10 ways to ween ourselves off fossil fuels (from Kunstler.com)
Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister
Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions" to our
looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your
hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a
purposeful way, here are my suggestions:
1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could
really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed
"greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this
monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether
they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymaxT oil, or cow shit). They are at
the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring
system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much
worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to
make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.
2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial
agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo.
As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming
organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix
this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic
life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer
scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated
with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have
to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and
vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly
retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation
organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few
places (Phoenix, Las Vegas,
Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to
traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities
(along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be
reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed
proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta,
Houston) will
pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss
of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications.
The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional
materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured
components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous
demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require
the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The
graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching
Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about
land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws
will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular
wisdom. Get busy.
4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy
Motoring (including the entire US
trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining
resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people
by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get
involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's
make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel
or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub
the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We
also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by
water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also
for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with
them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New
York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo
sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in
place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now,
programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes,
sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.
5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high
tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local
economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not
survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run
the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly
circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to
the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US
and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of
commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed
(with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and
inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered
networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the
much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the
Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally
dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also
is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is
something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant
for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation?
There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and
get busy.
6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to
make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The
curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that
has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will
still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are
not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's
heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of
fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have
to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use
more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make
anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds
and muscles into.
7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We
liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make
our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses
and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and
playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and
stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The
Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time
(or more).
8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school
systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming
decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the
transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a
less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized
facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not
right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will
grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate
locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond
secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be
salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment
by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and
write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case,
will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure:
teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared
to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think
about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
9. We
have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets
based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities
to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to
what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to
change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the
21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer
opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so
far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our
hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the
unsqueamish.
10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something
practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you
are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire
social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of
television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the
helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful
as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots
of jobs here for local heroes.
So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit wishing and
start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your
ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual
resolutely able to face new circumstances.
Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions" to our
looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your
hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a
purposeful way, here are my suggestions:
1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could
really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed
"greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this
monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether
they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymaxT oil, or cow shit). They are at
the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring
system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much
worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to
make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.
2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial
agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo.
As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming
organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix
this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic
life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer
scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated
with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have
to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and
vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly
retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation
organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few
places (Phoenix, Las Vegas,
Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to
traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities
(along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be
reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed
proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta,
Houston) will
pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss
of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications.
The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional
materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured
components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous
demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require
the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The
graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching
Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about
land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws
will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular
wisdom. Get busy.
4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy
Motoring (including the entire US
trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining
resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people
by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get
involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's
make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel
or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub
the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We
also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by
water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also
for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with
them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New
York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo
sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in
place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now,
programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes,
sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.
5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high
tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local
economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not
survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run
the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly
circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to
the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US
and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of
commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed
(with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and
inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered
networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the
much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the
Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally
dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also
is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is
something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant
for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation?
There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and
get busy.
6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to
make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The
curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that
has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will
still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are
not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's
heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of
fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have
to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use
more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make
anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds
and muscles into.
7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We
liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make
our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses
and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and
playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and
stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The
Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time
(or more).
8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school
systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming
decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the
transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a
less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized
facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not
right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will
grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate
locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond
secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be
salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment
by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and
write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case,
will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure:
teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared
to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think
about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
9. We
have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets
based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities
to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to
what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to
change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the
21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer
opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so
far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our
hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the
unsqueamish.
10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something
practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you
are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire
social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of
television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the
helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful
as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots
of jobs here for local heroes.
So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit wishing and
start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your
ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual
resolutely able to face new circumstances.
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