Contraction and Electric Car Whimsy
The cat coming out of the bag this week — a frazzled, flaming, rabid, death-dealing cat — is the news that Goldman Sachs will announce impressive second-quarter profits, and set aside $18 billion or so for employee bonuses averaging $600,000 per head (though, of course, not evenly distributed among them). There probably are not fifty-three people in the USA who can explain how this development figures in with last fall’s bailout gift from the US treasury, or the $13 billion GS received on the backside of US gift payments to the failed AIG insurance company, plus the reams of necrotic securitized debt paper rotting in the back of the GS vaults. This is a company playing with the fire of world history.
It brings back the question, which has loomed dimly at the margins of America’s collective consciousness, as to whether we can get through the long emergency ahead without going through a wringer of domestic political convulsion. At this rate, sooner or later, anything identified with wealth could become a target for the wrath of the unemployed and foreclosed. The first rock that flies through an East Hampton window, or the first firebomb tossed into the lobby of Goldman Sachs Manhattan headquarters could ignite a chain of events that shoves all economic policy out of the political arena and quickly divides everyone at the center of power into armies out for blood.
What the nation — including President Obama — can’t seem to get through its head is that the USA has entered a period of epochal economic contraction. Instead of growth, as measured in conventional econometrics, we can only expect (in the best case) transformation to a different economy within the limits of real contraction. The president has got to stop promising renewed growth. While this would affect the perceived “standard-of-living” as measured in things like shopping mall sales and vehicle miles driven, it would not necessarily mean diminished “quality-of-life.” It would mean different ways-of-life for a lot of people — for instance, young adults who had expected lifetime employment as corporate executives but who, instead, find themselves ten years from now working at farming. We have an awful lot to get real about.
A genuine reorganization of the US economy seems beyond the ken not just of all US politicians but of the entire US news media and business leadership. A wonderful example last week was the idiotic press conference by General Motors marketing chief, Bob Lutz, who thinks he can revive the American Dream with electric cars. (By the way, this is pretty much the same thinking I encountered at the Aspen Environmental Forum among the Green celebrities.)
From a purely practical standpoint, the electric car is absurd. If they were produced on a mass basis, they would crash the electric grid — assuming that the masses could afford to buy them, which assumes a lot. We simply don’t have the electric generating capacity to run even one-quarter of the current car fleet on volts, and building the necessary nuclear or coal-fired power plants in five years is also an absurdity. (Don’t expect wind, solar, biomass, or anything else to pick up the slack.) If electric cars were produced as just a niche product for the elite (e.g. Goldman Sachs employees), they would soon provoke the resentment of the non-elite left to the mercy of the oil markets.
Anyway, America’s motoring dilemma has gone beyond the issue of how we power the cars — and even beyond the insanity of blindly maintaining our extreme car dependency per se. The continuation of Happy Motoring now hinges on two other big quandaries: 1. the likelihood that there will be far less capital available for car loans, and 2.) the likelihood that there will be far less government money for road maintenance. The problem of Peak Oil — and the prospect of price-jackings and shortages — is just the cherry on top.
By the way, for practical purposes Bob Lutz of GM is an employee of the US taxpayers now, since the US owns 60 percent of the “new” General Motors, so he must be considered a spokesman for national policy. Since a transformation of the US car fleet to electric vehicles is absurd, what would be an appropriate response to profound economic contraction? How about walkable communities connected by mass transit? Why is that not a focus of the “new” General Motors? In 1941 the company made the transformation from cars to armaments in a matter of months; why can’t it produce the rolling stock for a renewed passenger rail system? Or trams? Is this not enough of a crisis? The answer is that there is no leadership in this direction. If President Obama declared this to be a policy objective, and stuck to it for more than one business day, he could drag the sleepwalking American public in this direction, and the rest of national leadership in government, business, and media with it.
This kind of thing is what prompts casual observers to wonder if the president is a cynical shill for business as usual, or a victim of the worst conventional thinking with no real vision, or just another clueless sleepwalking bozo with a charming veneer.
