New York
I’ve finished reading James Howard Kunstler’s new book Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation.
This book is pretty much an update to Kunstler’s 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.
Seven years have come and gone. Has the Peak Oil doomer forecast panned out?
(1) In hindsight, the highly anticipated global peak in conventional oil production – the dependable stuff you pump out of the ground in oil rigs from vast underground pools – seems to have arrived on schedule in late 2005/early 2006.
(2) In 2007/2008, the “housing bubble” collapsed and the suburban sprawl economy sputtered and still hasn’t recovered. This doesn’t come as any surprise to Kunstler who has spent over a decade criticizing suburbia as the greatest misallocation of resources in world history and as a living arrangement with no future.
(3) In 2008, the global financial system got into serious trouble, and before the dust settled Congress and the Federal Reserve had ponied up a $7.7 trillion dollar bailout to Wall Street and European and American banks. Although Kunstler is renowned for his annual failed stock market predictions, the destruction and/or transfer of wealth in the 2008 financial crisis was effectively the same.
There is no telling how much money the Federal Reserve has printed since that time. Meanwhile, the financial crisis never ended in Europe and has become a slow motion trainwreck, with world leaders flying by the seat of their pants trying to stamp out fires as they appear in the eurozone.
(4) We’re now in the fourth year of a depression (recovery) which the Beltway establishment refuses to acknowledge.
(5) In the Middle East and North Africa, the uptick in global food prices has already led to political instability, most recently with the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt and with the civil war now raging in Syria – oil prices are down in part because Saudi Arabia has put the foot on the accelerator to stave off its own problem with “domestic unrest.”
(6) As I write this, protests are breaking out in Japan over the restart of nuclear reactors following the Fukushima disaster.
(7) In the Nineties and Aughties, much hope was invested in alternative energy sources ranging from the hydrogen economy to switch grass to ethanol to algae to wind and solar and biomass to the “Pickens Plans” with liquified natural gas – none of which panned out, btw, in spite of the hype.
Like all the other presidents before them stretching back to Nixon, Bush and Obama promised to make America “energy independent,” and seven years later it still hasn’t happened. Obama’s “green economy” and “green jobs” has become the butt of jokes even on the Left.
(8) In Spring 2010, the Gulf Coast was inundated by an oil spill following BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe – disasters such as this one were predicted as drilling has shifted to ever more marginal areas overseas and offshore.
(9) Since Kunstler’s The Long Emergency was published in 2005, we’ve seen various countries like Mexico go through Peak Oil which is one of America’s biggest sources of imports.
(10) We’ve seen all the major airlines (most recently American Airlines) either merge or go bankrupt. In 2011, the last space shuttle was launched with a promise that America would go back to space sometime around 2025.
(11) Since 2005, technology has continued to advance, so we now have things like HDTV, smartphones, Netflix, Kindle, YouTube, Facebook and various apps, but the really important systems haven’t advanced much unless you count, say, the advent of predator drones.
(12) Kunstler is a big fan of paleo-futurism. In 2001, there was no space odyssey. We’re almost to 2015 and it is unlikely there will be any of Doc Brown’s flying cars or hoverboards. The future of 2000 hasn’t lived up to the hype of those imagining the future in 1950.
(13) Americans are an optimistic people and much hope is now being invested in shale oil and shale gas (now that we have moved on from solar, hydrogen, and ethanol) which Kunstler spends a considerable amount of time debunking. He points out that the Bakken formation in North Dakota only has 1/3 of the recoverable oil of Prudhoe Bay and that Alaskan production – the stuff coming down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from the North Slope – is now only a trickle of what it was in the 1980s.
The kerogen in the Green River Formation is not conventional oil. It would require enormous inputs of water and energy to heat and process it. It just happens to be located in one of the most arid corners of the entire country.
(14) Chesapeake Energy, the herald of the shale oil and shale gas revolution in the United States, is now immersed in a thicket of scandals and is approaching bankruptcy as volatility in energy and capital markets disrupts its operations.
