|
In The Long Emergency James Howard
Kunstler delivers a lucid and straightforward glimpse at
the global changes that lie ahead of us. It is a startling
vision of America after the cheap oil era comes to an end.
The industrialized world is built on cheap
energy -- in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas -- to
create all the marvels and miracles essential to daily life.
But now the cheap fossil-fuels era is ending, climate change
is upon us, and our models of global industry, trade, food
production, and transportation are unlikely to survive.
Civilization as we know it is in big trouble, and the American
people are sleepwalking in to their future.
What will happen when global warming, disease,
and population overshoot collide with the end of the cheap
oil age? Will the new global economy be able to survive?
Could corporations like Wal-Mart and McDonald's, built on
the premise of cheap transportation, become a thing of the
past? Will suburbia collapse when car culture comes to an
end?
Riveting and authoritative, James Howard
Kunstler's The Long Emergency is a startling vision
of what lies ahead, bringing new urgency and accessibility
to the critical issues that will shape our future, and which
we can no longer afford to ignore.
- Did you know that the conveniences provided
by cheap fossil fuels allow us to live as if each individual
had 300 personal servants?
- How long do you think America could survive
solely on its own remaining crude oil reserves? Try 4
years.
- Do you know that there is no combination
of alternative energy that will allow us to continue our
lives the way we do today?
- The global oil supply is at or very near
its peak. The remaining half of the world's oil reserves
is difficult to obtain, much more costly to extract, owned
by people who hate us, and lower quality than the first
half. Some of it will never be recovered.
- The complex systems -- big-box retail,
commercial aviation, the electric grid, mass motoring
-- that make up our industrial civilization, depend on
absolutely reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural
gas. Without that, they implode.
- We essentially eat oil. Our food
production has become tragically linked to cheap fossil
fuel "inputs." Without it, many will starve.
- The "hydrogen economy" is a
fantasy that is not likely to rescue us from the peak
oil predicament.
- The future will compel us to live very
differently in America. Suburbia and the global economy
will soon be history. Our lives will become profoundly
and intensely local.
- Lost in the raptures of infotainment
and bargain shopping, Americans are grievously unprepared
for the Long Emergency.
James Howard Kunstler was born in New
York City in 1948. He is the author of three other nonfiction
books, The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere,
and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition,
as well as nine novels, including Maggie Darling,
A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, and
An Embarrassment of Riches. He has been an editor
with Rolling Stone and his articles have appeared
in the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times
Magazine.
|
