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 geoeconomic
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 ass 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.
(Posted Mar 24, 2005)