Kunstler: Farewell to suburbia

Car-dependent communities, the greatest misallocation of resources in history, have no future — but that’s just one of the shocks the global oil crisis is going to bring

The fog of cluelessness that hangs over North America about the gathering global oil crisis and its ramifications seems to thicken by the hour. One reason for all the fog is that the key part of the story is so broadly misunderstood — namely, that it’s not about running out of oil; it’s about how the complex systems we depend on for everyday life begin to destabilize as the global demand for oil starts to outstrip the supply.

By “complex systems” I mean very precisely:


– the way we produce and distribute our food;

– the way we do commerce and manufacturing;

– the way we move people and things around the landscape;

– the way we accumulate and deploy capital investment;

– the way we get and allocate energy resources (i.e. the oil markets themselves);

– plus many other activities such as education, medicine, governance, and so on.

All these systems are visibly wobbling these days, and mutually reinforcing each other’s instabilities, multiplying and accelerating our problems. For instance, our ventures in bio-fuels are affecting worldwide grain prices so severely that food riots have broken out in several poor countries. Whoops! Bitten by unintended consequences.

Ottawa Citizen