[SustainableTompkins] Fw: Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.

[Jon Bosak]

Nothing new in Kunstler's message, but it's great to see the
exposure (the Sunday Washington Post).  Maybe someone in the
government will start to pay attention.

Jon

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washingtonpost.com
Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.
By James Howard Kunstler
Sunday, May 25, 2008; B03

Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy
predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental
conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions."
This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now
grips the nation, especially among the educated and
well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate
wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other
than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination
of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands
and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney
World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of
these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands
the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's
about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of
daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global
supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches
as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did
last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one
sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will
hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution,
manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading
effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that
requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as
well as government spending. These systems are all
interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress
induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the
wishful thinking across our nation.

And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's
narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the
environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain
Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for
years -- inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't
need to change.

Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference
told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up
for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two
pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in
recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a
star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion
last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret,"
which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something,
it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child
and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing
for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.

The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one
can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new
favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of
unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las
Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the
notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for
nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as
our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.

These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid
of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its
implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and
maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax
holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that
the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into
fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on
global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even
in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil
shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped
clean.

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll
have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of
American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a
manner that will require more human attention. In fact,
agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll
have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that
the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of
fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in
traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant
metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places
will be ones that encourage local farming.

Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one
project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest
impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not
talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign --
shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating
under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire
any more employees and have already offloaded their pension
obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small
airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two
months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again,
Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.

We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the
presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We
cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must
understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real
hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are
competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and
doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who
can be honest about the way the universe really works.

--

James Howard Kunstler is the author, most recently, of "World Made
by Hand," a novel about America's post-oil future.