BOOK REVIEW
The End is Nigh
David Ehrenfeld
The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the
Twenty-First Century. James Howard Kunstler. x + 307 pp.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005. $23.
James Howard Kunstler begins The Long Emergency with the
hope that "the American public will wake up from its sleepwalk
and act to defend the project of civilization" while there is
still time. "Throughout this book," he writes, "I
will concern myself with what I believe is happening, what
will happen, or what is likely to happen, not what
I hope or wish will happen." The reality that our society is
currently refusing to face, Kunstler says, is that time is just
about up for industrial civilization as we have known it.
Kunstler's thesis is straightforward: Malthus was right, but cheap
oil has postponed the day of reckoning, creating a century-long
"artificial bubble of plenitude" and generating a host of
intractable problems partly or entirely related to our prolonged
energy spending spree. These problems include serious damage to our
agricultural infrastructure, global climate change and the
reorganization of living places into unsustainable suburbs and
cities. Now cheap oil is disappearing fast, leaving only the
problems behind.
What sets The Long Emergency apart from numerous other
books on this theme is its comprehensive sweep—its powerful
integration of science, technology, economics, finance,
international politics and social change—along with a
fascinating attempt to peer into a chaotic future. And Kunstler is
such a compelling, fast-paced and sometimes eloquent writer that the
book is hard to put down.
Beginning with the story of Edwin L. Drake, who drilled the world's
first oil well in northwestern Pennsylvania in August 1859, Kunstler
takes us through the development of the global oil-based economy of
the 20th and early 21st centuries. He carefully traces the origins
of the idea, first proposed by geologist M. King Hubbert, that oil
consumption by modern industrial society will draw down current and
potential supplies in a predictable way. Hubbert's 1956 prediction
of the date of "peak oil" production in the United States
(which he put at sometime between 1966 and 1972) was strikingly
accurate—the peak occurred in 1970. After Hubbert's death in
1989, the distinguished petroleum geologists Colin Campbell and Jean
Laherrère, Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, University
of Colorado physicist Albert Bartlett and others adapted his model
and applied it to global oil production, yielding a prediction that
the global peak would occur between 2000 and 2010.
As pointed out by Richard A. Kerr and Robert F. Service in the July
1, 2005, issue of Science, petroleum geologists tend to
accept this "pessimistic" prediction of the date when the
global peak will be (or has been) reached, whereas
"optimistic" dates farther in the future are being
advanced primarily by resource economists. Kunstler sides with the
geologists, and his fast-paced but detailed discussion of the
economics of oil supports this position. In his chapter
"Geopolitics and the Global Oil Peak," he comes to grips
with a complex mix of elements: Middle Eastern and Islamic
nationalism, terrorism, Chinese industrial growth and the
overwhelming problems of Russia, the world's second-largest producer
of oil. These are set against a backdrop of diminishing supply, as
one country after another, including Saudi Arabia, passes its oil
peak. Kunstler's explanations of why the Saudis can no longer
control world oil prices (they lack the reserves to increase
production much beyond what they are already pumping) and of the
immense significance of that loss of control are particularly
insightful. American politicians have not yet grasped this new reality.
The book's lengthy discussion of the alternatives to cheap oil that
are so beloved by techno-optimists is straightforward and sobering.
Kunstler gives all of the alternatives a critical but fair inquiry,
from conventional energy sources such as coal and natural gas,
through oil shales and tar sands, synthetic oil, renewable energy
(including wind, solar and hydroelectric power and biomass), nuclear
fission and nuclear fusion, hydrogen, thermal depolymerization
(turning organic waste into oil), methane hydrates and even
zero-point energy.
Most of these technologies founder on "the classic problem of
energy economics: energy returned over energy invested (ERoEI).
"The figure in the case of tar sands and oil shale is
approximately three barrels of oil produced for every two barrels of
oil-equivalent invested. In the case of ethanol produced from
agribusiness corn or sugar cane, the ratio may be less than one.
Some alternatives, such as methane hydrates, are dangerous to
handle. Hydrogen is not a primary fuel: Its production requires
considerable energy. Also, because of the low density of hydrogen
gas, it must be stored and transported under high compression, or
liquefied at very low temperatures, or combined with other
compounds. Each of these options costs still more energy, and they
introduce an assortment of complications and hazards into the
delivery system. Although hydrogen will have its uses, Kunstler
says, his verdict is unequivocal: "There is not going to be a
'hydrogen economy.'" Nor is he sanguine about such far-out
schemes as a process for deriving zero-point energy from the dark
matter of the universe; he reminds us that "A useful maxim in
engineering states that when something sounds too good to be true,
it generally is not true."
Kunstler's moderate treatment of nuclear power (fission) has angered
some environmentalists. I think he makes a good case, however, that
during the transition period to a post-petroleum economy, the United
States, which produces much of its electricity from a rapidly
declining supply of natural gas, will not be as well off as France,
which gets 80 percent of its electric power from nuclear energy.