(15) “Shale oil” is oil that is trapped in source rock which was never able to collect in vast underground pools like conventional oil fields. Some of this oil is recoverable through hydraulic fracturing, but this process is expensive and like offshore drilling or drilling in the Arctic it is not remotely the same as drilling a conventional oil well.
The overarching message of this book is that Americans have too much faith in technology which leads to ever more complexity and to diminishing returns over time. The technology and prosperity of the oil age has lulled us into a dangerously false sense of security.
You go to the gas station and take for granted that the gas (which comes from imported oil from overseas) will always be there at an affordable price. You go to the supermarket and take for granted that the cheap food (which depends upon the depleting aquifers and the vast oil and phosphorus inputs) will always be there.
You to the Super Wal-Mart and take for granted that all the manufactured goods imported from the other side of the planet will always be there. You go to the bank and take for granted that your money will always be there.
Complex systems have a tendency to get into trouble in a crisis. Look no further than the catastrophic decline in material culture in the sixth century remnants of the Western Roman Empire following the barbarian invasions. The energy crisis represents the ultimate challenge to the perpetuation of global industrial civilization and the American standard of living.
Will our faith in technology fail us? Kunstler is betting that it will. Seven years from now we ought to know for sure. In the meantime, I plan to keep watching and blogging as history unfolds.
Note: In the book, Kunstler describes race as “America’s wild card” and anticipates widespread racial conflict as BRA collapses. He also thinks America might break apart along regional lines down the road.
The “financial crisis” is going to get even worse if we are able to fix America(or even just a part thereof). They are speculating on oil, and when demand drops they’ll be left holding derivatives that will be worthless to them. When they can no longer get zero percent interest from the discount window, again, a lot of what they are doing is over. When realestate collapses(there are ~22 homes for every American, and all it would take to open up dirt cheap good neighborhoods would be restrictive covenants), their big cash cow of the last 60 years is over.
Technology may solve all of our problems, after all, aluminum used to be one of the rarest and most expensive metals on planet earth, but I doubt it. That said, I am hopeful that we’ll be able to adapt to what is coming, and that in the long run we’ll be far better off than even during the cheap oil years.
The key to all this is population. We really need to get the population down to a sustainable level and control the reproduction process. The days of any Tom or Mary having children are coming to a close.
I don’t buy into this “back to the Stone Age” mentality, we’ll find alternative energy resources and out technology will continue to advance, minus the stupid mistakes of the past. What really ails us is the egalitarian mindset, something that must be wiped out in it’s entirety, or we really will be done for.
For a country in serious economic trouble, I sure don’t understand why we are so averse to using more coal. China is gladly taking whatever we don’t use off our hands, while we waste billions investing in windmills and solar panels (probably manufactured in china) that couldn’t power Tim Wise’s McMansion on a hot summer day.
Hunter, if you were a little older I could easily imagine you with a bookshelf full of Y2K Bug doomsday scenario literature. Purveyors of this crap know very well that there is a (disturbingly) large market for it so they never cease producing it. Real pity to see so many swallowing it whole.
Anon, give it up will you, as if you know anything about finance, ya goof.
Spain eh?
The master class of football.
Good to see the Balitelli fellow laid low. Good stuff.
JK is a fascinating writer, but I take him with a good helping of salt just like any other tendentious writer/web site/academic, etc.
I don’t see how it is a doomsday scenario to say there is only so much recoverable oil in an oil well, only so many potential oil wells in a state, only so much oil in a nation, and by extension, only so much recoverable oil in the world.
It seems very logical to me – oil production is constricted by geology, some areas have a lot more oil than others (Saudi Arabia vs. Japan), and it is non-renewable and thus “growth” is necessarily limited in any location where extraction is going on.
tom,
As I explained in the previous threads, the energy problem is compounded by other problems.
So, while there might be a lot of coal in energy rich states like West Virginia and Wyoming, or even offshore oil deposits off the coast of California and Florida, there might be a political consensus in America that the coal industry ought to be destroyed by Cap-and-Trade or that offshore drilling ought to be banned.
