1. How do you view 'peak oil' & why do you take it seriously?
Julian Darley: So my first question is: How do you understand oil peak and why do you take it seriously when so many others don’t?
James Howard Kunstler: How do I understand oil peak? Well, I understand it the way it has been presented to me. It seems to me that the people who have presented this to the public, namely Colin Campbell and the group surrounding him, have made a compelling case that’s hard to ignore, given who they are, and their credentials, and the case that they present. So, you know, I proceed with my ideas simply by accepting their premises and finding alternate explanations to be inadequate. Why do I take it seriously? Well, some years ago when I started looking into the issues that I write about - namely the fiasco of suburbia in America - I did that, I pursued that, because when I was a newspaper reporter beginning in the 1970’s and I lived and worked through the oil embargo of 1973 and had a very vivid memory of what happened, it seemed to me that the way America was arranging everyday life, the great suburban build-out, represented a tremendous economic, political, social, and ecological catastrophe. And I agonized for many years wondering, where it was leading us, you know, that feeling that you get when you are out on a freeway and you’re a young man and you see just these wave upon wave of cars coming at you day after day after day and you wonder: Is this what it’s going to be like 11 years from now, 23 years from now, 50 years from now? Where does it end? Because it can’t go on like this forever. And the economy that was associated with it seemed to me to be a pathological economy. So I was fascinated by that and that’s what I set out to explore in my books Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere. And of course, you know, the oil supply is at the bottom of it. And the fact that we can now in retrospect identify these extraordinary conditions of the 20th century as being “The Cheap Oil Age” and especially the conditions in the second half of the 20th century and being a very special set of circumstances that created a very special kind of growth medium and allowed us here in America to behave a certain way and make certain choices and altogether I think it’s had a very baleful effect on American civilization. And we have now reached a kind of crossroads where we are faced with a set of very important choices and if we fail to make the right ones American civilization may not really be carried on the way we might have liked it to be. So that’s where I’m coming from on that.
2. What about all the substitutes for oil - solar, hydrogen, nuclear etc?
Julian Darley: One of the places where people find solace in this is the fact that we’ve managed to 'substitute': before, when oil got problematic in the seventies, why, there was gas - we dashed for that and that was splendid and then there is solar: You know, more sunlight hits the earth in a day than we can conceive of using in goodness knows how many dozens of years. So this is all splendid and, you know, as hydrogen is everywhere clearly it’s all around the universe and we’re probably practically made of it, so hydrogen is going to be super. And then there’s fusion and you know methane hydrates. There’s an endless list of things, which are plainly going to save us, and it’s all going to be excellent. And then there’s nuclear and so forth. What are your feelings about all these wonderful substitutes, which are in fact going to save us?
JHK: I regard them as very unfortunate fantasies. It doesn’t take a lot of technical expertise or scientific education to understand, for example, what an energy sink is. The fact is, that with my limited expertise, it’s obvious that none of these alternatives as we know them or can even conceive of them within the limits of what we know, none of these things scale, really, they don’t pencil out. You may be able to create a fuel cell prototype car in a laboratory, but can you manufacture a hundred million of them to substitute for what we’re running now? I think the answer’s clearly no. We can’t. And we certainly can’t scale up solar in any way that would be an adequate replacement for the way we are running things. That’s really the big question. Can we continue running things the way we have with these substitutes and the answer is no. And in truth the dirty secret of the American predicament is that our economy is now based almost entirely on the creation of suburban sprawl, on the servicing of it, and the furnishing of it. You know, we’ve out-sourced all of our manufacturing, well, a lot of our manufacturing, it’s really not fair to say all of it, but enough of it to have reduced its significance. So we now have got an economy that is based on suburban sprawl. But what makes it even more problematic is this, is that, all the wealth that we’ve been investing in it also represents at the same time a tremendous, monumental, misallocation of resources. We’ve been investing all of our national wealth for the last fifty years in the infrastructure for a daily life that has no future. There’s no future in the suburban sprawl way of life and that’s where all of our money is. And so not only are we running our economy on it but we’ve also stuck all our wealth in it. And that is the real tragedy of where we’re at now because the fabric of our daily life, the suburban cul-de-sacs, the strip malls, the parking lagoons, the commercial highway strips, you know, all the stuff that Americans are familiar with as the daily setting of their lives, really does not lend itself to retro-fitting for a different kind of future, for a more energy efficient future, or a different kind of energy future. So what I imagine is that it’s going to represent a kind of an economic catastrophe, as its disutility becomes manifest and its associated value vanishes, and the people who have invested their life savings in things like McHouses and suburban property of all kinds are going to find that they’ve been ruined and impoverished by this mis-investment. And I think the net effect is we’re going to see a mad scramble in the suburbs as people try to get out, and of course there are going to be very few buyers for this stuff, and the value of all the property of all kinds, commercial, residential, office, you-name-it, is going to crash and there’s going to be a kind of fight over the table scraps of the twentieth century out there. And it’s going to be very messy. It’s going to create a huge amount of political distress, recrimination, finger pointing, scape-goating. My own theory is that Americans will vote for corn pone Nazis who will promise to restore the Golden Age of the nineties and of course that will be a promise they will not be able to keep. We’re going to see a new class of Americans who I call “The Formerly Middle-Class”, and they’re going to feel a tremendous sense of having been swindled out of their entitlements to the American Dream, which is to say the life of the Drive-In Utopia, the life of suburban sprawl, which the world will no longer permit them to live in and they’re going to create tremendous domestic political turmoil in the attempt to hold on to those entitlements which cannot be held on to. So I think it’s going to be a big god damn mess. I think it’s probably going to lead to violence; it may lead to some degree to the dissolution of our democratic institutions in the United States. And we may not recognize our nation by the time the dust settles.
