I just finished re-reading James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press: 2005), and I have to say it holds up remarkably well.  I cannot recommend this book more highly.  I had read his two earlier books on suburbia and sprawl (The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere), but The Long Emergency is really his tour de force.  It was the Long Emergency that first got me thinking about Peak Oil and modern society.  Fortunately and unfortunately for my friends and co-workers, I pushed the Long Emergency on them as well.  I say fortunately because it is such a powerful and well-written book.  I say unfortunately because reading The Long Emergency can really be a life-altering experience.

After first reading Kunstler's masterwork, I was reminded of a section of Stanislaw Lem's book, The Futurological Congress.  In this piece of science fiction, the world of the future seems to be a glittering, leisurely utopia.  But the hero somehow stumbles across the truth, that everyone's perceptions of the world are maintained only by steady doses of powerful hallucinogens in the air, food and drinking water.  In truth, the world is nightmarishly overpopulated, and people are actually living in abject squalor, ill-health, and poverty.  In a climactic scene, the hero is able to sniff a blocker to all of the hallucinogens, and the real word of abject awfulness materializes before his eyes, and he is horrified.

That is similar to the experience I had when reading The Long Emergency.  I consider myself a fairly informed lefty type, pretty up to date on global warming, biodiversity collapse, etc.  But I had never come across the Peak Oil debate, until I read Kunstler's book.  The Long Emergency was that hallucinogen blocker, and it made many other social and environmental problems come into focus for the first time.  The Long Emergency starkly outlines what will slowly unfold in the coming decades, no matter how many Kyoto Protocols or hybrid cars we turn out. 

Because Kunstler's work is so important, let's outline the basic points.  This in no way does justice to The Long Emergency, so you should absolutely go out and buy the book and then share it with others.  But these are the essential facets:

• Just like individual oil fields, global oil discovery and production will follow staggered, dual bell-shaped curves, with maximum extraction following peak discovery by a few decades.  World oil production will thus "peak" at some point, and then decline inexorably.  All indications now are that global oil discovery actually peaked in the 1960s, and thus peak production is happening either right now or has just passed.
• After the peak, there is still plenty of oil left in the ground.  But it is the harder-to-get stuff, and it is lower quality.  The remaining oil is in politically dangerous areas, or at the bottom of the ocean floor, or trapped in tar sands, etc.  So after peak, it will become much more expensive to retrieve oil, and much more energy will have to be expended just to get the same energy out (EROEI, or Energy Returned on Energy Invested).
• So just as oil begins its decline, demand is surging, with China and India growing their industrial economies at breakneck pace.  This indicates that resource wars will be a regular feature of the near future; and clearly Iraq is a resource war.
• There will be no substitute for oil.  Its makeup is absolutely unique, in its portability, stability, and versatility.  Every other energy source (nuclear, coal, wind, solar, biomass) has a much different physical fingerprint or profile, and they will not allow the kind of infrastructure we have built to continue.  For example, nuclear power is great at producing electricity, but heavy construction equipment cannot be run on just electricity.  And solar energy is indeed abundant, but it is widely dispersed and cannot be moved great distances (not to mention that solar-cell materials are made with petroleum).
• Our society is absolutely linked to the uniqueness of oil.  Our agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, construction, and the entire consumer way of life are all predicated on and carried out with abundant supplies of cheap oil.  When oil prices continue to increase, and then when depletion sets in, the infrastructure of modern societies will wobble mightily.
• In the Long Emergency, life will become more local and more cooperative, and food production will become absolutely central to survival.  Long supply chains bringing bananas and pineapples to New York City in January will be gone.  Fifty-cent salad shooters shipped over from China will not be around any more.  The world will become much smaller again, and virtually all large-scale enterprises, from national governments to transnational corporations, will devolve and possibly disappear.

As I said, this is just a snapshot, and a poor one at that.  Please go out and buy The Long Emergency, and visit Kunstler's website at www.kunstler.com.  He has also written a new book, World Made by Hand, a beautiful novel set in the world of the Long Emergency.

But be prepared to have the scales fall away from your eyes.  The near future will be tough, and many of the things that we take for granted will be gone or very difficult to preserve.  And as other posts on this blog indicate, I believe that collective living arrangements are the only reasonable way through the coming period.  We'll look at the power of collectivity next time.