In Japan, there is now a movement against nuclear power following the Fukushima meltdown.
America appears to hate coal miners.
But mythologized coal burners.
It’s a messed up place.
The war against coal mining is a war against the actual working class.
I mean we run our healthcare system and the public schools for the benefit of negroes who have an average IQ of 85. We have legislated a disaster with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that has produced cities like Detroit.
Why would our energy policy be at the absolute top of its game? Maybe it is more like our investment in Head Start.
JH Kunstler is nothing more than a garden-variety leftist who hates cars and suburbia because they represent individual freedom from the all-controlling managerial state. Seriously, second-rate merchants of doom like him are a dime a dozen in the MSM. If it was up to them, we’d all be living in cramped apartments in the inner city and be totally reliant on mass transit to get around. No thanks.
Kunstler has mainly “distinguished” himself by being wrong about Y2K, wrong about peak oil, wrong about global warming, wrong about the stock market, wrong about technological advancements, wrong about pretty much everything. That this Marxist-determinist has a following on the race realist right is a sad reflection on all of us. Any prediction he makes, bet on the opposite and you’ll be just fine.
Why a smart guy like Hunter would waste his time reading Kunstler is beyond me.
Culling Africa is a first step. Then Cull East Asia.
Then extract resources.
Anything about thorium in that book?
“Why would our energy policy be at the absolute top of its game? Maybe it is more like our investment in Head Start.”
You’re right. I forgot that I lived in BRA for a brief moment. Won’t happen again.
Stat of the day: China already uses more coal than the US EU and Japan combined, and their coal consumption is expected to rise by 14% over the next year while the US has seen an 8% decrease from 2011-2012. Also the really big drop in coal consumption is set to hit the US in 2015 when dozens of coal plants will be forced to shut down by the EPA, making way for ……. ummmmm????
That’s the problem. Whitopia’s will become too expensive to live in when energy bills go from 200$ a month to 1000$ and you go from spending 150$ a month to commute into the vibrant city you work in to 400$.
Orion- Who says we are going back to the Stone Age?
More like 1850- we can once again have steam/coal locomotives, and candles/kerosene lanterns, localized farming communities with an ‘urban’ center of no more than 3,000 residents in the ‘cities’ with a racial consensus, and a normative White Anglo-Saxon work ethic/ethnic.
Places like NYC need to become graveyards, anyway, like that Kurt Russell film, where they are ‘locked in’ to the isle of Manhattan…. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082340/
That’s where I’d put all the jews and blacks. The equivalent of the ‘camps’ and the ‘ghettoes’ where they have made our lives miserable for the last 100 years…. And eye for an eye, I believe someone once said.
Yeah, he mentions thorium reactors in the book.
Based on Spain tonight. YT has all the capabilities to confound and confuse the enemy.
It’s not that. It’s the fiction that there are no alternative energy sources coming on line. No way in hell could these possibly prove adequate, the doomsday scenario insists. Perhaps doomsayers are right. The point is the evidence and their arguments don’t seem to justify their strength of their beliefs.
“It’s not that. It’s the fiction that there are no alternative energy sources coming on line. No way in hell could these possibly prove adequate, the doomsday scenario insists. Perhaps doomsayers are right. The point is the evidence and their arguments don’t seem to justify their strength of their beliefs.” – We’ll have plenty of adequate replacement sources of energy, but nothing like the truly stellar 2$ a barrel light sweet crude. that stuff is gone, and the myth of unlimited growth is gone with it.
I’m not sure people are understanding peak oil: the trouble we are seeing is that demand is outstripping the growth in supply.
We are actually producing more oil in 2012 than ever, but the price soars due to increased demand which is sustained by orgiastic money printing. As prices periodically spike, they destabilize the debt based global economy.
In terms of our national struggle, our solution to low growth is to lower prices; how do we lower prices? By lowering aggregate demand by taking away the subsidy to anti-white parasites. A white nation would one-up even the spectacular growth of China.