Julian Darley: You’ve covered several of my questions. I was going to lead into what do you think will happen to suburbia, but I think you’ve given us a pretty comprehensive look at that. Is there anything else you want to add to this, and I speak from Canada, which is a gigantic suburb.
JHK: Well I’ve been very active in the New Urbanist movement over the last ten years. It’s really a wonderful movement made up of some of the most hopeful, and competent, and honorable people who I’ve met in my culture. You know, I’m fifty-four years old, and these are in my estimation, just among some of the best of the baby boom generation, you know, people of tremendous skill and ability. And they came along at a time that was kind of crucial. They have been out there in the trenches sedulously trying to reclaim and restore the whole body of knowledge that we threw in the garbage in 1950 – the culture of civic design. Which is that body of skill and principle and knowledge and methodology, which allows us to construct meaningful, sustainable, and rewarding human ecologies namely - towns, villages, cities, farming ecologies, rural landscapes.
All of the conditions that are found on what we in the New Urbanism call the transect of the human habitat: a continuum that goes from the center of the city to the wilderness and all the conditions in between that obtain. And all the knowledge and skill necessary to produce these things has been put back into service by the New Urbanists, because we’re going to need it desperately. It happens to be the antithesis to the anti-city and the anti-human ecology of suburbia.
You know and all of the principles that go into the making of suburbia are not found in the principles of traditional town planning and traditional urban design. So the New Urbanists have been working on this very hard. And I think they’ve also gone to heroic lengths to try to understand what we’re going to do with the existing suburban places. Because of course whatever they represent in the form of a misallocation of resources or a misinvestment, there is still I think an understandable wish to try to do something with them. And I think that some of them indeed can probably be reused and fixed. There are already projects in existence in which, for example, dead shopping malls are being converted into village centers and town centers with mixed-use development: places for people to live, people of different incomes, houses, apartments, places for businesses to do their thing, retail, all mixed together in an integral way so that these places add up to more than the sum of their parts. Which is to say that they come alive as civic organisms, you know, just as you come alive as a human organism because the organs of your life are integrally deployed around your body. You’re more than the sum of liver and the lungs and the bones and the skin and the muscle. In that way, a real human habitat is more than just the sum of its parts.
And the whole idea of suburbia for the last sixty years really has been to dis-aggregate those organic relations between, those integral relations between the civic organs, you know, the organs of the residential organs where we have our houses, and the commercial organs where the shopping happens, and the educational organs where the schools and the museums are, and the cultural organs of the theaters and so on. And under the regime of single use zoning, which was the chief governing principle of suburbia, all these things were separated assiduously, and the separation was reinforced with either large streets or formal buffers that took the form of landscaping fantasias, and things like that.
So the main thing about suburbia was it could only be used and accessed by being in an automobile and that of course is its most obvious drawback and from the standpoint of energy it’s what makes the whole program a complete loser for the future. Because we are now stuck in America with tens of thousands of poorly integrated places that can only be used in cars. With massive amounts of mandatory motoring. We’re literally stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up.
The New Urbanists have tried heroically as I said to imagine methods and ways of fixing these places. I think the general point of view among us is that you can do a certain amount of this with malls and some of the commercial stuff. You can retrofit them, you can in-fill the parking lots you can create streets and blocks and eventually even remove the mall buildings and change them out with real urban fabric. But the suburban residential cul-de-sac subdivisions do not offer a whole lot of hope, and I haven’t seen one example of anyone who’s been able to come up with a scheme for retro-fitting them for the future. So I imagine they’ll be the slums of the future. My image of it is that where there is now one software engineer living in a McMansion outside of Atlanta, eleven years from now there will be twelve families living in that building growing Swiss chard where the lawn used to be. And it’s kind of a sad and tragic and hopeless and pitiful picture of the future.
4. What is your opinion of the way city planners judge success by market values?
Julian Darley:
You are mentioning things which I have tried to explore with people who are
in town planning. One of the things that I notice is that whilst the people
pay a certain amount of attention when it’s mentioned that this is running
on a fuel system which is going to run out, apart from its other problems which
you’ve noted both just now and so eloquently in your books, one is partly
talking about an ideology of the general city and town planner, which I think
allows them to get jobs and keep their jobs. Part of that ideology it seems
to me is powered by a profound belief in the market. I even heard, I think it’s
Professor Saveros saying that the market is the test of urban planning and urban
design, so if the consumers like it then it’s succeeded, and if they don’t
it’s failed, and he excoriated the use of steel rails, metal rails, and
was, as one might expect deeply in love with the rubber wheel, and I wondered
if you could comment on this. This is a whole institution which is pretty much
dead set.
