The Long Emergency by James Kunstler

Jim Kunstler has spent the last few years gazing into the future, matching long wave megatrends with hard empirical data. The result is a classic "I've got good news and bad news for you" proposition.

First, the American ideal of the suburban dream is about to die an ugly death. The decades-old expansion of superhighways, strip malls and ranch homes will soon end, accompanied by mass scale property abandonment and devaluation. Local enclaves such as Clifton Park and Wilton will be transformed into either ghost towns or the 21st century versions of the South Bronx and Watts.
That was the good news. Or, more accurately, that was the not-so-bad news.
The bad news, the REALLY bad news, according to the Saratoga based author and social commentator, is that civilization as a whole is in deep trouble. Global economic development and expansion is at the end of its lifecycle, with resulting turmoil and chaos in the collective rear view mirror. In essence, humanity is looking at the end of the industrial era that it has grown to know.
The major driver of this doomsday lite outlook, as offered in Kunstler's latest book The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press), is simple: the fact that the age of cheap oil is over. Peak production has passed it high peak tipping point and the coming period of fossil fuel depletion will halt economic engines around the world. Combined with such subplots as global warming, disease outbreaks and faltering agriculture, Kunstler's crystal ball predicts and epoch period where nations large and small will be "fighting for the scraps" in the aftermath.
The so-called Hubbert's Curve, which postulates the practical depletion of underground oil reserves within the next thirty-seven years, is championed by Kunstler and acts as the intellectual foundation for his argument. Those that may counter such a claim are confronted with a more immediate point: that worldwide production is peaking currently, give or take a year or two. When juxtaposed with the ever-increasing consumption requirements of both mature and emerging economies (especially Asia), the basic forces of Economics 101's supply & demand model are about to kick in. The result will be a sea-change type of a transition period for the tenants of Planet Earth.

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The Global Oil Situation

- The total planetary endowment of oil was roughly 2 trillion barrels

- The world has burned through roughly half of it

- The half that remains is hard to get and low quality

- Worldwide discovery of oil peaked in 1964

- Annual worldwide usage: 27 billion barrels

- After peak production, demand will exceed capacity to produce

- Depletion will proceed at 2 to 6 % / year

- Middle East share of remaining oil: 60%

- United State share: 3%

- United States usage: 25%

(From The Long Emergency)

Kunstler predicts an initial period of "confusion and denial," but as a predicted a post-peak depletion rate 2 to 6 percent annually kicks in, with demand continuing to rise, economic destabilization will eventually occur. The world has long been lulled into a pleasant daydream with a consistent flow of inexpensive energy, but when that ends, the whole global supply chain will become unglued.
The resulting economic stress will effect all nations and societies, big and small, rich and poor. Politics, economics, culture and religion will all converge in a flashpoint, centered of course, in the Middle East, which continues to sit on 60% of the precious supply. Aggressive political and religious extremism will continue to rear its ugly head in nations on both sides of the divide, which will be met by aggressive power geopolitics, which will be met by more extremism and a spiraling cycle of armed tension, conflict, and terrorism. We are out to enter "an abyss of …disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before."

Welcome to Jim Kunstler's long emergency. But don't count on the various incarnations of alternate energy technologies to bail us out of this mess; each option is looked at individually, with the conclusion being that none of them are capable of acting as the magic panacea.
This is certainly not a pretty picture being painted, but one that should be worthy of public discourse. It is here that Kunstler's hot button is rung. Quoting Carl Jung in his opening chapter ("people cannot stand too much reality"), the New York City transplant is frustrated by the unwillingness of the American media and public policy elites to bring this discussion to the table. He sees this as a terrible disservice, with the result being a society that is "sleepwalking into the future."
"It won't be so much the fact that prices keep rising that gets people nervous," Kunstler told a recent public gathering at the Saratoga Springs Public Library. "I think that the everyday American consumer will keep paying more and more at the pump without too much resistance. But it will be when there isn't any gas available, that there is an obvious supply problem, this is when it will all start to hit home."
It is this type of analysis where Kunstler is at his best. Although this topic has obvious worldwide implications, it is his views on the American experience where he shines. This, after all, is where he has staked his mark in the nonfiction publishing field. His previous titles, The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere and The City in Mind were scathing looks at the decline of the American community, mainly as a result of the lost art of civic design and misguided urban planning. These critically acclaimed works garnered national attention for Kunstler, and earned him darling status among the New Urbanist movement.
It is only natural then, for him to tie his complete body of works together, and to predict the effects of this coming energy crisis on his favorite whipping boy of Suburbia. True to form, Kunstler hold no punches.
"Suburban sprawl has no future," he matter-of-factly states. "Commentators uniformly overlook the colossal misinvestment that suburbia represents-a prodigious, unparalled misallocation of resources. The tragic truth is that much of suburbia is unreformable, and does not lend itself into the kind of mixed-use, smaller-scaled, walkable environments that we will need to carry on life in the coming age of greatly reduced motoring."
You might think that Jim Kunstler revels in this thought of the coming end of the suburban fiasco; but he doesn't. He knows the pain that this process will inflict on millions of his fellow Americans, and in that, he can find no solace.