So if you are a white nationalist, your mantra is that there IS peak oil, and our solution is a white nation.
For a country in serious economic trouble, I sure don’t understand why we are so averse to using more coal. …”
Too many nationalists where they mine coal. Southern WV —like Logan and Mingo counties— were under martial law until 1938 and their capital burned down once, just due to the confiscated guns from the citizens catching fire.
PTB really seem to hate that state.
No one has said there won’t be alternative energy sources. There is wind, solar, hydro, tidal, geothermal, etc. There is nuclear and coal which will be a mainstay for the foreseeable future.
Can those things do all the things that oil does today? The answer is clearly no. It is even more clear in the case of boondoggles like switch grass, ethanol, and algae.
Granted, we haven’t tried drilling down to the infinite, inexhaustible supply of renewable abiotic oil directly underneath Joe’s house.
Didn’t Obama say he wanted to close all the coal mines? Well, there’s your answer. We need more coal. However, there’s a big problem with WV. Any state that elects a scumbag banker like Rockefeller, not just once but repeatedly, needs to be put out of its misery yesterday.
Anyone see the movie, Thrive?
Interesting link from today:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/07/email-from-lead-analyst-at-eia-on.html
I know the plateaus etc are indicative of Peak, but it’s truly impossible to determine how this is going to play out.
I think Kunstler is farming the doomsday market. He is too sure of himself when no one can guess the future with so much confidence. Nuclear power will replace fossil fuels before we return to a world made by hand. Kunstler, when he is not hating on the white man, can turn the occasional neat phrase, and I like his art; but all things considered he’s strictly vaudeville, which is to say kosher.
We are going into a deep, dark depression regardless though. I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for about 15 years, and it’s still freakin’ scary how this is going to go down.
I’m of the mind that nuclear is as much a cultural endeavor as it is a technological endeavor, and I don’t think we’ll have it in us on the way down. Fractured cultures lead to fractured cores.
I’m not sure people are understanding peak oil: the trouble we are seeing is that demand is outstripping the growth in supply.
Is that so? I can’t find it online, but in this week’s edition of Maclean’s magazine there’s a chart titled “Awash in oil”, reading “Far from facing an energy shortage, the world’s oil and gas reserves jumped eight per cent last year, and have risen dramatically over the past two decades as exploration increased”.
The chart itself shows the world’s oil reserves jumped from 1,033 billion barrels in 1991 to 1,683 billion barrels in 2011, with most of the rise in North and South America. Imagine that, the world has burned hundreds of billions of barrels of oil over the past twenty years, yet our overall reserves are up by more than 500 billion barrels. Ain’t technology grand?
Another article I was looking at said that Alberta’s oil sands production is expected to increase from 1.7 million bpd in 2011 to 3.7 million bpd in 2021. But that’s old news. The really interesting part is that *conventional* oil production in Alberta was up by 7% in 2011, the first rise in 15 years. Human ingenuity strikes again.
http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article1249942.ece
I agree we are heading into some sort of dark age, I just have doubts it will be the way Kunstler foresees. They will fire-up the plants, and there will be enough whites, Chinese, and white-Chinese hybrids around to man the intellectual side of a nuclear powered pseudo-civilization, probably.
The alternative energy schemes aren’t failing because they’re not viable. They’re failing because they can’t yet compete with oil. And bear in mind that they’re not competing fairly with oil. Oil’s infrastructure is already there. The refineries are already online. The trucks are already rolling. In order to compete with oil, an energy source would need to not only be cheaper than oil: it would need to be dramatically cheaper than oil.
And how do you compete against something that’s next to free?
Gas was $3.10 in my neighborhood this morning, slightly more than milk. That’s just over $3 to transport my massive gas-guzzling Buick LeSabre 30 miles. Not bad, and only incrementally higher than it’s been historically when one accounts for inflation. Remove inflation, fuel taxes, and urban sprawl from the equation and I doubt Americans are paying much more for fuel than they ever did.
