The Long Emergency
By James Howard
Kunster
28 March, 2005
Rolling
Stone
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.
©Copyright
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.