In circles that pass for “progressive” these days, the natives are getting restless. Their agitation seems pretty inchoate for the moment — still resting on vague, poorly-defined wishes for “change.” These vague promptings need to be focused on specific action that is realistic within the context of comprehensive contraction and transformation. A big piece of this would be the recognition that our suburban sprawl economy is dying, and that we now have to bend our efforts to reorganizing American life on the most fundamental physical terms. We have to inhabit the landscape differently, move around it differently, generate food out of it differently, and make things on it again. Whatever remaining real capital there is in the system can’t be squandered on cash bonuses for Wall Street employees.
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
July 16, 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.
ShareThis
“Clueless sleepwalking bozo with a charming veneer” pretty much sums up our First Term Senator Turned President, I’m afraid.
The mainstream Democrats and the leftists should be feeling some severe buyer’s remorse about now in regards to BHO. Somehow they all think that it is the other guys- the rednecks, the working stiffs, the denizens of flyover country who will be forced out of their SUV’s and forced to drop their standard of living. In fact, without the critical mass of middle class earners striving for and getting a bit of the good life, the pie does start to shrink. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins and believing your neighbor unworthy of his things is certainly envy.
Shame about the railroads, though- if someone were to do a mixed mode system where interstate rail carried electric cars (a ferry scheme where the cost for a heavy petroleum fueled car cost more to ferry than a GEM car), you might have something. Instead we all fight about railroads as a symbol of public transport ( a communitarian leveler for the left and a communist freedom destroyer for the right).
Closer to home, getting rid of stop signs and lights at most intersections and redesigning to avoid accidents would immediately save millions of barrels of oil, not only in idle and acceleration, but in wear and tear on brakes, clutches, bands, bearings, shafts, tires, ad nauseum- all of which require energy intensive manufacturing. Instead they put out more cops and nazicams to enforce venality and stupidity.
Darling James:
I always love your work, but, alas, there is going to be a “but” following. Sometimes I wonder, Cupcake, if we live in the same world. Please explain to me, in your brilliant, far-sighted way, “young adults who had expected lifetime employment as corporate executives but who, instead, find themselves ten years from now working at farming.” We’ll pass lightly over the fact that it takes at least ten years to become an adequate farmer according to traditional wisdom.
What I can NOT give that statement a pass on is two factors:
1. Where, exactly, are these people to find employers? Ranch hands make $7/hour–if they are lucky!–with no benefits. Even when paid under the table, as many (probably all!) part time rural workers are and will be in a Depression, they could not live on twelve hundred dollars a month if they got forty hour weeks. That will not cover housing, transportation, and food, particularly as prices rise and the dollar continues to sink, as we think inevitable.
Take my word for it, starting a farming or ranching operation whether one has the requisite knowledge or no is so ruinously expensive that very few can aspire to even “Five Acres to Independence.” The bare minimum is land, a house, a barn, at least a couple of dairy goats and a buck, chickens, a way to support one’s self that has nothing to do with work in the boondocks, chickens, stockpiled fuel, farm equipment, food stores, seeds, a private source of water…the list is endless. I’ve been working on the project for two solid years and am not totally self-sufficient yet, not even considering being off the power grid.
The city boys and girls have no useful skills, although presumably they have strong backs. Maybe. They don’t know how to pick corn, plant herbs, or shut gates every time. They are afraid of cows, horses, goats, snakes, and tractors. What will they be GOOD for?
Where will they live? Farming communities are not usually lush with available housing. As I have noted before, they tend to be well-balanced closed societies which provide all the basics (WalMart is never more than 25 miles away.) All needs are provided and if there were room for a new enterprise someone would already have filled that need. Not enough people want a bowling alley, a skating rink, a tatoo parlor, or frequently even more than a once a week movie house enough to make them viable economically.
If your assumption is that young people with degrees in finance–or worse, those who majored in Geography, “Women’s Studies,” or Marketing–are going to be forced to do whatever they can to keep from starving I can certainly agree that the best choice will be a job someplace where food grows. However, we are never going to need any of them.
