In a nutshell, "The Long Emergency" (available at most major bookstores around the country, even though when you're as monstrously obtuse as I am, you do have to spend some time looking for it before giving up and asking a staff member to assist you, after which they will spend some time looking for it before it finally occurs to them to look the thing up on the computer) is about what's going to happen very, very soon, tonight, or maybe tomorrow, when we kind of realize that we've passed the Peak. Which is to say, we cannot dig up any more oil on a daily basis than we're currently digging up, and before anyone can say "Oh, shit, man, what do we do now, yo" we're in depletion, decline, and what not. Which is to say we're all screwed because, according to Mr. Kunstler (and he makes quite a few pretty compelling points in that book of his), civilization as we know it is predicated on oil, built with and around oil, subsists on oil, etc. Like, we wouldn't be able to produce amounts of food necessary to feed, even barely, the current population. Nor could we run our economy, or build buildings, or wage wars, etc. Everything is oil.

Which at first glance seems to be true. Moreover, Mr. Kunstler goes on to demonstrate how our technical and even purely scientific progress is hinged on the existence of, and easy access to, fossil fuels, most notably oil.

I tend to agree with Mr. Kunstler that should the current levels of oil production start to drop off, the world will change a great deal very rapidly. I totally agree with him that, should that be the case, suburbia as we know it will cease to exist, as will commercial aviation (at least for a while, until someone gets a proper airship together). And, of course, I totally agree and support him when he says that "easy motoring" is pretty much done. Good. Naturally, as an artist, I agree with him when he says we should be dedicating a lot of time an energy to rebuilding and improving our railroad system, and our public transportation in general. And our architecture should look more human again.

Having said that, -

Sometimes it just helps to do the math. Let's do the math. Care to do the math?

Approximately 2/3 of all the petroleum produced in, and imported into, the United States is burned in auto engines. Most of those engines are private cars engines. I suspect (look around you, and you will too) that a lot of the remaining third is burned in order to facilitate the burning of said 2/3. Making cars, maintaining cars (and roads), selling them, advertising them, improving them, educating the young with cars in mind, etc – our economy, indeed our entire social setup, as Mr. Kunstler very properly observes time and again, is structured around burning petroleum in the engines of private cars.

Plus there's the commercial aviation part.

However, the amount of petroleum production and import used to produce fertilizer, meds, plastics, and other very useful things, is negligible by comparison. Repeat. Negligible. The amount of oil we actually need to maintain most, if not all, of our civilized society is ridiculously small. We have enough of it in the U.S. to last us thousands of years. Literally. The rest of our civilized ways are maintained by getting energy out of coal, natural gas, rivers, and uranium. Okay, so natural gas is peaking too. That is where substitutes need to be sought. Well. Nuclear power is one option, even though it’s pretty dangerous. But with a bit of windpower and some biofuel here and there I'm sure solutions can be found.

The problem with Peak Oil is far less scary than the environmental crisis. Although of course there will be plenty of entitlement-obsessed morons pissed off by the fact that they can’t drive anymore, and the so-called real-estate market (all those plywood shacks Mr. Kunstler keeps ranting about) will collapse, and the losers will have to move into buildings after losing their "investment," and no one will buy Mr. Kunstler another first-class ticket for that New Zeland flight because there will be no New Zeland flights (even though, I repeat, some of the developments in the airship industry look somewhat promising), but apart from that, hey, opportunity looms. Maybe building a lot of railroads and reviving the steel industry will get this country (and the rest of the world) out of the economic, social, and moral funk, and put Asia (all of it except Japan) back in its proper historical place. Or maybe the Japanese will take over China like they always wanted to.

A lot of Mr. Kunstler's recent ravings sound like wishful thinking. And I happen to think that by owning a car and living in the suburbs (I don't care what he says about the exceptional unsuburbian feel of his piece of shit hometown) is tantamount to forfeiting the moral right to accuse anyone of being a burb moron/asshole. The fact that suburbanites still invite him to lecture them means that he speaks their language and is one of them himself. My biggest problem with Mr. Kunstler's philosophy, I guess, is that he knows exactly nothing about opera. That's funny, actually. But then, most truths are these days.