James Howard Kunstler quotes - page 3
The denial about [the] global peak in the United States is already fierce, as investments in car-dependent, oil-addicted infrastructure are greater here than in any other nation and Americans consider their way of life a[n]... entitlement. [...] The economic... [struggle] among... all nations, [...] will be considerable and is certain to lead to increasingly desperate competition for diminishing supplies of oil [and every other resource].
James Howard Kunstler
Eventually, [...] [we] will have to contend with the problems of the Long Emergency: the end of industrial growth, falling standards of living, economic desperation, declining food production, and domestic political strife. A point will be reached when the great powers of the world no longer have the means to project their power any distance. Even nuclear weapons may become inoperable, considering how much their careful maintenance depends on other technological systems linked to our fossil fuel economy.
James Howard Kunstler
Natural gas... is not as versatile as gasoline, but it does a lot of tasks beautifully. Gas is the feedstock-the raw material-for a wide array of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and plastics. Ninety-five percent of the nitrogenous fertilizers used in America are made... of natural gas, and so it has become indispensable to U.S. agriculture.
James Howard Kunstler
Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operate... complex systems at gigantic scales. Renewable energy sources are not compatible with those systems and scales. Renewables will not be able to take the place of oil and gas in running those systems. The systems themselves will have to go. Even many "environmentalists” and "greens” of our day seem to think that all we have to do is switch inputs. Instead of running all the air conditioners of Houston on oil- or gas-generated electricity, we'll use wind farms or massive solar arrays; we'll have super-fuel-efficient cars and keep on commuting over the interstate highway system. It isn't going to happen. The wish to keep running the same giant systems at [a] gigantic scale using renewables is the heart of our illusions about solar, wind, and waterpower.
James Howard Kunstler
Climate change, competition for water, and polluted water sources will also be exacerbated by failures in the electric grid caused by oil and gas supply disruptions. Even if water is available, localities may lack the power to push it through their treatment plants and municipal pipes.
James Howard Kunstler
Operation Dark Winter employed a cast of volunteers... to act out roles following a script in which a terrorist released smallpox in one eastern U.S. city. The result was sobering to an extreme. The public health system virtually collapsed. Hospitals degenerated into chaos. Smallpox spread to twenty-five states and overseas. The national stockpile of vaccines proved to be deeply inadequate. The exercise was called off after four days from the sheer exhaustion of the participants, while the fictional epidemic was still spreading.
James Howard Kunstler
Finance came to be viewed as a productive activity itself rather than a means to promote production. The public was no longer buying stock to invest in enterprises that would pay dividends over time, but merely because one could get rich from buying and selling stocks. As more people bought in, stock prices climbed still higher-a dangerous positive feedback loop.
James Howard Kunstler
At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by President Reagan and his advisors) that would be called "globalism.” It was not so much a new idea as the logical and inevitable result of mature self-organizing systems elaborating themselves under the influence of renewed, immense energy inputs-the ultimate cheap-oil way of doing business in the closed system [in respect to matter] that is the planet Earth. It entailed the maximization of short-term profit and the minimization of care for future generations. It was the ultimate generator of entropy.
James Howard Kunstler
As hunger and hardship increase, the world may see more than one wave of more than one disease. If and when an influenza pandemic emerges, for instance, many AIDS sufferers will succumb, but people infected with the AIDS precursor, HIV, will still survive influenza and AIDS will march on. India, for example, was among the hardest-hit nations in the 1918 flu pandemic. Today it has among the highest rates of AIDS infection. The age-old human enemies, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, streptococcus, and other members of the familiar gang will be on hand with new immunity to the old techno-tricks of the [nineteenth and] twentieth centur[ies]. Even after these diseases may have spent themselves for a while, climate change [which in turn could create new diseases] will still be with us. Nobody really knows where that is taking us, though we do know that the human race has endured more than one ice age in the past.
James Howard Kunstler
The idea of comparative advantage works when there is a complex local economy intact in the background of each trading partner's specialized item of production, with a variety of social roles and occupational niches to support the long-term project of community. But a locality geared to doing only one thing for export is... a slave system based on the extractive economics of mining. [...] One group had all the cheap labor, and another group had all the capital, and for a while, one group made all the things that the other group "consumed.” Thus, comparative advantage became, for a time, a con game strictly for the benefit of large corporations, which ended up enjoying all the advantages while the localities sucked up the costs.
James Howard Kunstler
The failure of the GSEs would make the S&L fiasco of the 1980s look like a bad night of poker. The failure of the GSEs would pose a far graver situation than the LTCM flameout. It could easily bring on cascading failures that might jeopardize global finance. This time, the... public would feel the pain.
James Howard Kunstler
Wal-Mart will not be able to profitably run its "warehouse on wheels” when the price of oil fluctuates chronically. [...] We will never again experience the explosion of products, choices, and nonstop marketing that characterized the... twentieth century. The public may look back on the big-box shopping era with deep and mournful nostalgia, but we are apt to discover that happiness is still possible without the extraordinary advertising-driven compulsive materialism of recent decades. We will still have commerce. We will have [a] trade. There will be shopping. We will have... medium of exchange. But we are not going to live in a perpetual blue-light special sale of cornucopian wretched excess.
James Howard Kunstler
We should... conclude that the abandoned big-box structures will not last more than one generation under any circumstances. [...] The same thing can be said about malls, strip malls, and chain restaurant buildings. Eventually, they will be the salvage yards and mines of the future.
James Howard Kunstler
The Southwest also faces increasing friction with adjoining Mexico. This is not a racist provocation but a description of reality. No other first-world country has such an extensive land frontier with a third-world country. The income gap between the United States and Mexico is greater than that between any other two contiguous countries in the world.
James Howard Kunstler
The Long Emergency will cause unprecedented social and economic dislocation, and the outcome may be a world we would barely recognize. The... egalitarian society we knew in the... twentieth century may become drastically more hierarchical as large numbers of desperate people place themselves in the service of those who control land, especially following a period of anarchy. Under such harsh conditions, the weaker individuals will sell their allegiance in return for security.
James Howard Kunstler
