Posts
Our
Years Of Magical Thinking: An Interview With James Howard Kunstler
9
September, 2012
“Everybody’s
got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
– Mike Tyson
– Mike Tyson
“That’s
a pithy way of saying where our country, perhaps the developed world,
is at right now,” notes author James Howard Kunstler.
We’ve
blown past the mileposts for global peak oil,
says Kunstler in his new book, Too
Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation,
and we expect technology to save us. Whether our cheap-oil lifestyle
falls quickly with a single knockout blow or crumbles slowly with a
battery of jabs, Kunstler is certain of one thing: We’re about to
be walloped.
We’ve
definitively entered the epoch Kunstler calls “the long emergency,”
an extended era of economic contraction and social stress caused by
shrinking resources.
Yet we refuse to see this, largely because we’re spellbound by the
mighty systems we run with technological magic. Peak oil got you
down? No worries; we’ll run those iPads with some other
undiscovered, inexhaustible means of power.
Writers
Paul Smyth and Judy George spoke with Kunstler about the end of the
fossil fuel era and whatever comes next.
You
talk about magical thinking in two ways: Not only do we believe we
can solve our energy problems with new technology, but we infuse that
belief with wishful thinking.
These
two ideas are related, and I think elements of them have to be viewed
historically. The last 150 years have amounted to such a cavalcade of
wonders and technological marvels that we’ve literally programmed
ourselves to expect it will continue indefinitely. This sequence of
events — the telephone, the light bulb, electricity in every home,
airplanes, motion pictures,
television, the computer and thousands of other conveniences to human
life—programmed us to think there’s an endless supply of
technological magic that can overcome anything.
I
think we’re heading into a time-out from technological progress as
we’ve known it—and by that I mean just the way I’ve described
it, the expectation of endless magic. And I think that will come as
an enormous shock to our culture.
Why
are we in for a shock?
I
don’t think the previous Dark Age that followed the collapse of
Rome was quite the same as what we’re facing. That involved a
profound and incremental series of losses in knowledge, technique and
the ability to do things, everything from making good pottery and
concrete to ways of organizing work.
Our
situation now has much more potential for cultural damage, because
our conditioning in technological progress is so extreme. The letdown
may be awful when it becomes evident we’re not going to solve our
energy problems with algae secretions, solar, wind or other
alternative fuel schemes–that we’re not going to run Disney
World, the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart and the military on
any combination of other energy systems.
Then
what happens?
This
has enormous potential for disrupting our sense of reality. It’s
hard to predict the kinds of reaction that this may generate, but I
think you will have a society so profoundly disappointed by science
and technology that it could propel us into a new dark age of
superstition.
What’s
changed since your 2005 book, The
Long Emergency?
First,
it’s apparent that the problems we have with capital formation and
the disabling of the banking system may be overcoming the issues of
resource scarcity and peak oil, in the sense that we’re rapidly
losing the ability to finance the kind of resource discovery and
production we hoped would compensate for peak oil.
Second,
I observed in The Long Emergency that we were becoming very
delusional about the set of predicaments that we’re facing. I’m a
little shocked at the quality and character of the delusional
thinking and where it’s coming from. When you see articles in the
New York Times, the supposed newspaper of record, that the USA may
soon become a net energy exporter, you know there’s some kind of
problem with perhaps the entire intellectual class in America.
What
do you mean?
When
societies get badly stressed, delusional thinking increases. We are
now in that situation.
When
you traffic in delusional thinking, you tell yourself a lot of lies
and untruths. This is a dangerously infectious process. Once you
start doing it in things like banking and money matters and carrying
it out in the practical form of accounting fraud, then you’re
really putting your culture, your society in peril.
These
problems infect all realms of practical existence, including
politics, business, media, education—so you end up, for example,
with the President of the United States telling the public that we
have 100 years of shale gas. That’s just an untruth. The
consequence is a society that cannot and will not prepare itself for
the reality of the future.
If
we accept peak oil—and the debate rages—we’ll need something
else to keep the lights on. In The
Long Emergency,
you held out hope for nuclear energy to help manage a transition to
what you see as inevitable decline.
I
had mixed feelings in 2005 about how nuclear energy was going to work
out. It was obvious that the hazards were monumental. The way I put
it at the time was that nuclear energy was probably the only way we
were going to keep the electricity running after a certain point, and
I think that’s still categorically true.
But
I don’t think we’re going to do it now, for a couple of reasons.
One is the fiasco at Fukushima. It’s created a climate in which
opposition, even in a crisis, could be enormous. But there was always
a question of whether there would be a broad enough window of
opportunity for us to ramp up a program of commissioning new nuclear
plants, and I think that’s closing—perhaps, closed.
The
other new wrinkle is that the capital formation issues have become so
extreme in the last five years that now, even if we did have the will
and consensus to go forward with the new generation of nukes, it’s
improbable we’d be able to finance it.
Your
message—that we’re heading for a re-set to an agrarian
communities, that we’ll be living in ways we haven’t seen for
several hundred years—is often not well received. How have you
prepared for the future you envision?
I
believe in facing the future with hope. I moved from a fairly
successful small town, Saratoga Springs, to a smaller, more decrepit
factory village 15 miles east. I bought three acres of land with the
intention of growing a lot of food on it. I built a substantial
garden that’s still under way.
I
chose to live in a place I care about. I spend a lot of time playing
music with my friends. I also put a lot of ongoing effort into
consciously building a social network here. I’m thinking about
starting a small business that would be a cafe and gathering spot,
but that’s in the larval stage now.
Editor’s
Notes
Authors Paul Smyth and Judy George add:
We think Kunstler has an important message with this new book and called him to interview him. We wound up meeting him in Greenwich, NY. We continue to find it amazing that so many educated people are not aware of peak oil. That’s one reason we wanted to do this interview and hope to write more pieces about the topic. We write for CityBeat[Cincinnati, Ohio] as well as other publications. Our work includes:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.