Kunstler: Cheap Oil Is Over

Kiss the Gas Guzzling NASCAR Era Goodbye

The car and all its manifold benefits hoisted poor rednecks into a middle-class existence that had seemed like a distant fairytale previously, something only seen in the magazine pages they had used to wallpaper the rooms of their “cracker cottages” (their own typological term for such a dwelling). They became truckers and car dealers and car repairmen and the owners of fried food franchise shacks out on the highway. They made good wages and some became rich. Once a broad money base was established, they excelled at suburban development because rural land was so cheap, and there was so much of it. They worshiped the car more than they worshiped Jesus. The economy of the South was utterly transformed after the Second World War and the new economy was mostly about the car.
Where does this leave us as we enter the new period of history I have several times alluded to: the post-cheap-oil world and eventually a world altogether without recoverable fossil fuels? You could say up a cul-de-sac in a rusted GMC Denali without a fill-up. Or you could say, more to the point, in a society that will have to get its thrills and satisfactions in other ways, involving fewer prosthetic projections of our will to power. The will to power itself will probably be subdued by something more elemental: a will to stay warm, clean, and well-nourished in the era of post-oil-and-gas hardship and turbulence we are entering, which I have taken to calling the “Long Emergency.”

In this new era, coming soon to a 21st century region near you, the formerly industrial nations will have a great deal of trouble keeping the lights on, getting around and feeding their people. Vocational niches by the hundreds will vanish, while the need to make up for a failing industrial agriculture, with all its oil and gas inputs, will require a revived agricultural working class in substantial numbers. This is, in effect, a peasantry, and the word itself obviously carries unappetizing overtones, especially among those who used to be certain that the perfectibility of both human nature and human society were at hand. It all seemed that way, I suppose, in the early 1960s, when the United Auto Workers was setting up vacation camps along the Michigan lakes, and President Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon before the decade ended, and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction kept a sort of peace among the great military powers, and Dad drove home from the Pontiac showroom with a new GTO, which his son, Buddy, used to cruise the strip on Friday nights while “Born to Be Wild” rang out of the radio and into the warm, soporifc San Fernando night.

All over.

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