We’re considering a third hand, and the people you describe couldn’t begin to compete against a homeless man who has been in prison for fifteen months! (Well, okay, so he was there in modern debtor’s prison for being unable to pay child support. I think they make thirty-seven cents an hour in some prisons, don’t they?) Roy is ex-military (something that always touches my heart) and has carpentry, roofing, and automotive repair skills. He loves to hunt and wants to take on the wild hawg population with a spear! (I feel faint.) He is in excellent physical condition and in his forties. He has not been valued in this society, but during the Greater Depression he will be. For those who can afford such a very useful man, he and others like him can probably be obtained for room, board, and a couple of hundred dollars a week at present. If we get to the barter society such men will be well worth food and shelter and happy to work for nothing for the incredible security they will have. The goal is to put together a self-sufficient fiefdom that provides all of the needs of those who contribute to the wellbeing of the community.
2. The Obama Nation is doing a superb job of making it completely impossible for us to feed ourselves legally. The Food ‘Safety’ Bill outlaws heritage seeds, raw milk, and slaughtering our own animals for home consumption. Small farmers will not be able to feed themselves, far less supply local grocery stores if we get to the Anti-Industrial Revolution without subsequent loss of millions of pages of regulations. MDC–sorry, My darling Charles–stripped an ear of Monsanto-produced corn recently. Not only did it not contain seed which would reproduce, it contained no kernels at all…nothing but silk and the cob. Oklahoma is trying to shut down 1800 poultry houses that produced millions of pounds last year and employed 55,000 people, on the incredible charge that chicken manure–the finest natural fertilizer available–is polluting the watershed! The houses are usually cleaned out twice a year, during which period most of the manure has composted naturally. Precisely how are they supposed to make money if they have to do…what? with 345,000 tons of chicken manure and wood shavings annually? The suggestion that it be burned would surely find favor with the Greens and the Cap and Trade bunch. The land needs the manure, and any run off does NOT cause disease but leads to fish growth.
We live in a world where it will be a CRIME to have raw milk in your car, a CRIME to possess heritage seeds which breed true, and a CRIME to wring a chicken’s neck, dunk it in hot water, pull out the smelly feathers, eviserate it, wash it off, and pop it into the oven for dinner. It will be a crime to give away raw milk and the regulations to be enacted are so costly and complicated that those without large herds and big bank accounts will never be able to comply.
“We have an awful lot to get real about,” indeed.
I couldn’t bear to live in the city, but legislation being churned out right now is going to turn my enormous (for me) investment into a millstone. What am I supposed to do with the Black Irish Dexter cows which not only eat a thousand dollars’ worth of food a month in bad times but will be taxed for emitting methane? No one else will want to buy them either. If we can’t feed ourselves and our hands legally, how can we begin to offer shelter to others in return for them being of no use unles supervised continually for at least a year, at which point we will still not have produced food we can eat or sell?
If you have some answers, I would really appreciate them.
Great article, you know, even if I can’t agree that the 2.1 million small farms still hanging on can assimilate millions of hungry unemployed. I try to imagine Thomas Jefferson’s response if told the Bill of Rights needed to include the right to grow and process our own food.
Regards,
LBT
Dear liberal readers: GO [be fruitful and multiply with] YOURSELVES.
(Edited with a chuckle by Gary Gibson.)
While you are right about the change we are facing being profound and structural, you make the same error of hubris as the acting president if you think you can predict the structures of the future. Cheaper transportation would likely not involve inefficient and expensive centralized light rail projects, but more likely buses and group taxis. Randall O’Toole has done some excellent writing on the inefficiencies of socialist mass transit projects. You reference to light rail was a jarring note in an otherwise excellent piece.
At the end of the day, with all the proselytizing from left right and center, there is only one salient point: because of our inability to turn many herds into one, WE’RE FUCKED. So what is left is to eliminate many herds until there is only one.