Kunstler To America: You're So Screwed And You Don't Even Know It
Peak Oil isn't a story to frighten just kids with anymore. Adults are getting in on it, too. We missed seeing doom-and-gloom purveyor James Howard Kunstler deliver his patented jeremiad at Town Hall last Sunday, but the good news is he's going to be popping up like Caddyshack molehills on the Seattle Channel throughout June.
The title of his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, gives you some idea of how he's raised the tone of his discourse to deal with public apathy and ignorance. His Town Hall appearance was in support of his book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.
People criticize Kunstler for seeing the utter catastrophe in everything, but he's a valuable national resource because studies show most people aren't very good at generating worst-case scenarios. Kunstler appears singularly unafflicted by any bias toward optimism.
His argument, in brief, is that we're on the wrong side of the peak oil curve but aren't acting like it. As oil gets harder to extract, and prices rise, we're actually using more of it than ever before to sustain the culture's operation -- letting out the belt a few more notches exactly when we need to be crash-dieting. Alternative fuels, he predicts, will be nowhere near meeting demand when we hit the other side of the peak oil curve's wall. And it will be ugly, Kunstler says.
For balance, we note he's a big fan of the train ride from Bellingham to Seattle. So we got that going for us.
