a living, breathing organism unto itself) what is coming is necessary and right. We were and continue to be amazingly silly to think that we could do all the things we did and not eventually be decimated. We shit in our own nest. We are evolutionary nimwits. Buh-bye!:hi:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. He may be extreme and intemperate and off-putting

but his analysis of our contemporary society is dead-on.

Deep down, we know that exurbia is unsustainable, but we keep allowing it to be built ever farther out, and people flock like sheep to buy brand-new trophy houses in subdivisions that have been thrown up in former cow pastures (instead of living in real small towns or becoming honest-to-goodness rural folk), just because they think that that's what adults are supposed to do.

Oh, and the media have convinced them that black and brown people are dangerous, so they move out to where they think everyone will be beige and pink.

They live a minimum of two miles from everything and an hour away from work, and then they have the gall to complain about traffic.

They work in office "parks," separated even from other businesses by chain link fences. so they can't even walk to lunch but have to drive to fast food or a chain restaurant.

They delude themselves into thinking that they're living this way "because of the children," but the children are simultaneously over-scheduled, bored out of their minds, and denied the ability to explore the world on their own.

They become Republicans, because between house payments on their three-story trophy houses and car payments on their three cars, they're strapped, so despite their affluence, they feel "too poor" to pay taxes.

They become fundamentalists, because the megachurches are the only sources of community.

When I see that BP ad where they ask the woman whether she would rather have a clean environment or her car, I want to throw up. That's the perfect Republican ad.

Rant on, James Kunstler.

[The2ndWheel]

14. Now that's a post, nt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. Why, what else would it be?

:-)

[blindpig]

17. He certainly speaks for me. n/t