Existential Lottery Winners

We are extremely lucky to be where we are, when we are. But as you will know if you've watched the career of big lottery winners, scoring big-time and being made aware of it don't always lend themselves to living happily ever after.

The Bushites would have you believe that Golden Age II ended with September 11, starting a generation(s)-long GWOT, also known as “the Long War” (see the "Appendix" for recent chronology from the "stoner" perspective). Of course, we here still living innit know that isn’t true: we’ve been told we must undergo “treatment” for our “addiction to oil”, but we haven’t got a space open yet for our chosen rehab unit. We may or may not emerge from our Golden Coma this year (hint: it only partly depends on the voters; the rest is just the vicissitudes of the House’s electoral roulette wheel, tricked up as it has been by both parties), or we may stagger on through the apocalypse we now call the 2008 elections to the inauguration of our chosen anti-Bushite.

James Howard Kunstler would call the current age, which he also believes will be extended for decades, The Long Emergency. That's the title of the book, and the current age starts from the peak of world oil production, which may have already occurred in 2005, but if not, it will certainly occur soon.

Kunstler starts with some premises that are incontrovertible, such as the fact that there must be a peak, then a decline, in world oil production, starting pretty darn quick. Another is that the era of cheap fossil fuel energy is ending, and that many of the technological and engineering miracles of the recent era were in large part due to those cheap fossil fuels. He ties in global warming quite well to the developing emergency due to decline in oil availability, pointing out accurately that many of the touted solutions to perpetuate the fossil fuel era would compound the impending global climate change disaster. Logically, he remains on solid ground by debunking the market argument; all the market forces in the world cannot change the laws of physics.

He reaches, though, to prove that none of the alternatives are feasible. It is a difficult argument that no alternative can work: he has to prove that each and every possible new source is either limited in supply, unworkable, or too far away in time to relieve the gathering storm. Further, that a combination of these alternatives can't sustain our lifestyle.

He goes on to predict that globalization will end, that suburbia in all its manifestations will collapse, and that a global famine will result, with viable society reduced to small towns and small farms, isolated.

I think that in his zeal to give his jeremiad maximum urgency, he has undermined his strong initial arguments. He makes us want to "gargle with razor blades" in despair (his phrase), instead of mobilizing people to do something smart to avoid the decline into barbarism.

First, if we are just now reaching our peak of oil production, then there are still a trillion or so barrels of oil products yet to be consumed. There's plenty left, if we can be intelligent about using them according to a plan. Some uses are indefensible and must be abandoned, others (plastics and other chemicals, production of electricity) need to be preserved. He makes a very telling point that America needs to invest now in electrified railways, but doesn't seem to believe that it will happen (as it did in most of the rest of the developed world).

When it comes to personal road transportation, a very plausible alternative is emerging in terms of plug-in hybrid technology, and it seems likely that future energy transmission will be through the electrical grid. This, like the hybrids themselves, is an energy-consuming system that is characterized by flexibility (in the means of generating power) and efficiency.

I think Kunstler is motivated in part by geographical ignorance and bias. One clear takeaway is that he despises suburban sprawl and has a desire to see it end. OK, but do the dying industrial towns of the Northeast really have an advantage in the hypothetical localized economy of the future over the green exurbs? We already see that the jobs are moving to the suburbs, and not just the service McJobs of fast foods, gas stations, highway and single-family home construction.
I'll buy that some of the big cities based on sprawl and massive car commuting are in danger from the end of cheap gasoline. This will be exacerbated in this part of the country when water supplies dry up as a byproduct of global climate change and the exhaustion of aquifers. However, there are efforts to make sustainability part of the culture of the Southwest, too. There is also a source of energy which is practically limitless, totally renewable, and the potential of which has not been even slightly exploited to its full extent: solar energy. Apart from the expanded use of passive solar energy to heat homes, buildings, and water use, I actually think there is a technological fix, which will come from improved photoelectric energy capabilities; it's probably about a generation away.

In thinking about the book and the world he envisions, I thought of a late Talking Heads song off "Naked"--a fantastic album. "Nothing but Flowers" envisions a world where all the shopping malls and fast food restaurants have been replaced by daisies and farms. The perspective of the lyrics is nostalgia for the lost parking lots, etc. It seemed pretty outlandish, and I was never sure whether it was sarcastic. Surely, there will be some parts of our automobile-driven culture that we may miss (if Kunstler is right), but like him, I think history will look back on this period as a strange, perhaps necessary, phase of society's development, characterized by bizarre behavior on a massive scale and leading, unfortunately, only to its own exhaustion. Which is not to say that we will lose our technology, that the arts of this period will be totally denigrated, or that we will revert to near barbarism, either. I'm thinking more "Childhood's End".