Kunstler: Crunch Time

…I haven’t changed my view of what is happening to us. We have run out our string of stunts and tricks in the money rackets. We’ve spent our legitimacy. The rest of the world will strive mightily to get free of their obligations to us, including their respect for the value of our currency. The meta-cycle of suburban development, including the “housing” and all its accessories in roads and chain stores, is hitting the wall of peak oil. The suburban build-out is over. This will come as an agonizing surprise to many. The failure to make infinite suburbanization the permanent basis for an economy will rock our society for years to come. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed men with pick-up trucks and panoplies of power tools will feel horribly cheated. I hope they don’t start an extremist political party when the re-po men come to take their trucks away.

Even under the best circumstances, with a nationwide change of heart, and really wise leadership, America would find it difficult to make the necessary changes that new reality requires. Of course, reality will force us to make these changes whether we’re on board with the program or not. The only variable is how much turmoil may ensue in the process. If we resist doing what reality commands, our trouble is certain to be worse.

What does reality command? Well, first of all (and especially for the benefit of the enviro-progressives I have met recently, who want gold medals for buying hybrid cars) we’d better drop the idea that there is any way whatsoever to preserve our system of happy motoring. The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished. We’d better find something else to talk about, or the American future will amount to little more than a colossal circle-jerk on an increasingly unfixable freeway. I am hugely worried (obviously) that even the intelligent-and-educated fraction of our society cannot focus on anything but how to keep all the cars running. A failure to drop this, and move on to more practical endeavors, will lead automatically to a failure of reasonable politics in this country. It is already manifest in the abysmal failure of the Democratic candidates for president to address the looming oil import crisis that will certainly be underway as soon as any of them is inaugurated.

Atlantic Free Press