James Howard Kunstler:
Well, these arguments about the marketplace and the idea that suburbia must
be OK, because that’s what people seem to want is transparently an exercise
in casuistry and transparently a specious argument. I think what we’re
really talking about when you clear away all the smoke, what stands behind this
in, it its baleful way, is the law of perverse outcomes, which states that people
don’t get what they expect, but they get what they deserve.
A lot of people ascribe the damage that’s been done simply to the planning officialdom, but really that’s certainly not solely what’s responsible, although it really didn’t help. What you’re seeing is just a tremendous aggregate amount of cultural inertia. The kind of behaviors that end up being expressed in the suburban “Geography of Nowhere”, as I call it, of the American landscape and townscape, really represents inertia that’s coming from many different parts of our culture. It certainly comes from the planning officials who have their single-use zoning ideology, but it also comes from the developers, the homebuilders, who have their habits and practices and have become very comfortable feeling that this is the way that they know how to make a profit, and they don’t really want to change the way they’re doing things, that they certainly don’t want to learn how to do it differently.
It comes from the bankers; the banking world has changed in some very dangerously perverse ways over the last twenty years and one of the most insidious changes has been that as the local banks were taken over by conglomerates, the lending decisions that they made, especially about real estate projects, no longer had anything to do with the merit of the project, you know, was it a good thing to do? It had only to do with whether or not that particular loan or mortgage could be re-bundled with a whole bunch of other mortgages and then re-sold to some other institution. And that was solely the basis of the decisions made. Now, the ramifications of that are that if you propose to do a good New Urbanist project namely, let’s say, to build a five-story apartment building in downtown Atlanta, where they need buildings like that, because they need an alternative to the single family home, the banks will not lend you the money to build it, because they don’t recognize that as the kind of re-bundleable, resellable mortgage that they have had experience with in the past. But that’s just inertia. Just because they don’t know how to do it, they will not do it. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a good loan; it just means they won’t do it.
And of course there’s plenty of inertia coming from the homebuyers themselves, who have certain expectations for a certain kind of a house. Now that comes from another very strange area in this sort of the darker, kind of Jungian, backwaters of our national psychology. The origins of suburbia in America really come from the fact that our cities and towns grew up in tandem with the Industrial Revolution, and all of its obnoxious procedures and by-products. And so really, pretty early in American history, which is not that long, let’s say the mid-nineteenth century, just around the 1850’s, the idea developed as these towns and cities are burgeoning with their factories, that the industrial city is a horrible place, and it’s really not fit for living in. And as soon as we can, we’re going to try and get out of it, if we can, and live outside of it somehow. And, after the Civil War, the interruption of the Civil War, the railroad begins to enable the escape from the city, in the form of the railroad suburb. The very first one is actually 1859, or ’57, just before the Civil War. It was a project called Llewellyn Park in New Jersey. But really the next significant one is Riverside, outside of Chicago, begun in, I think, 1871 or so, designed by the famous Frederick Law Olmsted, and his partner Calvert Vaux. And the idea was they were going to build a whole bunch of country manor houses in a kind of a park, nine miles outside of downtown Chicago. And that became the prototype for the suburban sub-division and the prototype for what would pretty soon become known as The American Dream. And that becomes firmly established in the national imagination. Everybody who can live outside the horror of the industrial city, will. And of course, in the beginning, only the very well off can afford to do this.
The basic promise of the railroad suburb is: you’re going to be able to live an urban life in a rural setting. That is, you can work in an office, you can work for a corporation, you can be part of the great industrial dynamic economy of the late nineteenth century, but you don’t have to live in it. You can live outside in the tranquil countryside, and back then in 1871, it really was a countryside. You know, there were no 7-11’s in Olmsted’s Riverside. If you wanted to make a chocolate cake, you literally went out to the henhouse, and to the barn, and you got eggs and milk. These people did keep chickens and cows. Of course the households were organized in a completely different way than they are today: they had servants who did all these things. And that was The American Dream – life in the suburbs. And it must have been lovely actually, when you think about it, you know, the idea of the railroad and later the streetcar suburbs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the beaux arts, is a lovely, lovely, kind of package.
The trouble is, it becomes, you know democratized in a certain way after the automobile comes in, especially after 1918 after the interruption of the 1st World War. And the car changes all of that. So really over the next 60, 70 years, and skipping over the other interruptions of The Great Depression and World War II, the suburb goes through this mutation in which it becomes something quite different, it’s no longer really country living. It becomes something more, kind of sinister, and pathetic, and pitiful. It becomes a cartoon of country living. In fact, it’s a cartoon of a country house, set in a cartoon of a rural landscape. And that of course was the great unexpressed agony of the suburbs, and it’s the reason why the suburbs are so easily subject to ridicule, including ridicule on the part of the people who actually live in it. They too, recognize that at some level suburbia is ridiculous. And I think that what’s at the bottom of that is, of course, it has not delivered what it promised for, you know, ninety years ago. It’s no longer country living, this cartoon rural existence. And living in a cartoon is just not good enough.
