Are You Ready for the Energy Crash?

The biggest obstacle to getting our petro-dependent society to change its wasteful ways is collective insanity.

While most of us are preoccupied with the astronomical price of gasoline, a far bigger energy catastrophe is brewing that will make pricey gas seem like a walk in the park. It’s “peak oil” — the term for the period after which global oil and natural gas demand outstrips supply and the prices for these commodities become too volatile for modern society to function. (For a primer on the topic, a good place to start is Hubbert’s peak oil theory.)

One writer, James Howard Kunstler, has been particularly passionate — some might say over-the-top — about peak oil. In his latest book, “The Long Emergency,” Kunstler addresses our stark looming reality square in the face and analyzes the consequences. While many of the scenarios he describes — the prospect of millions of Americans stranded in suburbia forced to preside over their economic decline as their once normal auto-dependent lives become unattainable luxuries — are no doubt valid, his tone strikes me as overly apocalyptic.

So I was curious to hear what Kunstler would say at the Local Energy Solutions conference in New York City last month. Aside from Kunstler, I knew what to expect from the rest of the speakers at the conference — ideas and information about how we can best cope after the energy crash.

Perhaps what was so striking about the speakers and attendants at the conference was their almost angelic goodness and optimism — even though by all rights they are among the most knowledgeable about the scale of the challenge facing our petro-dependent society, and would have the most cause to make a run for all those abandoned cabins constructed in the Yukon after the Y2K nonapocalyptic anticlimax.

AlterNet