Could it be that political instability in the Middle East caused the spike in prices rather than the other way around, as you and Kunstler suggest? A close analysis of the timing of the oil price fluctuations implies the former.
Multinational corporations have done the math and there’s a reason that alternatives remain in the ghetto of government pork, shady start-up hustles, and flaky sci-fi reporting. The reason is that there is no impending Peak Oil crisis. The difficulty of accessing oil will rise gradually, over the course of decades, giving the investors and the market plenty of time to develop and market viable alternatives.
And that’s not even accounting for the fact that Americans could…you know…use less fossil fuels. Perhaps a steady rise in fossil fuel prices coinciding with China’s transition from a sweat shop economy could result in sweatshop industry transitioning to Latin America and sucking our Mestizo immigrants back home with it.
I know I probably sound like a Pollyanna, here. I assure you, I’m an absolute curmudgeon when it comes to what the future will be like. I just don’t see this playing an especially important role in future events and I believe it distracts from the demographic and social explanations for our economic turmoil which are both more falsifiable and more predictive.
“Hunter, if you were a little older I could easily imagine you with a bookshelf full of Y2K Bug doomsday scenario literature. Purveyors of this crap know very well that there is a (disturbingly) large market for it so they never cease producing it. Real pity to see so many swallowing it whole.”
PPPTTTT. I’m prob one of the most well-read Peak Oilers here. I’ve read, I’ll bet, a dozen books on the subject
Twilight in the Desert
1000 Barrels of Oil a Second
The Long Emergency
The Oil Factor
Kuntsler’s The Long Emergency and
World Made By Hand
The Oil We Eat
Party’s Over
Beyond Oil
that I can think of off the top of my head.
As well as the primer videos and newsletter by Zapata George (Blake):
http://www.youtube.com/user/Zapatageorge
Whiskey and Gunpowder contributor Byron Hunt decimated the myth that Russia has superwells drilled to 40,000 feet and producing huge numbers of barrels of oil:
“Even in the post-Soviet era, the contemporary Russians are taciturn about the purpose, let alone the output, of their known deep wells. One thing that we know for certain is that there are no massive pipeline systems around these wells.
Pipelines would ordinarily be necessary to move any large amounts of oil away from the hole in the ground. ”
No pipelines = no vast quantities of oil being produced=the assertion of Russian superwells is a falsehood.
http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/peak-oil-and-deep-oil-part-ii/
So, I’m just a nutjob that buys into doomerism without evidence? Nah. I knew by 1999, from reading stuff, that the programmer cowboys had fixed the Y2K date incompatibilities and that there was no terrible problem coming.
Had the Y2K programmers NOT headed off the problem, well…..
But they did. Probably because some people screamed bloody hell and they had to.
Peak oil is something else, again. Because oil is the Lifeblood of tech civilization. It can’t be fixed by a keystroke. Only hard, sweating, infrastructure, designed by smart White men and built by smart White craftsmen can save us. But we’re not doing the hard, sweaty stuff.
“Yeah, he mentions thorium reactors in the book.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel.html
“So if you are a white nationalist, your mantra is that there IS peak oil, and our solution is a white nation.”
HEAR! HEAR!
“Remove inflation, fuel taxes, and urban sprawl from the equation and I doubt Americans are paying much more for fuel than they ever did”
If you removed inflation and fuel taxes from the equation, you would be cheating, because a very large portion of the taxes and inflation you pay go to keep the aircraft-carried equipped Navy in the Persian Gulf in order to keep the Middle East flowing.
When you count in the cost in blood and treasure spilt by the American Empire in the Middle East in order to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and the oil tankers bringing us our fix, the cost of oil is far, far more than $3 / gal.
And urban sprawl is a direct result of desegregation. If Americans didn’t HAVE to drive 40 miles between work and home, they wouldn’t. They only bought that house in the hinterlands because the cities are overrun by feral blacks.
