Jim Kunstler addresses Commonwealth Club on preparing for Peak Oil

[JohnyCanuck]

From the transcript of the March 29, 2007 speech:

Remarks to the Commonwealth Club of California
By James Howard Kunstler
Author of The Long Emergency

Two years ago in my book, The Long Emergency, I wrote that our nation was sleepwalking into an era of unprecedented hardship and disorder – largely due to the end of reliably cheap and abundant oil. We’re still blindly following that path into a dangerous future, lost in dark raptures of infotainment, diverted by inane preoccupations with sex and celebrity, made frantic by incessant motoring.

The coming age of energy scarcity will change everything about how we live in this country. It will ignite more desperate contests between nations for the remaining oil and natural gas around the world. It will alter the fundamental terms of industrial economies. It will ramify and amplify many of the problems presented by climate change. It will require us to behave differently. But we are not paying attention.

As the American public continues sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those super-vivid ones people have just before awakening, as the fantastic transports of the unconscious begin to merge with the demands of waking reality. The dream is a particularly American dream on an American theme: how to keep all the cars running by some other means than gasoline. We’ll run them on ethanol! We’ll run them on biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil. . . !

The dream goes around in fevered circles as each gasoline-replacement is examined and found to be inadequate. But the wish to keep the cars going is so powerful that round and round the dream goes. Ethanol! Biodiesel! Coal Liquids. . . .

http://globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/2455

You can also listen to a streaming audio version (Real Player only) or download an MP3 at the following link: http://globalpublicmedia.com/james_howard_kunstler_remarks_to_the_commonwealth_club_of_california

For more un-cheerful thoughts on Peak Oil and the consequences for industrialized life as we know it, Kunstler's blog is at: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com

Meanwhile, also last week, the General Accounting Office came out with a report last week that acknowledges some problems ahead on the world energy scene -- oil in particular -- with possible adverse implications for the US. It's the first time that any responsible party in the executive branch has acknowledged the situation, but the tenor of the report was -- how shall I say -- fucking unbelievably stupid and craven -- insofar as it suggested global oil could top out somewhere around the year 2030 (possibly sooner!). The poor grinds in the GAO didn't want to stick their necks out too far on that one.

Independent researchers studying the global oil situation -- including retired geologists for major oil companies -- have established a pretty firm consensus that we are already in the zone of the global oil production peak -- meaning that whether we are just past, passing now, or passing imminently, the effects are already thundering through the complex systems we depend on to maintain advanced industrial societies. For instance, the crashing of Mexico's Cantarell oil field (60 percent of Mexico's production) means that inside of five years the US will receive no more imports from what has been its third leading source. Being in the zone means that the world's oil exporters in the aggregate will see their exports drop seven to eight percent this year -- because nations like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and even Norway are using more of their own oil and have less to send out. Being in the zone means that new pricing arrangements will be made, taking the power away from the spot futures markets in New York and London, and shifting that power to long-term deals made by nationalized producers like Russia and Iran, who may decide to embargo consuming nations who don't dance to their tune. Being in the zone means that people in poorer nations will starve because so much of the corn grown in North America will go to ethanol distilleries instead of the dirt-floor kitchens in the Third World.

The more interesting point in all this, for the moment, is that the media has still not put together the collapse of the housing bubble and the permanent oil crisis. These events will be happening simultaneously. The housing industry, so-called, will never recover because the oil crisis spells the end of the suburban build out. The cycle is over. The big production homebuilders will go down and never come back. We won't need any more retail, either. We won't be building anymore WalMarts and Target stores, and the thousands now running will die off just as the giant Baluchitherium of the Asian steppes crapped out in the early Miocene epoch.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/03/in_the_zone.html

[pstans]

1. Thanks for posting

[JohnyCanuck]

8. You're welcome n.t.

[Parisle]

2. Very important post,...... thank you

--- While the exact timing of so-called "peak oil" production may be debated among dates stretching from the present day to (perhaps) the year 2020 or so,.. the fact that it is coming is in no way arguable. And its effects will be very similar to those mentioned by Kunstler, I'm afraid. People in the street do not think about this,.. but you can bet your ass that big governments and big corporations DO think about. Hell, they probably know more about it than they care to disclose.

--- But a few things may be reasonably intuited, Ok? To wit: The US is militarily storming the Mideast in a trumped-up oil grab,...doubtless at the proxy behest of Big Oil, itself. Meanwhile, the same administration doing the storming is also doing all it can to assist the wealthy and ultra-wealthy to amass money faster than they ever have before, while the economy stagnates, debt accumulates (on the "public"), and the currency spirals downward. Why is all this happening at this precise moment?

--- Are the richest and best-informed among us salting away real wealth and preparing to hunker down for the coming seismic shift in civilization? That one's got my bet.

--- Also, bear in mind that at least some of the effects of the looming cataclysm could be blunted... if only our important national decisions were being made by scientists, non-enfranchised smart people,...ordinary folks........... and NOT by Big Business. Hell, we could have been taking serious steps to deal with this ten years ago,... maybe more. But we were not. The situation has been rigged so that the only survivors of the crash will be those who were driving the bus.

[scarletwoman]

3. "...the only survivors of the crash will be those who were driving the bus."

Damn! That's really IT in a nutshell. Great post!

sw

[JohnyCanuck]

4. "The US is militarily storming the Mideast in a trumped-up oil grab,.."

As the PNACers themselves said, "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

http://www.newamericancentury.org/

Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?

by by Robert Freeman

SNIP

America has its own hand in a coconut, one that may doom it just as surely as the monkey. That coconut is its dependence on cheap oil in a world where oil will soon come to an end. The choice we face (whether to let the food go or hold onto it) is whether to wean ourselves off of oil — to quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis for civilization — or to continue to secure stable supplies from the rest of the world by force.

As with Pirsig’s monkey, the alternative consequences of each choice could not be more dramatic. Weaning ourselves off of cheap oil, while not easy, will help ensure the vitality of the American economy and the survival of its political system. Choosing the route of force will almost certainly destroy the economy and doom America’s short experiment in democracy.

To date, we have chosen the second alternative: to secure oil by force. The evidence of its consequences are all around us. They include the titanic US budget and trade deficits funding a gargantuan, globally-deployed military and the Patriot Act and its starkly anti-democratic rescissions of civil liberties. There is little time left to change this choice before its consequences become irreversible.

SNIP

Returning to Pirsig’s metaphor, the choice of a Grab the Oil strategy is the equivalent of the monkey holding onto the handful of food, remaining trapped by the coconut. It is an ironclad guarantee of escalating global conflict, isolation of the US in the world, unremitting attacks on the US by those whose oil is being expropriated and whose societies are being dominated, the militarization of the US economy, the irreversible rescission of civil liberties, and the eventual extinguishment of American democracy itself. It is the conscious, self-inflicted consignment to political and economic death.

http://energybulletin.net/4834.html

[Junkdrawer]

5. MP3 Download...

http://media.globalpublicmedia.com/RM/2007/03/James_Kunstler_Talk_3-26.mp3

[JNelson6563]

6. To the greatest page with you!

:kick:

[Junkdrawer]

7. .