The Get-Ready Men  

Posted by Big Gav

MIT Technology Review has a look at peak oil. Say what you like about Kunstler's vision of the future, but at least he has done a good job of raising awareness.

We will run out of cheap oil, either now or later. The most pessimistic disciples of the late geologist M. King Hubbert believe that production will peak somewhere between 2000 and 2010. Others suggest that production may top out a few decades after that.

What will happen next is unknown, but an increasing number of the peak-oil handicappers share the dark beliefs of James Howard Kunstler, who predicts that alternative energy sources will never meet our needs and that we are in for a "rough ride through uncharted territory," which will take us "off the edge of a cliff" and thence into "an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before." The sprawl of metaphors is characteristic of Kunstler, who in The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century adds a relentless, scary, and entertaining voice to the rising alarm about life after the cheap oil is gone.

Prophets have been warning Americans of the terrible things in store for decades, but Kunstler joins a fresh corps whose numbers seem to have been increasing as quickly as the price of gas. The past two years have seen books with titles like Paul Roberts's The End of Oil, Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over, Tom Mast's Over a Barrel, and David Goodstein's Out of Gas and a film called The End of Suburbia by Gregory Greene, to name a few, and to leave out their long and unsettling subtitles, most of which approximate Roberts's choice, which is On the Edge of a Perilous New World. These authors may someday join the ranks of the dated alarmists--Jeremy Rifkin, among countless others, issued similar warnings in Entropy in 1980--but then again, they may be right. One may demonstrate that the alarm rings too often and too soon, but that does not mean that danger will never come.

I particularly dislike Kunstler's vision of the future down under. As I also dislike our present government's pathetic and obseqious sucking up to the US in a desperate attempt to guarantee our future security, I'll add a hawkish note that I think we should follow the Indian example and go nuclear - its not like we're short of the raw materials. And as for the idea of desperate Asians raiding the Pacific Northwest, lets just say that seems rather fanciful.
The suburbs--which Kunstler calls "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," and for which he seems to reserve a special contempt--will become particularly miserable places, devolving into wastelands of abandoned McMansions, empty Wal-Marts, and disintegrating asphalt. We will not be able to heat our 5,000-square-foot houses, if we can get to them, and we will not be able to fill the box stores with Chinese goods, or to resurface the roads, which we won't be using much in any case.

As for the rest of the world, Europe may fare slightly better, having to some extent preserved the small, agriculture-friendly, locally focused communities that Kunstler believes will dominate the post-oil world. But overall, the strife will be biblical: "Australia and New Zealand may fall victim to desperate Chinese adventuring....The coastlines of all nations may become prey to a new species of stateless freebooting raiders....The Pacific coast of North America will be especially vulnerable to raids emanating from the disintegrating nations of Asia." Poor nations will never develop but will seem unexceptional among "the hardship and chaos that will become common elsewhere."

Unfortunately the article to fails to go beyond simply echoing Kunstler's foretelling of doom, which is a shame, as I would have thought Tech Review could do a decent job of putting together a summary of the most promising alternative fuels and other replacements for oil.

2 comments

Kunstler's prediction of Asian Pirates off "my" pacific coast always cracked me up.

It is pretty silly, and because it is so silly, everybody always brings it up.

Now, having said that, I'm not ruling out PIRATES off the coast, just asian ones.

I mean, I'll need a new profession like everybody else!

YAr!

I'm glad Kunstler is pointing out post peak careers, even if he is still thinking that the world is flat and these jobs will be offshored.

I think you will need to do some work on talking like a pirate if you want to take this further - this site may help.

Post a Comment

Statistics

Locations of visitors to this page

blogspot visitor
Stat Counter

Total Pageviews

Ads

Books

Followers

Blog Archive

Labels

australia (619) global warming (423) solar power (397) peak oil (355) renewable energy (302) electric vehicles (250) wind power (194) ocean energy (165) csp (159) solar thermal power (145) geothermal energy (144) energy storage (142) smart grids (140) oil (139) solar pv (138) tidal power (137) coal seam gas (131) nuclear power (129) china (120) lng (117) iraq (113) geothermal power (112) green buildings (110) natural gas (110) agriculture (91) oil price (80) biofuel (78) wave power (73) smart meters (72) coal (70) uk (69) electricity grid (67) energy efficiency (64) google (58) internet (50) surveillance (50) bicycle (49) big brother (49) shale gas (49) food prices (48) tesla (46) thin film solar (42) biomimicry (40) canada (40) scotland (38) ocean power (37) politics (37) shale oil (37) new zealand (35) air transport (34) algae (34) water (34) arctic ice (33) concentrating solar power (33) saudi arabia (33) queensland (32) california (31) credit crunch (31) bioplastic (30) offshore wind power (30) population (30) cogeneration (28) geoengineering (28) batteries (26) drought (26) resource wars (26) woodside (26) censorship (25) cleantech (25) bruce sterling (24) ctl (23) limits to growth (23) carbon tax (22) economics (22) exxon (22) lithium (22) buckminster fuller (21) distributed manufacturing (21) iraq oil law (21) coal to liquids (20) indonesia (20) origin energy (20) brightsource (19) rail transport (19) ultracapacitor (19) santos (18) ausra (17) collapse (17) electric bikes (17) michael klare (17) atlantis (16) cellulosic ethanol (16) iceland (16) lithium ion batteries (16) mapping (16) ucg (16) bees (15) concentrating solar thermal power (15) ethanol (15) geodynamics (15) psychology (15) al gore (14) brazil (14) bucky fuller (14) carbon emissions (14) fertiliser (14) matthew simmons (14) ambient energy (13) biodiesel (13) investment (13) kenya (13) public transport (13) big oil (12) biochar (12) chile (12) cities (12) desertec (12) internet of things (12) otec (12) texas (12) victoria (12) antarctica (11) cradle to cradle (11) energy policy (11) hybrid car (11) terra preta (11) tinfoil (11) toyota (11) amory lovins (10) fabber (10) gazprom (10) goldman sachs (10) gtl (10) severn estuary (10) volt (10) afghanistan (9) alaska (9) biomass (9) carbon trading (9) distributed generation (9) esolar (9) four day week (9) fuel cells (9) jeremy leggett (9) methane hydrates (9) pge (9) sweden (9) arrow energy (8) bolivia (8) eroei (8) fish (8) floating offshore wind power (8) guerilla gardening (8) linc energy (8) methane (8) nanosolar (8) natural gas pipelines (8) pentland firth (8) saul griffith (8) stirling engine (8) us elections (8) western australia (8) airborne wind turbines (7) bloom energy (7) boeing (7) chp (7) climategate (7) copenhagen (7) scenario planning (7) vinod khosla (7) apocaphilia (6) ceramic fuel cells (6) cigs (6) futurism (6) jatropha (6) nigeria (6) ocean acidification (6) relocalisation (6) somalia (6) t boone pickens (6) local currencies (5) space based solar power (5) varanus island (5) garbage (4) global energy grid (4) kevin kelly (4) low temperature geothermal power (4) oled (4) tim flannery (4) v2g (4) club of rome (3) norman borlaug (2) peak oil portfolio (1)