One of the great sad lessons among the many diminishing returns of technology that we’ve learned over the last hundred years is that the virtual reality isn’t an adequate substitute for the authentic. And it’s true in many, many, many ways. But it’s certainly true in the sense of the places that we live in. A cul-de-sac subdivision is not an adequate replacement for living in a real neighborhood or a genuine town or a genuine village where you actually enjoy real civic relations. That’s sort of the dark story of how we got to where we are. We’re now in the unfortunate situation of having now invested so much of our previous wealth in it, we’re in what I call The Previous Investment Trap, which probably is self-evident. We’ve allocated so much of our national wealth in it, that we’re psychologically unable to find a way to move on to something else. Nor can we understand how we may possibly recoup our misinvestment in this. I mean it’s in the nature of misinvestments, that they’re not really re-coupable. And that’s what we’re presented with.
All of this was a product of the cheap oil age, which really starts at the beginning of the twentieth century. And so, the whole twentieth century has represented this process. We’re now leaving this behind us and the suburban way of life and everything it represents has become so completely normative to most Americans, including ones who are intelligent, that it is very hard for us to imagine any other way of life, including ways of life which, at another level we recognize as being more desirable. People do, after all, pay premium prices to travel to Europe to live for a few weeks every year in these far superior urban environments and town environments. People like me go to Tuscany to visit the hill towns and we recognize that these are superior environments and that the quality of life is better there. But we come back to America and we continue to make the same foolish decisions and continue to make the misinvestments, and, it’s amazing. And you see it in another scale in America. There’s a whole other class of Americans who will drive 2500 miles from their small town in Minnesota to go to Walt Disney’s Main Street and walk down Main Street there, you know, unmolested by cars, because they really don’t let them in except for the few antique props that they keep around. And they’ll walk around and they’ll say “Gosh, doesn’t it feel good to be on a nice walkable street in a mixed use, in a simulated mixed-use neighborhood”. And then they’ll go back home to their small town and they’ll turn main street into a six-lane expressway, and they’ll cut down all the street trees on Elm Street in order to remove these “hazards to motoring”, as they’re regarded by Departments of Transportation, and they’ll do everything possible they can to destroy the great relationships between the things in their older town. And then, another year will go by, and they’ll go back to Disney World to feel good about America. So it’s a pretty kind of pitiful situation.
5. What do you say to a city that is still converting its old infrastructure to parking structures (multi-storey car parks in British English)?
Julian Darley: I received a couple of e-mail requests as well with questions for you. One of them was a person very pleased to see you picking up on oil peak [especially in your most recent piece], on the sixth of March, and he says – this fellow is in Columbus, Georgia – where I gather you will be speaking in a few days.
JHK: I’ll be there in about a week and a half.
JD: Yes, and so he says in the light of that, what do you say to a city that is getting ready to build a parking garage in an older downtown as part of re-habbing and enlarging a converted ironworks convention center.
JHK: Every city and town, large or small in America, believes that it’s a good idea to build parking lots, and parking structures, multiple level right now. And given the cognitive dissonance that exists now in our culture, you know, the mental static in our collective consciousness, it’s almost impossible to persuade people that parking structures are a bad idea because they regard parking structures as a necessary accessory to the rehabilitation of their downtowns.
To some extent it’s understandable if you were to believe that the current conditions would continue indefinitely. And I don’t try to persuade people not to do it because I think it’s a futile thing to do. You can’t persuade them not to do it. I personally don’t think that we’re going to be using cars ten or twenty years from now the way we’ve been accustomed to using them in the past. I think the role of the automobile in our life is going to be greatly diminished and I regard it as another form of misinvestment to make accommodation for them, especially at that scale.
That said, I think right now about the best thing that you can do is to try to talk to people into creating parking structures that can be re-used adaptively for something else, 10, 20, 30 years down the line. Now I don’t even know if that’s possible. A structure that big generally has to have a light well in the center just to create apartments in it. But one of the things they can think about doing is designing them so that in the future there can be a light well in the center of the block, and create ceilings that will be high enough in the future to accommodate the pipes and things that have to go up in the 12 or 24 inches above the ceiling which means more than an eight foot deck. And that’s, to my way of thinking, about the best you can do right now for that kind of thinking that’s going on.
Look, I live in a town that has built one parking deck in the last several years and is planning two more and I’m in the middle of this argument all the time. And I’ve told people, I said “Don’t expect the future of this town to be about parking. It ain’t gonna be about parking because it ain’t gonna be about driving as much as it has been.” But they’re really, their eyes glaze over when you say that and they simply don’t believe it. So it’s really more a question whether you can persuade them to put up buildings that can be used for something else in the future when their disutility as parking structures becomes evident.
Q6. What do you say to those who 'just don't believe' there will be energy shortages?
