Climate, Oil, Reality and Delusion
Against a greater welter and flow of incoherence jerking the nation this way and that way en route to collapse comes “ClimateGate,” the latest excuse for screaming knuckleheads to defend what has already been lost. It is also yet another distraction from the emergency agenda that the United States faces – namely the urgent re-scaling, re-localizing, and de-globalizing of our daily activities.
What seems to be at stake for the knuckleheads is their identity, their idea of what it means to be an American, which boils down to being an organism so specially blessed and entitled that it is excused from paying attention to reality. There were no doubt plenty of counterparts among the Mayans when the weather changed and their crops failed, and certainly the Romans had their share of identity psychotics who doubted reality even when Alaric the Visigoth was hoisting off their household treasure.
Reality doesn’t care if we are on-board with its mandates or not. The human race has to get with whatever program reality is serving up at a particular time. Are we shocked to learn that scientists fight among themselves and cheat as much as congressmen? Does that really change the relationships we understand about parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and the weather?
What the people of the world can do or will do about a change in climate is something else. My guess is that the undertow of entropy is now too great to provoke any meaningful unified change in behavior. The collapse of the US economy is too close to the horizon, and the so-called developing nations will have problems equally severe. In the meantime, it is unlikely that any of the major players will burn less coal and oil, or not cheat on each other even if they pledge to burn less. People who are not knuckleheads will make the practical arrangements that they can. These will, by definition, be localized, small-scale, and non-global communities, doing what they would have to do anyway.
A parallel identity mania afflicts those who have decided that the Bakken shale oil deposits and the Marcellus gas play will allow the USA to cancel any modifications to our living arrangements. This cohort of knuckleheads wants to believe the public relations of the oil and gas industry, and in particular the bankers who are arranging the financing for these ventures. The facts are irrelevant to their identity-claims (that the USA has limitless energy resources). In fact, the Bakken shale formation is unlikely to produce more than a few hundred thousand barrels of oil a day in a nation used to burning about twenty million. A few hundred thousand might mean a lot if were only used to light kerosene lamps, but it is unlikely to keep the faithful motoring off to WalMart and Walt Disney World – which is the exact expectation of the knuckleheads.
Shale gas is a similar story. It will be too expensive to get out of the tight rock at a flow that will allow business as usual to continue. It certainly won’t be produced at under $10 a unit, and the nation’s comprehensive bankruptcy accelerates every day, making it less likely that the public can pay premium prices within the framework of our current living arrangement.
The Green Shoots crowd – a sub-category of identity maniacs, who think the USA is immune to the laws of history and physics – has made common cause with the oil and climate knuckleheads to proclaim that we are returning to normal, back to the “consumer” orgy, the suburban sprawl nexus of McHousing and miracle mortgages, and new frontiers of corporate profit-raking.
They are tragically wrong. Instead, we’re headed into the wildest king-hell debt workout that the world has ever seen, which will propel a lot of people used to working in air-conditioned cubicles into a world made by hand. We march day by day into the great holiday season with mortgages going unpaid and the credit cards getting cancelled and money disappearing and the fears and grievances mounting. Pretty soon, the folks doing “God’s work” at Goldman Sachs (and their tribal kin on Wall Street) will announce their annual bonuses (because they are publicly-held companies, which have to do so). Won’t that be a galvanizing moment for us all?
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
December 8, 2009
James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler is perhaps best known for The Long Emergency, which predicted the financial meltdown and the implications of the peak oil problem. The Geography of Nowhere , about the fiasco of suburbia, is a campus cult classic among the architecture and urban planning students. It was followed by a sequel, Home From Nowhere and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition . Mr. Kunstler has also authored 10 novels including World Made By Hand, a story set in America's post-oil future. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly.
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I never trouble my mind with things beyond my control, such as how to get 300,000,000 individuals and a vast bureaucracy to do what strikes me as sensible. It can’t be done, and, as Mr. Kunstler implies, a great many would think a collection of small, agrarian societies a fate worse than any other they can invision at present. Yes, they appear to have very poor imaginations. Eventually it will be every man for himself, and those who can see the danger and have the will and some sort of resources will do what is necessary to procure at least a modicum of safety while there is yet time–IF there is yet time. Still, anything would be better than nothing if you awoke to a world where all you had was what was in your house or automobile. It may be that if the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away those who survive the first three weeks to three months will come through to a new world where either you grow your own food or you have skills valuable enough to swap for it. My suggestion for a very, merry Christmas is to give each other emergency food supplies or a first-class water purification system.
