[Carfreeliving] Car lighter....
Jason Henderson
jhenders at sbcglobal.net
Tue Mar 29 19:13:46 MST 2005
There is an essay along these lines in the recent issue of Rolling Stone.
-jh
*The Long Emergency *
* By James Howard Kunstler *
* The Rolling Stone *
* **Thursday 24 March 2005** *
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a
barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The
next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times
business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered
significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of
ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred
points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation.
Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that
"people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may
challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and
especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are
in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.
It has been very hard for Americans - lost in dark raptures of nonstop
infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring - to make
sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of
everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist
attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call
this coming time the Long Emergency.
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is
no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural
gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -
not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air
conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing,
recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense - you
name it.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering
global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument.
That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having
severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We
only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down
the arc of steady depletion.
The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will
come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given
year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is
usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of
the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment,
meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil,
and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more
difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and
located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of
it will never be extracted.
The United States passed its own oil peak - about 11 million barrels a
day - in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it
ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas
condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That
means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will
continue to worsen.
The US peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic
power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting
the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In
response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea
fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about
two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile,
worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant
levels in 2003 and 2004.
Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a creamy
nougat center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great oil
fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no
replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America
or any other place.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best
estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between
now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and
India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its
reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production
despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their
predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time
global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also
declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with
the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of
the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl
and the acid-rain problem, the US chose to make gas its first choice for
electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power
plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are
heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import.
Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network.
Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260
degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified)
at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first
attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they
are such ripe targets for terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly
understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a
permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the
disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot
to produce higher orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed
conditions.
No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life
the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of
it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the
reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome,
leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough
will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are
wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their
putative replacements.
The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We
are not going to replace the US automobile and truck fleet with vehicles
run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is
largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other
way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of
water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim
prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are
also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that
present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas,
especially in storage and transport.
Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are
also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only
the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require
substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they
can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a
fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to
generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local
and small scale.
Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid
fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things
are currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil
and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops
that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net
energy loser - you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with
the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by
means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced
by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.
Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant
supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological
drawbacks - as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming" gases and many
health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to
acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this
was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions,
using impressive amounts of slave labor.
If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed
have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and
eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a
new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may
be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are
no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than
we were in the 1970s.
The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of
potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously,
geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has
already led to war and promises more international military conflict.
Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil
supplies, the US has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in
effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to
secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring
states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The
results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in
that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident
about.
And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the
world's second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging
industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are
counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these
places - the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia - and
extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil
in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the US
military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to
secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant,
unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the US could
exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw
back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world's
remaining oil in the process.
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this
predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of
the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and
repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a
report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is
for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like
this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the
problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."
Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other
arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a
special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a
society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns
and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the
additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America.
Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of
resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The
psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our
drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.
Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the
ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food
shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to
stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale
and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of
communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way
we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become
profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility
and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large
scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as
Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall
away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic
losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former
middle class.
Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long
Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and
gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer
to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of
the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not
information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or
hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling,
radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the
reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of
land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and
integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of
readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production
will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for
decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American
farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned
economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream.
These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social
relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical
security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if
mistreated they may simply seize that land.
The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not
survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels"
won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain
stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted
by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that
have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they,
too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the
disorders that go with it.
As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements
for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will
probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory
system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower
- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands
of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are
made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The
selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will
have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost
certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer
choices.
The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the
least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our
roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate
than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers
call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and
escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The
interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.
America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be
ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004
mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there
may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades
from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees
financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic
airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet.
Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes,
and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed
infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway
network.
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones
surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally
sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and
smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will
probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and
tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St.
Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall.
New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied
with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy
supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over.
They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that
will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities
occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they
are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century
industrialism.
Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long
Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it
prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I
predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become
significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well
as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air
conditioning.
I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons.
I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the
grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the
delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior
of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the
belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor
recipe for civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems,
from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The
Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better
prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy
or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best
social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.
These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is
going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe
that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought
to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to
cultivate a religion of hope - that is, a deep and comprehensive belief
that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark
changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal
relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our
neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully
engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely
entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all,
we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.
Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler, and
reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Bert Hill wrote:
> How was it enforced in the 70's - didn't it go by license plate digit
> or number?
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
> This is where the faded memories of Baby Boomers come in...