Julian Darley: You’ve brought up the “don’t believe it” problem. I was talking to Colin Campbell about [this] in the light of recent interviews with journalists - and you can lay out certain facts, and they may be disputed as facts, but somehow there’s a kind of thing beyond disputing the facts, there’s a simple "I just don’t believe it", you know, it doesn’t fit with anything that I know.
James Kunstler: Well, absolutely, and this has been part of my mode of operation for the last ten years on the lecture circuit is that one of the things I refuse to do is engage in a lot of exercises in statistical analysis. Suburbia was largely built on the basis of statistical analysis. That’s one of the problems with it. It wasn’t based on human neurological needs, it wasn’t based on artistry, it was based on things like highway geometries and measuring volumes of traffic, and things that have no relation to whether a place is worth living in or not, finally. And the product of a human habitat based on statistical analysis ends up being a place that’s not worth living in and not worth caring about. This, incidentally, is now one of the salient problems that faces America is that having constructed 27 thousand odd places now that are not worth caring about, we may find ourselves living in a country that’s not worth defending. That ends up being a very deep and persistent cultural problem that we’re going to grapple with for a long time to come. It’s hard for me to imagine a lot of those young kids who are in the Army who are now going to be shipped over to the desert to engage in combat and probably get wounded, and I wonder how they’re going to feel when they’re lying in the desert sands there with their blood leaving their body. What is their image of their hometown going to be like, you know? If they’re from someplace like the suburban wasteland between Dallas and Ft. Worth, what’s their final memory of their hometown? Of a curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the car wash? That’s not good enough. That’s not a good enough reason to give your life for your country. And so, that’s one of the other unexpected, unanticipated consequences of doing what we did. You spend half a century creating a land full of places that aren’t worth caring for, and you end up with a country that’s not worth defending. And it’s a tragic, tragic outcome, isn’t it?
JD: And how these things relate to wider issues.
JHK: For America, it’s really a question of how we are going to carry on civilization; how are we going to remain civilized in the face of this catastrophe of losing the motive power behind our living arrangements.
Q7. What will be the impact of the coming fossil fuel peak on small towns?
Julian Darley: Another chap wrote: “I have read all of Mr. Kunstler’s books and I’m a regular for his Eyesore of the Month. He lives in my neck of the woods and his penchant for seeing the sad state of architecture and community keeps me coming back. I would like to ask him what he thinks the impact will be on small towns and villages of the coming fossil fuel peak, and does he think it will ultimately create a drive back to those types of living situations or to something different, i.e. rural, urban?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, yes, in fact my next book is going to be about this and is largely concerned with the tremendous project of downscaling all of the activities of American life and recondensing our living arrangements into coherent towns and villages and neighborhoods. I’m not quite as sanguine about the big cities of America; many of them actually are already cratered. If you go back to central Detroit now, you will find wildflowers growing in many of the, what used to be, immense neighborhoods of houses in the center of Detroit. Same thing with St. Louis. Same thing with many, many great industrial cities in the Midwest.
I think that the small towns and small cities probably offer much more hope. I think that the story of the 21st century is going to be about the re-localization of American life, a tremendous need to reconstruct local networks of economic interdependence, including the occupational niches and social roles that went with them, which were systematically destroyed by the kind of cheap oil behavior that spawned activities like Wal-Mart and all of its imitators.
You know, it’s a funny thing about Wal-Mart, I’ve seen this all over the country for the last 10 years where I’ve been brought into various local battles over Wal-Mart but, you know, Americans almost universally greeted this kind of thing with open arms and the whole idea was “Fabulous, we will save $7.00 on a hair dryer and that will make our life perfect.” What they didn’t reckon on was that in the process of saving $7.00 for a hair dryer, they would throw in the garbage $100,000 of their civic life for each $7.00 that they saved on a hair dryer and the net effect has been the almost complete disassembly of local networks and local economies and the complete destruction of the civic life of our country and of the social systems that took care of that civic life.
The people that used to conduct retail commerce in America formed the middle class of most of our towns and cities. They were the ones who also happened to be the caretakers of our civic institutions. They sat on the school boards and library boards, you know, and you removed this class of people, not just an individual, but a whole class of people. You’re basically throwing your culture in the garbage. The destruction has been so enormous, and ought to have been so vivid, because anybody can visit an American small town almost anywhere in America and see nothing but empty storefronts, delaminating buildings, and just tremendous physical decay and dereliction. So that part of it ought to be self-evident, not to mention the loss of jobs, the loss of rich networks of social interaction, interdependence, mutual care, you know, all of these things.
This is the great job that faces us now is restoring those networks and restoring the social roles that went with them. I don’t know if we’re up to it, but we’re going to have to do it whether we like or not. That gets back sort of to the whole market issue of well “Americans like suburbia, therefore it must be good.” Life doesn’t work that way, actually, history and destiny and fate have plans for us, and sometimes we have to do things whether we like it or not. And this is what America really has to do. This is its assignment.