Eew, ouch. James Kuntsler called me and my kind knuckleheads. Kuntsler, do you say mean things to teenagers with braces on their teeth? What will you do when the global economy produces carbon-free electricity in abundance at rates below $0.10 per kwh? It will happen. WIll you knit your trousers by hand? Will you need to try to grow enough grain to feed your family in your backyard? Please. Who really needs to get real? The billions of hard working people who get up everyday and create the science, services, materials and technology that delivers the goods or the whining, losers who can’t produce anything except worn-out 60′s doom, gloom and fantasies.
Make it to next summer and the market will begin to correct itself. The end of the world is not here. But hard times are and will remain to be.
Don’t get caught up in your own fantasies.
monitorclimatechange.blogspot.com
I caught a glimpse of the image you are writing about Mr. Kunstler.
Reality, the way you see it. Searching through the uncertainty to understand an unknown future.
Seeking the truth, like jousting with windmills and searching for the holy grail of sorts, some of us are seeking answers in the random madness of life.
You are correct about the “wildest king-hell debt workout that the world has ever seen” upcoming.
The writers of Agora Financial keep drawing my attention, thanks.
Ahhh…the joys of screaming “Who cares if I’m lying, as long as I’m right!”
You global-warming worshiping wealth-transferers are down there with FDR (Pearl Harbor), Bush (Iraq), and LBJ (Tonkin).
Oh, and btw, scientists understand nothing about PPM of CO2 to temperature. That’s why they were LYING. The sun is melting the ice caps of Mars. And, intelligent people suspect, Earth as well. But there’s no money/power to be gained from that truth. Is there?
Dear Nicholas: I enjoyed visiting your http://www.monitorclimatechange.blogspot.com. DO hold forth on why you think the market–admittedly an artificial construct subject to manipulation–will begin to correct itself by next summer. I admit cheerfully that the DOW, as a measure of economic health, probably has roughly as much bearing on reality as who will be voted off an island next, without the benefit of going home to civilized comforts as compensation for losing the work invested. Just for fun, go over to http://www.thetexasring.com and look for “We Don’t Have to Practice Being Miserable” and my piece on a stay-at-home survival weekend. I put the readers on their honor not to use electricity at all but let them “earn” gallons of water by jogging up and down two flights of stairs with full jugs to simulate getting it from a creek or well. Next we’re going to do “everything you can have for the weekend is what you can put in a 5-gallon bucket,” that standing in for a backpack. Oh, my…a sleeping bag would fill it up, wouldn’t it?! And 2 gallons of water, weighing 16 pounds and being rather bulky is a nasty restriction, but very realistic “if.” If you have to carry your comforts you must choose them wisely–AFTER attending to necessities. Linda
Part of the rationale for oil continuing to increase in price is that India & China will take up any slack from lagging American demand. Maybe, if we’re talking about industrial demand, but the question that arises there is who are they going to be selling the stuff they make with all that oil? And in the case of India, incremental increases in services don’t tend to require much in the way of increased oil demand. Maybe enough to keep the lights on until midnight instead of 6 pm.
Or will China launch another stimulus program focusing on infrastructure investment and demanding huge oil inputs to operate machinery, produce and process materials, and etc? No. The Chinese are slamming the brakes on lending now because of inflation worries.
Alright, well maybe consumers in China, which is now the world’s largest car market, and India, are going to start doing the eastern equivalent of “see the USA in your Chevrolet”? No. Yes, China’s overtaken the US as the largest market for automobiles, but just in time for prices of gasoline to get so high that they won’t be able to afford to buy them.
Recall that although incomes have increased in these countries, the median incomes are still far below those in the west. Worldwide increases in oil prices will snuff out consumer demand for gasoline in China and India even more quickly than in the U.S. Accelerating this drop in demand will be the fact that, as Ambrose Pritchard-Evans so cheerily summarizes in a recent column, we’re all going down together, all off us lucky developed world types that is, the ones who buy the stuff that all the bright-eyed new consumers of the east eagerly sell us, motivated as they are buy the increasingly realizable possibility that they, too, can live the good life, just like us.
Barring market manipulation on the scale which produced $147/bbl a few years ago, and that’s a pretty big assumption in a world where Goldman Sachs rents oil tankers to sit off the coast, full of the stuff, until prices rise enough to make delivery profitable; the price of oil will drift slightly downward over the next year or so. The Oil Cos will pull their usual stunt and just let everything go to seed for a while, and without investment to keep production near current levels, and to bring known but currently not producing capacity online, it will begin to recover slow upward momentum at some indeterminate time 6 months to 2 years in the future.
The world will not end when the lights go out, but when we all suffocate to death under ever increasing piless of worthless paper.l