The Long Emergency – James Howard Kunstler

This book, “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century” by James Howard Kunstler [Atlantic Monthly Press (2005) ISBN 0-87113-888-3] is depressing. Nonetheless it should be in the background of every thinking, questioning, concerned citizen of the 21st century.

The principal themes are several: Virtually everything in our present economy requires, is made from or is based on gas or oil, from agriculture through transportation. Fluid fossil fuels – natural gas and oil – and their derivatives are past their prime in availability. As both their scarcity and worldwide demand increase, they will price themselves out of utility for all but the most wealthy individuals, corporations or nations. Alternative energy sources will NOT substitute adequately. Consequently, civil society will HAVE to reconstitute itself, becoming more local, more self-reliant at every level of organization. Ultimately humanity will have to do without essentially all the gas- and petroleum-derived amenities presently taken for granted. It is an important and sobering exercise to step through everything in everyday middle-class American life that currently is derived from, or dependent upon, cheap fluid fossil fuels.

This book is essentially a walk through the history, economics and social consequences of humanity’s dependence on, and depletion of, a resource that was, and is, absolutely non-renewable on the scale of hundreds of millions of years. We, the developed world, have allowed ourselves to become addicted to a limited stash; the withdrawal phase will be very difficult at best.

There are at present no general ready replacements for fluid fossil fuels. Each of the well-known, oft-mentioned possibilities – nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric, etc. – may do a little to soften the landing but overall not at the scale required to sustain present levels of industrialization. Massive attempts to upgrade any or all of the alternatives would cost so much of the remaining oil and gas reserves as to make those a poor use of an increasingly scarce commodity. It is time to readjust and reconfigure.

Axis of Logic