The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
James Howard Kunstler
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0871138883
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With his classics of social commentary The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great commentators on American space and place. Now, with The Long Emergency, he offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy, we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance over the last 200 years. But the oil age, which peaked in 1970, is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore. It is bound to become a classic of social science.
it. Producers had to use the same expensive wooden barrels made for whisky and pickles. T h e railroad tank car hadn't been invented yet, nor had the overland pipeline. Refineries were little more than back yard science projects. Even the manufacture of household lamps to burn kerosene lagged. For a little historical perspective, consider this: During the Civil War, kerosene lamps were new technology. 35 THE LONG EMERGENCY I won't recapitulate the whole history of the oil industry—which has
handmaiden of vigorous economic expansion. 47 THE LONG EMERGENCY What many of them failed to register was the way that the O P E C embargo and its aftershocks represented a unique crisis of a fossil fuel-addicted industrial civilization—the suspension of assumed growth per se. Though the embargo officially ended in March 1974, the high prices per barrel remained in effect and the economic effects lingered for years. Saudi Arabia bought out the U . S . companies' interests in Aramco and na
in technologic achievement (though the insidious diminishing returns are far less apparent). How could a nation that put men on the moon feel anything but a nearly godlike confidence in its abil ity to overcome difficulties? T h e computer at which I am sitting would surely have been regarded as an astounding magical wonder by someone from an earlier period of American history, say Benjamin Franklin, who helped advance the early understanding of electricity. T h e sequence of discoveries and
bellig erent Muslim population, it is something of a miracle —or perhaps a trib ute to the British intelligence services—that a major terrorist incident has not occurred there since the March 2003 Iraq invasion. To some extent France, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia have enjoyed a state of denial equal to that of America in these years leading up to the permanent energy crisis, but their denial is focused differently. America has been able to pretend that its energy-intensive suburban
those mosquitoes have unleashed dengue fever, or for a person infected with SARS to travel from China to Toronto in a day's time, or for someone to carry AIDS from Johannesburg to Atlanta. As the Long Emergency proceeds, and globalism winds down, this kind of travel and traffic will decrease, but much of the damage has already been done. West Nile virus and dengue fever are al ready established in places where they had not previously been. They are probably there to stay. If anything, global