The Long Emergency September 19, 2006

About a month ago i finished this book, The Long Emergency, but James Howard Kunstler. I had read him before in Home from Nowhere: he is a very articulate voice about sprawl with great recognition of not just its environmental impacts but also its spiritual and community impacts.

The Long Emergency is nuts. It freaks you out. Part of that is because Kunstler is fast and loose with the facts, I think (the facts on this issue are very hard to come by anyhow).

The major thrust of The Long Emergency is about how every part of our civilized life relies completely upon cheap, abundant fossil fuel and the supply of such fuels is about to run out. This is an phenomena everyone is aware of, but Kunstler really sharpens the immediacy and the magnitude of its impact.

First he points out our incredible fossil fuel dependency: how everything in our lives runs on oil and coal. It seems that civilization has been some great march forward of technological progress, but it really was all about inventing the steam engine and then incrementally improving that technology and its exploitation of millions of years of solar energy (stored in fossil fuels). The USA is particularly screwed in that its entire infrasturcure is way more dependent of cheap energy than any other part of the world and it will be helpless with that energy.
He then talks about how the supply is running out. The numbers here are debateable of course, but the finite nature of the supply is undisputable, of course. More importantly, he illustrates how all of the proposed alternatives–hydrogen, ethanol, bio-diesel, solar, wind, hydroelectric–won’t come close to supplying our current demand. There is one and only one source of energy: nuclear reaction. Our solar system’s sun is the biggest source of nuclear energy we can harness. Fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored energy from the sun: a one-time supply that can’t be replaced. Our own man-made nuclear reactors are the only thing he recognizes that will “keep the lights on” (he notes that there is a good supply of remaining uranium).

He then goes on with predictions of how the world will revert to a late 18th century type of civilzation: much less energy consumption, much more localized and with a much much reduced population (he postulates that the “natural” carrying capacity of Earth for humans is 1 billion). The transition to this fossil-fuel-less society will be ugly with lots of mayhem, disease, war, etc.

Unfortunately Kunstler seems to delight all too much in the coming of his predicted Dark Ages. It seems that he has a long-standing grudge against civilzation and he seeks disaster to find revenge. This bitter edge undermines his credibility and makes this book appealing only to those already with an interest in sustainability; it does nothing to communicate to those who most need the message.

But the message remains a most powerful one. I highly recommend the book. It clearly lays out the various factors at work and how they will effect us, even if the forecast is a little too pessimistic. Pick it up and read it . . . and then start working on changing you, your neighborhood and your country’s energy dependency!