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To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

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Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Kunstler: The Long Emergency

Via Progressive Review. Yeah, I know it's, like, the third item from ProRev today. Well, it's my damn blog.

As Sam Smith asks in his lead-in, "What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?" Jim Kunstler has some pretty disconcerting answers in The Long Emergency.
The circumstances of the long emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the long emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists.

Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the reformation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. . .

Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.
Although he jumped the gun a bit on peak oil, Warren Johnson made some very similar predictions during the energy crisis of the 1970s about the effects of a significant long-term increase in fuel prices. The outcome would be a decentralized economy of diversified production for local markets, much less demographic mobility, and more stable intermediate social institutions like extended families, neighborhoods, and communities.

8 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is there any reason to believe that this will happen any time soon?

Lawrence

March 30, 2005 12:24 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't you think that trains would relieve a lot of the mobility issues? I think that long before we "run out" of oil, the increased price will cause us to shift to other sources of energy, like biodiesle. It's important to start that change soon, so that the economic crisis described above doesn't happen, but I don't think the collapse of civilization as we know it is really inevitable. I hope so, anyway.

March 30, 2005 12:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Same shit, different decade. The end-of-oil is always 20 years away.

- Josh

March 31, 2005 6:46 AM  
Blogger Kevin Carson said...

Anon and Josh,

From what I've seen, the idea that we've either reached Hubbert's Peak, or will reach it within a couple of years, is pretty widespread--even in oil industry circles.

Free Radical,

I don't see it as resulting in the "end of civilization"; if the economy were decentralized to make efficient use of available energy, we could probably avoid very little reduction in standard of living. As it is, the corporate economy makes grossly inefficient use of energy and transportation inputs because they've been so heavily subsidized.

March 31, 2005 2:20 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Actually, I think the decentralization process would improve living conditions for nearly all of the world, except maybe the "suits" and the super-rich.
And pretty much, to hell with them.

Whatever we lost through increased energy costs, and their cascade upwards (into food, transport, etc), would be offset by the massive amount of creative productivity unleashed.
In the transition phase, there would be a lot of problems though, as the "last-ditchers" of corporate fascism tried to cling to their empires.

The best way, IMO to "deal with" peak oil would be to stop subsidizing oil consumption.
As the price rises, industry will shift on the margin to less oil consumptive methods, and consumer products will become more energy efficient. The risk-reward ratios involved in developing non-oil based technology will shift.

April 01, 2005 8:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It will be really hard to make good investment decisions in such a changing environment, so I thought I would mention a few investments I've made that turned out really well:
Education. Especially, in addition to regular liberal arts-
Learn to play an instrument.
Have great sex.
Marry early, marry often.
Take some time off and get outside.

With these tips, your portfolio need not crash when the economy changes....

April 01, 2005 3:52 PM  
Blogger Kevin Carson said...

Adem,

I fear there will be major dislocations in the near-term, though. People will be selling off suburban real estate at distress prices to move closer to where they work, and some former bedroom communities may become ghost towns. In other cases, small groceries and various trades may set up in suburbs to capture their custom and labor. And those staying in the 'burbs will almost undertake gardening and other forms of household economy on a much larger scale than ever before.

Similarly, there will likely be a crash program to turn over as much urban space to emergency housing and community gardens as possible.

serial catowner,

And with all those alimony payments, hyperinflation may seem like a *good* thing.

April 01, 2005 4:22 PM  
Blogger Kevin Carson said...

Anton,

I think he's referring to the proliferation of subdivisions there. If not, I'm not sure what his beef is about "subdividing" land. Although I have to say, the real estate industry around here has inflated land prices until new houses in working class subdivisions are typically on 1/6 acre lots or less.

April 14, 2005 9:02 AM  

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