Jay Currie

My friend Kevin Grace posts his excellent review of James Kunstner’s The Long Emergency which he wrote but had rejected by a magazine beginning with “American”. Kevin was kind enough to lend me his review copy of The Long Emergency and I wrote a rather shorter review for Victoria’s own Monday Magazine. It too was rejected. I suspect that had Kevin and I the collective wit to swap reviews we would have been quids in: horses for courses and all that. Here’s mine, but read Kevins.

The Long Emergency: Surviving The End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press, 320 pages

Oil hit $60.00 to celebrate the 4th of July (2005) and the start of the summer motoring season. Triple the $20.00 a barrel Saudi Arabia had maintained for years by opening its tap a bit wider to accommodate the world’s growing demand for oil.

Saudi Arabia ceased to have the pricing power of the big tap about the time Saudi’s other notable export, jhadis, hit the Twin Towers. Somewhere between 2000 and 2003 it is very likely Saudi Arabia passed its own peak production. From there on oil prices have been driven by the market and as there is no “extra” new supply and lots of new demand – prices are going up. Welcome to peak oil.

Peak oil is the base note for James Kunstler’s most recent excursion into apocalypse porn, The Long Emergency. Like Ron Popeil selling rotisseries, he can’t resist, “But, wait, there’s more.”: Islamo fanaticism, AIDS, climate change, water scarcity, bird flu pandemics, resource wars and the wily Chinese. Like any good pornster Kunstler hits the money shots: Wall-Mart destroyed, rusting hulks of SUV’s, soccer moms hoeing potatoes in suburban backyards, perhaps, for added excitement, at gunpoint.

Porn is all about editing. Kunstler’s most skillful edit is ignoring the long tail of the oil age. Peak oil means the end of new oil production. With no new supply, price will go way up if there is a continued increase in demand; but how quickly that happens is another question.

Kunstler palms a card: as price rises, demand falls and previously uneconomic supply comes onstream (such as several hundred billion barrels of oil in Alberta’s oil sands.). Indeed demand may vanish altogether because the rise in price creates huge incentives for consumers to radically change their habits and their technology. At $9.99 a liter the Colwood crawl looks even less attractive. At least in a gas powered SUV. A hybrid, a little Smart Car or an electric scooter might make sense. What makes more sense is to live within walking distance of your job.

Suburban sprawl, long Kunster’s real enemy, takes a huge hit when the price of oil goes to truly painful levels. So will carbon emissions. While Kyoto’s bogus targets and Rick Mercer’s silly ads aren’t working – if it costs you $600.00 to fill up the Navigator you’ll park it.

Kunster won’t spoil his story with anything as mundane as supply and demand or a hundred year oil wind down. A slow transition away from fossil fuels and towards technological, and more importantly, cultural, alternatives driven by nothing scarier than the marketplace might leave Wal-Mart standing and soccer moms running errands in electric cars.

Kunstler’s sensationalist edits are sad because the end of cheap oil is radically altering Western life. That needs to be explored with less hype and a greater sense of the ingenuity people display in the face of change. A good place to start that exploration is www.worldchanging.com