Along with this, of course, comes the tremendous task of restoring our food production and farming and agriculture because along with the end of suburbia, we’re going to obviously going to be experiencing the end of industrial food production, you know, and the 3000-mile Caesar salad which epitomizes it. This has tremendous implications for the kind of towns that we have, the kind of value-added manufacturing activities that will go on, and the kind of jobs and occupations that people will have. I happen to believe that we may actually live to see the birth of a new social class in this country, the rebirth of the American agricultural laborer. It might not be a great life, it may be a very harsh life, but I think we’re going to see it, because a lot of our food raising, I think, is going to have to be much more labor intensive in the future. Where I live, we still have quite a bit of intact agricultural landscape that can be put back into service. But there are a lot of other places in America that have been very, very, severely damaged and paved over. And I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen with them.
Q8. Will the current North American natural gas difficulties cause a wider questioning in the US of hydrocarbon problems?
Julian Darley: More news came in today, that I believe, all the anhydrous ammonia production plants in Minnesota I read today have been shut down for lack of natural gas and natural gas is 80% of the price of fertilizer, which we know is very closely related to ammonia. And that leads me to mention, do you think the natural gas problems, or the natural gas crunch, do you think that will wake Americans up to a greater hydrocarbon problem?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, you know, something is capable of waking Americans up. We may be sleepwalking into the future, we may have gone into a kind of a coma, but we’re not dead. I think it will take what I call a bitch slap upside our nappy heads to wake us up. And I think we’re going to get it, and it’s going to come in one form or another. We could have an oil crisis tomorrow if some chap walks into Prince Abdullah’s bedchamber with a bomb strapped to his belt. That could be the end of our Saudi Arabian imports, indeed that could be the end of the Sauds and their family and their regime and the beginning of something else in Arabia. And that would change everything.
As I said earlier, I lived through the 1973 oil embargo and that made quite an impression on me because, you know, you saw people’s behavior change overnight. You saw people being severely impressed with the power of extrinsic events to change your life. And I remember driving down to New York City to see a girl when I was 25 years old from 150 miles away in Albany, N.Y. And I was a newspaper reporter at the time; I had planned this trip to see this girl very, very carefully so that I knew where I might be able to get some gas, you know, on the way back from there. And I was the only person on the New York State Thruway between Albany and the Tappan Zee Bridge. And it was like that science fiction movie The Day The Earth Stood Still. There were like five cars on, going down Second Avenue in Manhattan that night. It was very, very spooky.
And I’ve never seen anything like it since. Certainly nothing that we’ve experienced since, except the World Trade Center disaster matched that for sheer shock value. But the difference was that the World Trade Center disaster, although it was seen by everybody, it only happened, really, in one small place. The oil embargo actually happened all over and people from California to Boston sat on those lines and experienced the trauma and thought very hard about how they were going to make some maybe different decisions about commuting. I, for one, when the oil embargo happened, I had been living in a kind of rural village about 20 miles away from my job. Two weeks later I went in and rented an apartment in downtown Albany, NY, I was working for the newspaper there. So I obviously made a very concrete decision to move, and was basically glad I did.
But, yeah, I think that it’s conceivable that that could wake up Americans and so could a natural gas crisis, many things could. But, the trouble now is of course is that our investments in suburbia are orders of magnitude greater than they were even 25 years ago in 1973. And it’s going to be much, much harder for Americans to find the pathway out of this. You know, I think the real key to all this is that Americans kind of, in the strange complacency that overtook us in the last 20 years, ever since the North Sea and the Alaskan Slope kind of came on line and made it possible for us to postpone this reckoning.
This strange complacency that overtook us kind of gave us the idea that there’s a guaranteed happy ending to every terrible predicament that you find yourself in. That life is sort of like a TV show or a Bruce Willis movie – that there is a happy ending. But in my opinion, the great shock to Americans is going to be to find out that there is no smooth transition between the end of the cheap oil era and whatever follows. In fact it’s going to be very disorderly, and very turbulent, and it’s going to involve a lot of stress, and woe, and ruin, and whatever emerges from it is going to emerge from really a great kind of fire of the soul that may even match what we went through in the Civil War. And I hope we’re able to come out the other end. I’m just young enough, or put another way, just not old enough, so that it’s conceivable that I could see coming out the other end. And I’m as curious as anybody to see how it turns out.
Q9. What are the prospects for the US 'sunbelt'?
Julian Darley: In your book, The City in Mind, you gave one of the most graphic portraits of that fine town Las Vegas that one can imagine. And there’s been a vast migration to the Southwest. Not just Las Vegas, but huge numbers of places in Arizona and Nevada. That’s seen as one of the great places to go in America. It’s nice and warm. You need a spot of air conditioning when it stays over 100 for a 100 days in Dallas and that kind of thing. But how do you think--Las Vegas being sort of the most extraordinary example--but how do you think this extraordinary new band of suburbanism really in the Southwest is going to cope not only with the fact that its power--its natural gas for its power and other means and its oil and petrol and gasoline for its autos--and there are not a few water problems in that part of the world--would you say this is one of the areas of the USA that is going to be hardest hit and how do you think it’s going to cope?
James Kunstler. Absolutely. I think the prospects for the Sunbelt are very very grim.
Julian Darley: Even though it has lots of solar?
