www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_09_12/cover.html
September 12, 2005 Issue Copyright 2005 The American Conservative End of the Binge The exhaustion of our energy supply may end affluence as we know it. by James Howard Kunstler Among the strange delusions and hallucinations gripping the body politic these days is the idea that the so-called global economy is a permanent fixture of the human condition. The seemingly unanimous embrace of this idea in the power circles of America is a marvelous illustration of the madness of crowds, for nothing could be farther from the truth. The global economy is, in fact, nothing more than a transient set of trad e and financial relations based on a particular set of transient, specia l sociopolitical conditions, namely a few decades of relative world peac e between the great powers along with substantial, reliable supplies of predictably cheap fossil fuels. The result, as far as America is concern ed, has been an extended fiesta based on suburban comfort, easy motoring , fried food in abundance, universal air conditioning, and bargain-price d imported merchandise acquired on promises to pay latera way of life d escribed by Vice President Cheney as non-negotiable. Of particular concern ought to be the 12,000-mile-long merchandise supply lines from Asia that American retailers such as Wal-Mart depend on and from which American consumers (as opposed to citizens, ie, people wi th duties, obligations, and responsibilities) get most of their househol d goods these days. Wal-Mart now gets 70 percent of its products from Ch ina. This fragile calculus plays out against a background of rapidly escalatin g and increasingly desperate strategic maneuvering around the global oil -production peak and its implications. Peak oil, for short, would unseat the relative peace and cheap-energy basis of our current global arrange ments. Yet most of the discussion abo ut the boon of globalism, especially the virtual cheerleading of New Yor k Times columnist Thomas Friedman, is occurring in complete disregard of the gathering peak-oil crisis. The Left and Right are both equally guil ty of epic cluelessness. Even among those who have heard the term, peak oil is generally misunders tood. Its about the remorseless decl ine in production following the all-time worldwide peak and a desperate competition to control the remaining supplies, which happen to be inequi tably distributed in a few select regions of the world. The US happens to be one of them, but we are into the twilight of our own supplies. We began production back in 1859, ramped up over many decades to a peak of over 10 million barrels a day in 1970, and have now fallen off to under 5 million barrels a day of conventional crudewith the numbers headed y et more steeply down. We have 28 billion barrels of conventional crude l eft, and we burn through more than 20 million barrels a day or 7 billion barrels a year. Commentators such as Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize, a history of the oil industry, and now head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a P R firm serving the major oil companies, like to point to North Americas substantial supplies of tar sands (theyre up in Canada) and oil shale (it isnt really oil but a hydrocarbon precursor called kerogen). The ma in catch is that these unconventional sources will yield oil only at hig h prices, while the procedures for getting them impose additional severe environmental costs including massive water pollution. One is that technology will rescue us from energy scarcity, which is based o n the idea that technology can be substituted for energy, that they are virtually interchangeable. Linked to this is the notion that alternative energy sour cescoal, natural gas, solar and wind power, hydrogen, nuclear fission a nd fusion, bio-fuels, and even some long shots like zero-point energy (Z PE) will bail us out. The truth is that there is not going to be a hydrogen economy because hyd rogen requires more energy to produce than you get back. Thats why you havent heard any more about it since President Bushs premature tub-thu mping in the 2002 State of the Union address. We have less coal than man y people believe, of lower quality, and using it comes with enormous cos ts related to climate change. Our natural gas supplies are arguably more at risk of depletion than our oil supplies. Wind and solar energy will never produce more than a fraction of what we are currently using, nor c an these things do what oil does in transportation. We probably will hav e to resort to more nuclear-powered electric generation if we want to ke ep the lights on after 2025, but were not going to run the interstate h ighway system on electricity alone nor fly jet planes on U-235. Fusion i s still the same energy of the future that it was in 1970. Make no mistake, we will be using many of these things, but they will not replace the benefits we have derived from cheap oil, and they will not in themselves be cheap or plentiful. The bottom line is that no combinat ion of alternative fuels or systems for running them will allow us to ru n the non-negotiable American Dream the way we are currently running it or even a substantial portion of it. We are going to have to make other arrangements, and the process will probably include an interval of hards hip and discontinuity. America went through a harrowing decade of stagfla tion and related economic woes: high unemployment, inflation, skyrocket ing interest rates, tanking industries, asset deflation, gas lines. In r esponse to that trauma, the US and its Western allies desperately brou ght into production the last great discoveries of the oil age, the North Sea and the arctic region of Alaska. While these developments afforded us some leverage against OPEC and bought us some time, they also led to an unfortunate intermezzo of complacency from the mid-1980s into the 200 0s during which a world glut of oil briefly materialized, sending prices down as low as $10 a barrel, in turn leading the American public to fal l asleep over energy issues after deciding that the crises of the 1970s had been a shuck-and-jive by greedy oil companies colluding with Arab sh eiks. In short, we tragically squandered the opportunity to remake the A merican Dream along less oil-addicted lines. Instead, we shifted into party-hearty suburban turbo-development overdriv e and elaborated with greater recklessness than ever on a hyper car-depe ndent living arrangement that was profitable to construct but which has exceedingly poor prospects as an armature for daily life in the decades to come. To make matters worse, we surrendered the bulk of our manufactu ring economy to other nations with cheaper labor and fewer environmental scruples and actually made the doomed suburban expansion project, and a ll its ancillary activities such as mortgage-lending, real-estate sales, strip-mall commerce, and easy motoring, the new basis of our economy. T his was the dirty secret of our economy from Reagan on: the creation of ever more suburban sprawl and its accessories was mostly what we did in America. Subtract it from everything else and there was little left but haircutting and open-heart surgery. The economy wasnt about informatio n or buying and selling things on the Internet. It was about bulldozing 200 acres of red clay 38 miles outside Atlanta, plunking McHouses down on half-acre lots, tilting up a programmed set of national chain retail outlets on the nearest collector highway, granting no-money-down inter est-only mortgages to anyone with a pulse regardless of creditworthiness (or lack of), and then flipping those mortgages into yet more abstract tradable securitized debt instruments. Thus, when the Tom Friedmans and David Brookses of the world beat the dru m for the global economy, it is not clear whether they are really talkin g about international trade relations or the sleazy and destructive rack ets that have insidiously replaced the formerly productive activity of t he United States especially insofar as the suburban project can be cate gorized as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world precisely because it will be so valueless in the future. It must be o...
|
http://csua.com/feed/