JK and Peak Oilers in general (non-racialist) tend to commingle their scientific points with a left-wing political agenda. The agenda is usually about imposing social controls from a left perspective, reigning in “consumerism” and such things, aka ordinary human activity leftists don’t like. This fact alone makes me skeptical of PO claims. Not that I trust big energy’s positions on this issue either.
Lost my comment. God damn mobile.
Awash in what?
Shale oil, tar sands, kerogen? Notice the sleight of hand. It is the assumption that unconventional oil and conventional oil are the same thing.
When most people think of oil, they think of oil rigs pumping oil out of supergiant oil fields like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia or Cantarell in Mexico. You drill an oil well and pump the crude up like sucking your diet soda up through a straw. It is all there in one place and it is easy to get at.
What is shale oil? It is oil that is trapped in source rocks. It is oil that hasn’t pooled in vast underground oil fields. Conventional oil is like the water in your swimming pool. Shale oil is like the water trapped in your beach towel.
Just as you can wring water out of your beach towel, you can wring shale oil out of source rock with hydraulic fracking. The only reason you would ever bother with shale oil though is because the world has an unquenchable thirst for oil.
Can shale oil make up for the inevitable decline in conventional oil production and the vertical arc of global demand? Not a chance. There will be a lot of happy talk about shale oil and tar sands though.
You can supplement our demand for oil with shale oil but you are not going to replace what you are losing through conventional oil depletion.
barb,
Can I ask what do you think racialist-oriented Whites should do or not do as a result of PO?
barb,
The geography of Atlanta is an obvious example of how the race issue intersects with the energy issue.
Kunstler’s solutions are common sense things like rebuilding the passenger rail system and electric streetcar systems that existed in the early twentieth century. I don’t see how those proposals are anti-White.
It makes much less sense to be utterly reliant on Arab oil and Chinese manufactured goods and the dollar’s status as the world reserve currency.
I think Kunstler is too optimistic because this whole scenario doesn’t even factor in the race crisis, the culture crisis, and the aging crisis which would be sufficient by themselves to take down the global economy, but which will converge with the dysfunctional political system, the financial crisis, and the energy crisis which is the other side of the coin.
Forget oil, I’d be more worried about clearn, drinkable water. In case no one noticed, they’re starting to really control the water sources. Why did the Bush family recently purchase a tremendous amount of land that just happens to sit on one of the largest aquifers in the world – and, in Paraguay of all places?
Forget the oil, you don’t need that to survive. They’ve had you distracted with oil when water will be our biggest problem in the not too distant future.
Hunter,
There’s nothing directly anti-White about public transportation, but the White strategy for the past few decades has been flight. I would imagine that the admin of Occidental Dissent would be among the first to recognize why White Americans wouldn’t benefit from a major investment in public transportation.
I suppose time will tell whether Peak Oil is a legitimate concern. Personally, I don’t trust capitalism to be a positive moral force, but I do trust it to dynamically work through these sorts of massively distributed challenges. I don’t believe there will be one single answer as fuel prices increase (which I don’t dispute will happen).
People will telecommute more. They’ll purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles. They’ll ride mopeds more. “Clean coal” production will increase, solar panels will become more common, homes wired with USB and 9V DC power and devices designed to run on those will become popular.
To me, it’s sort of like saying that my car is heading towards a T intersection and will therefore fly off into a cornfield. No. I can slow my car down and go in a different direction. The fact that our politicians sold off virtually our entire industrial infrastructure to make a buck and have thrust our borders wide open to third world invasion…and yet most White Americans continue to enjoy a relatively posh existence…makes a case to me that we’re a bit more flexible, resilient, and creative than Peak Oil doomers presume.
But, like I said, time will tell. What I don’t get is crowing that Peak Oil has already arrived when oil is still so damn cheap.
Speaking of Atlanta, sbpdl has got a recent piece about how sandy springs and north Fulton county is trying to basically secede from the black undertow south Fulton. I will be closely watching what happens there as it might start a trend among counties with similar urban black tax siphoning problems.