James Kunstler.Yes, that’s not going to compensate for the loss of these other fuels, not by a long shot. I actually see many of the sunbelt places being significantly depopulated over the next 30 years. Some of the populations may be replaced by Mexicans. I also happen to believe that we’re gong to have much more trouble in our relations with Mexico in the decades ahead, and that to a certain extent, Southern California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico are going to become contested territory. And that from a practical standpoint, life is going to become very very difficult there. They were not places that were really fit to live in in anything but a cheap oil economy because you really need heroic amounts of air conditioning there. They didn’t have to lay them out the way the way they did. I mean the actual suburban development pattern did not have to happen there, and that would have given them much more of a future. But it didn’t work out that way.
I went to a conference in Arizona a few years ago and I stayed in a hotel in Phoenix that was so sprawled out in its own little pod that you actually had to drive from the place where you slept to the place where they gave your breakfast within the resort itself. It was remarkable how auto dependent it was. Yes, I regard places like Phoenix and Houston as being hopeless.
I make somewhat of a distinction between what they call the dry sun belt and the wet sun belt—that is, the Southeast and the Southwest—the Southeast after all does has some prospects for becoming once again a kind of an agricultural backwater, which I think it will. I mean there’s a reason that there were no big cities in the South really until after World War II. Atlanta was smaller than Buffalo, New York until the 1960s. Orlando was pretty much just a bunch of fruit groves, and Houston was a jerkwater, Phoenix was a jerkwater, these were all tiny little towns until after World War II. They’re completely a product of cheap fossil fuels. You could say there is a Hubbert’s curve that applies just as appropriately to these cities as it does to oil. So the prospects are poor.
Q10. Do you see conflict arising in America between those who are willing to reduce their energy use including growing their own food and so forth, and those who regard the American way of life as non-negotiable?
James Kunstler: Yeah, but I see it sort of happening on a regional basis, more or less. I do think that the Northeast probably has somewhat better prospects, even though it’s colder. We do have water and plenty of it. We have water power. I think that it will tend to be some regions doing better than other regions.
Q11. What do you think about the media response to oil peak?
Julian Darley: One thing that interested Colin Campbell and many others, he from his point of view of trying to get the message out, and I’m interested in aspects of the media, because I’ve been in it, I’ve studied it, I’m doing quite a lot of work around how the media doesn’t do a frightfully good job of covering complex issues, and I wondered what you thought—you’ve been a journalist, a writer, for many years—what do you think of the media response as you see it to this oil peak, the hydrocarbon problem, and how much longer can it be hidden?
James Kunstler: Well you know, I tend to be non-conspiracist. That is, I’m a non-believer that there are great conspiracies going on in the world of a nation, and really for two reasons. One, that it’s part of human nature that people just can’t keep secrets. You know, they just can’t. They’re just not very good at it. And the other one is that by and large people aren’t that smart. They’re smart enough and there a some very smart people and there are even large numbers of them. But I don’t think there is a conspiracy in the media to hide this issue. I think what we’re seeing in the media is really just another example of the diminishing returns of technology. We have more means and greater ability to move information in different ways than we even had in the history of the world, and almost all of the information that we’re moving around is meaningless. The more conduits of information we create, it seems, the more crap and static and nonsense we fill it up with. Here in my house, we have about 60 cable channels including about nine cable channels of news. And on those nine news channels we’ve got Larry King talking about Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. And I don’t think it’s malicious and I don’t think that they’re trying to hide anything, I just think there’s a natural tendency for bad news to drive out good news, just as bad money drives out good money when you introduce a lesser form of money into a currency system or a gold system. Grisham’s Law applies and Grisham’s law unfortunately applies to culture too. So we’re seeing the diminishing returns of it, The consequence of that, is there there’s a tremendous amount of noise out there and very little real good information, and certainly even less wisdom, and certainly beyond that, less motivating information that gets people to act in ways that are intelligent. So that’s what I think is going on there.
Q12. Why are people talking about currency, particularly the Euro, and oil?
Julian Darley: You mentioned Gresham’s law and you picked up on currency, and so I would love to ask you, I know you said you’re not an expert on oil, of course, and currency is one of these complex areas, but could you say something just because you have a voice which is listened to by many, could you at least say something about why you think people are talking about currency, particularly the euro and the dollar, with regard to oil, and if you have any sort of feelings about that, why it might be significant, what it might mean for the economy, because after all, a lot of what you’ve been talking about has been oil and economy and effects, behind the scenes...