Nevertheless, he does not see nuclear power as more than a
short-term stopgap. Its ultimate limitations come first from safety
issues with regard to plant operations and the disposal of waste
fuel (although he points out that coal has cost far more lives than
nuclear power, especially in the West). Second is the large amount
of oil needed to mine and process nuclear fuel and to build and
maintain nuclear plants. And the third, formidable objection
Kunstler makes is that "Atomic fission is useful for producing
electricity, but most of America's energy needs are for things that
electricity can't do very well, if at all. For instance, you can't
fly airplanes on electric power from nuclear
reactors"—although, as he notes, the U.S. military has tried.
Kunstler describes a host of natural disasters that will interact
with the energy crisis to cause social upheaval on a global scale.
No country will be exempt, he says. Some of these disasters, such as
climate change, are the direct result of our profligate use of cheap
energy. Others, including the widespread shortage of fresh water,
have been greatly augmented by the drain on resources brought about
by the explosion of high-oil-input agriculture, industrialization
and changes in living habits. All of those natural disasters,
however, including the emergence of new infectious diseases and the
re-emergence of old ones, will be much harder to cope with when
cheap energy is no longer available. Our efforts will also be
confounded by diminishing returns on technology and by
"technological regress—the loss of information, ability,
and confidence."
The Long Emergency is more than a list of disasters,
present or impending. It is an attempt to understand how we got to
where we are. Nearly 100 years of cheap oil have allowed us, even
prompted us, to construct an economic and social system that depends
utterly (often without our knowledge) on a continuous, never-failing
energy subsidy. The system cannot stand on its own feet. It is
unstable, lacking internal restraints and negative feedbacks, and
most of all it undermines all stabilizing alternatives, such as
diverse small businesses and local community support systems.
Kunstler's understanding of history and economics helps him
delineate this clearly.
My only complaint about the book is that it lacks an index, which is
inexcusable for a text so crammed with names and facts. Kunstler's
use of entropy as a synonym for social disorder may bother
readers who prefer that the term be reserved for discussions of
thermodynamics, but an accepted definition of the word is
"inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society."
One question that most readers of this review will ask is, When will
the coming collapse occur? As Kunstler notes, Deffeyes—perhaps
not entirely in jest—has predicted on National Public Radio
that the global oil peak will occur on Thanksgiving Day, 2005, with
"'an uncertainty factor of only three or four weeks on either
side.'" But the closest thing to a hint of Kunstler's position
on the subject is found in his remark in the last chapter that
"The denizens of Bergen County, New Jersey, or Fairfield
County, Connecticut, today may never believe how desperate their
localities may become in 2025." He is probably wise to be
vague. As the great biochemist Erwin Chargaff remarked in his 1978
autobiography, Heraclitean Fire, "On the whole,
professional pessimists prove right at the end if one does not hold
them too tightly to a time scale."
The last (and longest) chapter of The Long Emergency is
also the most innovative and controversial one. Having made a
powerful case that it is too late to avoid serious trauma, Kunstler
speculates on what life will be like during the painful transition
period, as cheap petroleum wanes. The question is well worth asking,
if only to stimulate creative thinking about alternatives to a
high-energy lifestyle. The book is not a survivalist tract, but
Kunstler argues persuasively that life will be better in some
geographic regions of the country than in others and better in some
kinds of communities than in others. Factors such as the
availability of water, the degree of dependence on automobiles and
air-conditioning, the regional tolerance for violence and the
persistence of strong communities lead him to conclude that the
states of New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the upper Midwest that
make up the "Old Union" of the Civil War period, along
with the Pacific Northwest, will fare much better than the
Southwest, the Rocky Mountain states and the Southeast.
Within each region, however, conditions will not be uniform.
Kunstler, whose earlier book The Geography of Nowhere
established him as heir presumptive to the intellectual legacy of
Lewis Mumford, describes America's automobile-dependent suburbs as
"the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the
world." It is the suburbs, he thinks, that will suffer the most
during the coming energy crisis. (I concur, having taught the same
message in field courses in suburban New Jersey for 30 years.) And
cities, with their skyscrapers and total food dependence, will not,
Kunstler claims, be far behind the suburbs in misery.
There is much more in the final chapter than I can do justice to in
a review: The many topics discussed include, among others, the new
economy and new commerce that will accompany the end of
oil-dependent consumer culture (he predicts the demise of the chain
stores and the rise of scavenging), possible political fragmentation
of the nation, changes in education, the end of romantic childhood
and changes in race relations. The picture he paints is
incomplete—he doesn't say what will happen to health care, the
arts or entertainment in the long emergency—but there is
material enough to provoke scientists and laypeople alike into
considering what lies ahead.
Kunstler, like George Orwell, understands that being honest about
the past and present is the only way to prepare ourselves for an
uncertain future. Civilization, he believes, will survive the end of
cheap oil, but not without great loss. "How many ... familiar
things in time may go?" he wonders. "What will abide in
our collective memory?" Not all readers will accept his answers
to these questions, but I think we must be grateful to him for
showing us the need to ask them.