> License plates were one scheme in certain localities. Most areas
> limited fuel filling to 5 gallons at a time; people waited long hours
> in gas lines, carpooled, didn't drive, kept jerry cans in their trunks
> & garages, installed illegal underground tanks, and siphoned each
> other's gas tanks. The national freeway speed limit was set at 55
> MPH, and all speed limits were rigidly enforced, under threat of
> losing federal highway funds. Nixon and Congress played with price
> controls. Unfortunately, the rapidity of the shortage was such a
> shock that everyone suffered, even city dwellers, non-drivers and
> conservationists. There was no system of equity for the victims of
> the secondary effects of high fuel prices, and the nation faced
> inflation and recession at the same time. A number of elderly and
> poor died because they couldn't afford to heat their homes or wait in
> line for heating fuels in the Northeast. Wood became a valuable
> commodity, and there was an increase in carbon monoxide (and air
> inversion) deaths. For the next ten years, compact cars were the best
> sellers, and Toyota & Honda became major companies in the U.S.
>
> We can only hope the memories of the fuel embargo are latent but
> recoverable in the minds of enough people that we are moved more
> towards sensible conservation, technological alternatives (sustainable
> energy), and equity; and not repeat the actioons that led to WWII with
> global resource imperialism in a short term effort to mollify the
> panicked masses.
>
> For those who haven't read it, 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond and 'Out of
> Gas, the End of the Age of Oil' by David Goodstein are instructive.
>
> Bert Hill
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> /Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 by Reuters
> <http://www.reuters.com/> /
> *Unlikely Bedfellows Lobby Against U.S. Gas-Guzzlers *
> *by Chris Baltimore*
>
>
> WASHINGTON -- A group of former national security officials on Monday
> took up the cause of weaning U.S. drivers from their oil addiction --
> normally the realm of environmental groups -- and asked the Bush
> administration to spend $1 billion on lighter, more fuel-efficient
> automobiles.
>
> Retail U.S. gasoline prices now averaging above $2 a gallon make U.S.
> reliance on foreign suppliers like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia a
> looming national security crisis, a group of 31 national security
> officials said in a letter to President Bush.
>
> "This really constitutes a national security crisis in the making,"
> said letter signer Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security
> Policy, a thinktank, and a former Defense Department official under
> former President Ronald Reagan.
>
> Other signers included Robert McFarlane, Reagan's national security
> advisor, and James Woolsey, Central Intelligence Agency director under
> President Bill Clinton.
>
> In an uncharacteristic move, the security experts sought input from
> groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, which have long
> lobbied for more fuel-efficient cars.
>
> "It's strange bedfellows but this is actually the real American
> majority," said Nicole St. Clair, a spokeswoman for the NRDC. "It's
> common sense."
>
> Policymakers should address rampant oil demand from gas-guzzling
> vehicles, and stop trying to solve the problem by opening land like
> the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, she said.
>
> The letter urged the government to encourage car makers to design
> vehicles from lighter materials to improve mileage. It also endorsed
> the use of "plug power" -- hybrid vehicles that can run off internal
> batteries for short trips before switching to their
> internal-combustion engines.
>
> The program would cost $1 billion over five years.
>
> Regulations known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards
> require automakers to achieve an average fuel economy of 27.5 miles
> per gallon for all passenger cars sold, and 20.7 mpg for vans, sport
> utility vehicles and pick-up trucks. The standards have not been
> tightened for more than a dozen years due to opposition from Detroit.
>
> The average fuel economy has steadily dropped since 1988. It was 20.8
> mpg for all 2003 model vehicles, according to the Environmental
> Protection Agency's annual mileage report.
>
> McFarlane told the White House that stricter mileage standards could
> help cut U.S. crude oil imports in half.
>
> The group's recommendations gave short shrift to hydrogen-powered
> vehicles, a Bush administration priority, because they will take
> decades to field.
>
> U.S. drivers should not depend on foreign suppliers like Saudi Arabia
> for security reasons, they said. Although Saudi officials say the
> kingdom's oilfields are protected from terror attacks, McFarlane said
> the oil installations are "extremely vulnerable from a military point
> of view."
>
> If Saudi oil facilities are damaged, "You're not talking about $100
> (per barrel) oil. You're talking about well beyond that," McFarlane
> said. U.S. crude oil prices peaked on March 17 at $57.60 a barrel.
>
>
>
> Cheryl Brinkman
> McKesson Corporation
> Sr. Product Manager
> Generic Rx
> 415-983-7501
> 415-732-2699 - fax
> cheryl.brinkman at mckesson.com <mailto:cheryl.brinkman at mckesson.com>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
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--
Jason Henderson
San Francisco CA
(415)-255-8136
jhenders at sbcglobal.net
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