‘The Long Emergency’ predicts dire future

James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” is something like required reading among peak oil activists, and it’s a great primer for those not yet familiar with peak oil’s full ramifications. But I know of no other book so deeply, consistently pessimistic; it’s a vision of a future that resembles Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish depictions of the apocalypse. Or maybe the movie Road Warrior.

But the scope of Kunstler’s inquiry and his scholarship make it uncomfortably plausible.

The book begins with an excellent history of our discovery, use of, and eventual over-reliance on fossil fuels, primarily oil. The sheer quantity of energy that humankind was suddenly able to access, and the changes it wrought, cannot be adequately conceived by those of us who have lived our lifetimes amidst its benefits.

The first well was drilled into a surface seep in Pennsylvania in 1859. With the coal, water and horse-powered industrial revolution already ramping up, the new energy source was quickly exploited to power new machines of all kinds. The U.S.-led world production for over a century, an era Kunstler describes as the “cheap oil fiesta.” The party’s about to end in “a tremendous trauma for the human race.”

Times-Argus (Vermont)