[Dialogue] The Suburban Fantasy

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Friday, May 26, 2006 by TomPaine.com <http://www.tompaine.com>


The Suburban Fantasy 

by James Howard Kunstler

 

It's actually kind of funny to hear Americans complain these days about the
cost of gasoline and how it is affecting their lives. What did they expect
after setting up an easy-motoring utopia of suburban metroplexes that make
incessant driving inevitable? And how did they fail to register the basic
facts of the world oil situation, which have been available to us for
decades? 

 

Those facts are as follows: oil fields follow a simple pattern of production
and depletion along a bell curve. Universally, when an oil field gets close
to half the amount of oil it originally possessed, production peaks and then
declines. This is true for all oil fields in the aggregate, for a nation and
even the world. 

 

In the United States, oil production peaked in 1970 and has been declining
ever since. We extracted about 10 million barrels a day in 1970 and just
under 5 million barrels a day now. Because our consumption has only
increased steadily, we've made up for the shortfall by importing oil from
other countries. 

 

There is now powerful evidence in the production figures worldwide that we
have reached global peak oil production. The collective nations of the earth
will not make up for this by importing oil from other planets. 

 

Contrary to a faction of wishful thinkers, the earth does not have a creamy
nougat center of oil. Oil fields do not replenish themselves. Also contrary
to the prevailing wish, no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to
keep running the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World and
the other furnishings of what Dick Cheney called our "non-negotiable way of
life." 

 

People who refuse to negotiate with the circumstances that the world throws
at them automatically get assigned a new negotiating partner: reality.
Reality then requires you to change your behavior, whether you like it or
not. With global oil production peaking, we are now subject to rising oil
prices, as markets are forced to contend with allocating a resource heading
in the direction of scarcity. Oil prices are only likely to go higher-though
there is apt to be a ratcheting effect as high oil prices depress economic
activity and thus dampen demand for oil which will depress prices leading to
increased consumption which will then kick prices back up, and so on. The
prospects for more geopolitical friction
<http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/16/less_oil_more_wars.php>  over
oil also self-evidently increase, as industrial nations desperately maneuver
for supplies. 

 

Mainly though, the danger lies in the resulting instability of the
super-sized complex systems that we depend on daily. 

 

Trouble with oil will spell huge problems with how we grow our food, how we
conduct trade, how we move around and how we inhabit the terrain of North
America. These systems are going to wobble and eventually fail unless some
effort is made to reform their scale and their procedures. For example,
Wal-Mart's profit margins will disappear as higher diesel fuel prices hit
its "warehouse-on-wheels." 

 

Now, in the face of this, you'd think that the national leadership in
politics, business and science would prepare the public for substantial
necessary changes in the way we do things. What we are seeing across the
board, though, is merely a desperate wish to keep the cars running by any
conceivable means, at all costs. That is the sole target of our focus. Our
leaders don't get it. We citizens have to make other arrangements. 

 

We simply cannot face the fact that time has run out-that our lease is
expiring-for the easy-motoring utopia. But we must. We have to live
differently. We're going to have to re-inhabit and reconstruct our civic
places-especially our small towns-and we're going to have to use the
remaining rural places for growing food locally, wherever possible. Our big
cities will probably contract, while they densify at their centers and along
their waterfronts. Our suburbs will enter a shocking state of economic and
practical failure. 

 

We cannot imagine this scenario because we have invested so much of our
collective wealth the past 50 years in the infrastructure for a way of life
that simply has no future. 

 

We'd better start paying attention to the signals that reality is sending or
we will be living in a very violent, impoverished and demoralized nation.
And we have to begin somewhere, which is why I suggest we start by
rebuilding the national passenger railroad system. It would have a
significant impact on our oil use. It would put a lot of people to work on
something meaningful and beneficial to all ranks of American society. The
equipment is lying out there rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. We
don't have to re-invent anything to do it. 

 

The fact that we are not even talking about such solutions shows how
unserious we are. 

 

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0871138883/commondreams-20/ref=nosim
> , just released in paperback by The Atlantic Monthly Press. 

C 2006 Tom Paine.com 

###

 

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