James Kunstler: Yes, in my view, one of the reasons that we’re seeing such anxiety over the American dollar is not just because historically for a period of time the sale of petroleum has been pegged to the dollar, but it has to do the nature of what the American economy is and what the dollar stands for. Currency in our lifetime, of course its not pegged to anything concrete like gold that actually holds value, but it really takes the form of a kind of collective hallucination--which is to say a consensus, an agreement, among many many many individuals about what constitutes value and what stands behind a given currency. In our case, it has been the idea that the American economy was a fabulous dynamo that produced tremendous wealth. And I think from my point of view, what’s happened is that the American economy has actually been hollowed out, as we’ve outsourced and thrown away our manufacturing abilities and capabilities, and really what the American economy is about now, it’s about the creation of suburban sprawl and its furnishings and accessories. And at some point, there’s a recognition, I think perhaps unconscious, among the other nations in the world who observe us, that that isn’t good enough. And the consensus is beginning to form that that’s not enough to support a strong dollar. In fact, this is a problematical economy, and perhaps a weak and precarious economy, and one that is based on the continuing misallocation of resources into a living arrangement based on the future consumption of enormous amounts of fossil fuel that are not going to be there. The Europeans on the other hand, for all of their historic problems, and perhaps the various individual national character deformities--or their virtues--one thing you can say about the Europeans and their living arrangement, is that they at least are living in towns and cities that have some prospect for utility in the future. They will be able to carry on their life in their cities without the same kind of massive amounts of petroleum that we’re using now to run a place like Atlanta or Phoenix or Houston. So i think that not only is it a matter of the dollar being pegged to the price of oil, it’s a matter of what kind of economy really does stand behind the dollar, and I think the view is that possibly we recognize it’s a flimsy economy based on things that are not producing much of real value.
Julian Darley: It’s just so important to hear people at least linking currency in with this business, because it’s going to become more and more apparent, and it is a ferociously complicated business.
James Kunstler: There’s one more thing I think I could add: tied to the whole extremely precarious condition of the suburban sprawl economy is the enabling mechanism of our out-of-control credit system and all the debt that has been amassed explicitly and overtly in the service of creating all these suburban houses and subdivisions and strip malls and all the stuff that I’ve been talking bout. The nature of that investment is not only have we put our national wealth in this stuff that has no future, but we’ve also hocked ourselves up to our eyeballs in the creation of more of this stuff that has no future, utility or worth or value, so that actually takes the problem a bit further.
Q13. Is the US entitled to as much energy as it needs from anywhere it chooses?
Julian Darley: The last couple of things I’d like to ask you, if I may, you’ve talked a lot about allocation in terms of misallocation of particularly monies and investments and so forth, to come onto a question which is very much on the tips of many people’s tongues but perhaps put in a slightly different way than it often is: Do you think that Americans have a right to as much energy as they need, which is kind of coded way of asking whether the U.S. is entitled to Iraqi, Saudi Arabian oil?
James Kunstler: Well, it ought to be clear from what I’ve already said that I don’t necessarily think that anybody is necessarily entitled to anything. We get what we do in this world sometimes by accident, and sometimes by luck, and sometimes because we’ve worked very hard to earn it, and sometimes because we’ve been virtuous, and sometimes because we’ve been wicked. And I suppose that many of those things have worked in combination for America. I tend to think that we’ve simply been in some respects lucky. Our nation is founded on a continent that up until recently enjoyed a great deal of protection from lying between two oceans. We were the first people to discover large amounts of oil on our continent and to be able to exploit it successfully. Those were kind of lucky things. And we were able to develop an oil-based economy that seemed to work and produce some technologically miraculous things for a period of about a hundred years. And we were fortunate. But now we’re suffering a kind of equal misfortune of having enjoyed all that luck and having been lulled into a false state of security and finding ourselves now sleepwalking into a long emergency. And we’re going to find out, I think, that the law of perverse outcomes is correct, that we may not get what we expect, which is to say our entitlements to a drive-in utopia, forever. We may instead get what we deserve, which is a long period of turmoil, turbulence, woe, distress, misery and ultimately the loss of the things we cherish most--our democratic republic and its institutions.
Q14. Is there any hidden blessing in the 'oil peak'?
Julian Darley: There are many possible reactions to an understanding that oil peak is going to happen or indeed is happening. Some people can see in it a certain blessing in disguise. Other people think it's going to be just a universal horror and they can't face it. And then there are some people who are the opposite of cornucopians--the absolute 'die-off doomsdayers' -- and for them, this is 'it', this is what they've been predicting all along. I wondered where you were--a bit of blessing in disguise, a bit of die off, neither?
James Kunstler: I think that's accurate. You know, the die-off gang has put out a pretty compelling set of arguments, and one of things we didn’t talk about today was where microbiology fits in because you can make some persuasive arguments that the world is revving up for a combination of events that are going to considerably thin out the population, and I mean specifically a serious mega-influenza pandemic, or the thing that is already underway, the AIDS pandemic, which has prospects for becoming much worse over the next 20 years and very problematically. But, that said, I do find myself not very firmly in the die-off camp. I do think the human race does have some resilience, and I do think that we have some prospects of going forward and remaining civilized. It occurs to me that we may face a period of darkness. That has happened before, and it's not something I particular welcome but it’s a plausible outcome for a while. History happens to occur in cycles. I don’t think the human race is ready to throw in the towel. We have the means to do it, but it ain't necessarily going to happen. It's certainly an interesting period of time to live in. Those of us who were born in the hippie period, like myself, may even enjoy the prospect of returning in another incarnation, to see things going on a little further. Who knows? I'm really not that much of a New Ager, but I'm very curious about what’s going to happen, and I wish us the best.
Julian Darley: That's a very nice way to end, thank you very much
- 6807 reads
