Kunstler's Long Emergency

Just finished reading "The Long Emergency" by James Howard Kunstler, a very-very dark look forward to a time when we begin to run out of oil; ie. in about thirty years.

We will soon (or have already) gone past the point of "global oil peak" -- the halfway mark when we have consumed as much oil as is left in the ground. but, as Kunstler points out, the half we got is the easy half, the second half is going to be harder to extract and of much lower quality. There are no "hybrid" airplanes. Everything that's made from plastics or machined with power tools is about to become much more scarce. Our global economy is about to hit a giant speed bump.

When oil was first pumped in 1859, the poluation of the US was around 30 million, and the world population was around 1.2 billion. The population of the US has increased ten-fold in 150 years. The world population has about tripled. Kunstler makes it clear: these increases are sustained only by the massive use of cheap oil. The loss of fossil fuel on a population totally dependent on it results in: famine, disease, strife, and unrest. The past gave hints of the future: remember the gas lines? rolling black-outs? What happens to people working or living in 30-story skyscrapers when the power goes out?

Before we started pumping it, there were about 2 trillion barrels of oil in the planet. The world currently consumes about 84 million barrels per day; it will consume 103 million barrels per day by 2015, and 119 million barrels in 2025. At some point it will take more energy to extract the oil than is recovered; at which point we will be, essentially, out of oil -- we will never really recover all the oil in the planet. This oil was like an endowment; we could have invested it in something that would generate some kind of return -- we could have developed and built wind, solar, or geothermal technologies. Instead, we basically drove around a lot and burned away our inheritance.

Which sucks cause I really do like driving around a lot.

Kunstler takes it a step further -- a return to a regional economy, regional self-reliance, and regional governance. It sounds a bit like the Dark Ages run with computers. The loss of plentiful oil is double-compounded by the environmental legacy of our oil consumption: both the natural environment (global warming, industrial farming) and our built environment (suburbia, lack of mass transit). In 30 years, by the time the Long Emergency is in full swing, the world's population is expected to surpass 8 billion. One of the most thought-provoking books I've read in some time. Here's a good sampler:

An exceprt on the Rolling Stone Web SIte

Don't believe Kunstler? -- how about believing Chevron:

"It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We'll use the next trillion in 30."