Kunstler: Author speaks of future oil, environmental, economic crises

The kind of society Americans know and support cannot continue, said James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency”, a book about the issues future generations will face regarding the oil crisis, global warming and living in suburbia. Kunstler spoke on Tuesday in Lewis Lab.

America does not know how to pay back its debt, and our resources are approaching their scarcity limits, he said.

Kunstler also spoke about the future of America and what must happen for the country to be able to thrive in the future.

He focused on the depletion of oil. The United States uses one billion barrels of oil every two weeks, almost all of which is imported from other nations, he said. Oil will become a source for political turmoil, he said.

He said new, usable oil fields have not been discovered, so he anticipates a companion crisis in oil nationalism, meaning that oil-producing nations will learn to divide and distribute oil differently. There are no apparent combinations of alternative fuels that will allow America to keep running the way it is running, according to Kunstler. America needs to create more urban and rural towns.

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