KUNSTLER/EATON - Interview on Peak Oil

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Kunstler: Kunstler - Eaton Interview on Peak Oil and its implications for small scale localized economies

Transcript of Janet M. Eaton, Ph.D. in Conversation with James Howard Kunstler, author and expert on Peak Oil.
(Videotaped at Saratoga Springs, New York, on March 6th, 2006)

COMMENTS ON THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT (EIS) OF THE WHITES POINT QUARRY AND MARINE TERMINAL PROJECT - APPENDIX 4.

http://www.sierraclub.ca/atlantic/progr ... gbyquarry/
CEAA_Submission.pdf

The file is large and takes about two minutes to open but can viewed more readily at: Click on Appendix 4

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www.sierraclub.ca/atlantic/programs/eco ... gbyquarry/
CEAA_Submission.pdf+Janet+Eaton+dialogue+with+James+Howard+
Kunstler&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1[/url] [page 66 - 77]

Dr. Janet Eaton: … as the so-called global economy and the fossil fuel industrial economy is going, I'd like to have your view on what is wrong right now with the fossil fuel-related economy in the United States of America - that is, vis-à-vis your ideas on suburbia – why it is not sustainable?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, economies,… I think if we look over the last 250 years, we see quite a bit of turbulence in the evolution of world economies and economic relations, both in a nation itself and how they trade with other countries, one of the things that's impressed me was going to Maine and seeing these ruins of the quarries -- the old granite quarries on the islands -- and trying to imagine the whole economy that was out there doing that at a certain time. People never imagined that that would come to and end, and of course, it came to an end.
To answer your question, though, I think that what we're specifically troubled by is the issue of scale. You know, there are certain things that you can do right now in early twenty-first century Canada and America that you can do. But can you do them five or ten years from now? Maybe not, especially on the scale that we're doing them. I happen to think that the world is probably going to become a larger place in the years ahead, that is, we're probably going to see countries drawing back into their own corners of the world. A lot of the economic relationships that we take for granted as being permanent are going to prove to be rather transient.
You know, we have some economic gurus in America like Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, who has a best-selling book now, which says that the world it flat and that globalism is a permanent institution. Well, I'm sorry, it's not. Globalism is a set of transient economic relations that came into being principally for two reasons: one, relative world peace for several decades (relative between the great powers); two, several decades of extraordinarily cheap petroleum. You put those two together, and you end up getting these large international trade powers and global manufacturing chains and things like that.
Actually, there's a Scottish historian named Neil Ferguson who made the excellent point that we actually went through an earlier cycle of globalism, starting right about 1870 when the railroads and steamboats really got ramped-up -- you've got those large ocean-going vessels, and you get that first exuberant phase of global trade. And it all comes to an end in 1914. It's over with World War One. And then you get all the tariff activity and protectionism of the 1920s, and then you get the fiasco of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and World War Two. And that, of course, ends up destroying most of the advanced industrialized nations of the world, or putting them out of business for a while.
So, it isn't until 1960s and 1970s that globalism starts to slowly get traction again. We've had a kind of resumption of it now -- the second phase of industrial globalism -- for about fifty years.
Janet Eaton: Well, is that a permanent thing?
James Howard Kunstler: No, it's not a permanent thing. You know, you remove a couple of those factors like extraordinarily cheap oil and regular supplies of it and relative world peace, and all of a sudden, you know…
Janet Eaton: Well, that's where I was going to go. You are known as an expert on peak oil, and I was wondering if you could explain that phenomenon now, which is becoming rather pervasive, in the awareness of what is happening to globalism?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, it's taken an extraordinary effort at and extraordinarily difficult time to get the public, and particularly our business and political leaders, to understand what the global oil production peak means. And what it means is that we are reaching a point where the world will produce the maximum amount of oil ever. There is reason to believe that we've reached that point, and that we are now tipping over the peak into this long kind of nauseating descent into depletion and decreasing supplies. Of course the whole picture is aggravated by the fact that, most of the remaining oil in the world is concentrated in some very particular regions, like the Middle East or Central Asia. That's become a part that we have enjoyed immense access to, and are the places that got depleted the soonest -- namely North America, the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic region of North America, the North Sea in Europe. So, the prospect is that we're going to have very troubled international geopolitical relations and problems.
Janet Eaton: Which we are already seeing.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, we've already really begun to see, in my opinion, the beginning of a kind of world war over resources. And what will probably happen is that, sooner or later, we're going to have to withdraw from the Eastern Hemisphere, and we may lose some of our access to some of the world's oil as a result. We're not going to compensate for it by the Alberta Tar Sands.
Janet Eaton: That's going to be too expensive, isn't it? In the end, in terms of emissions, and in terms of actual costs? And in terms of water?
James Howard Kunstler: Yes, it's fantastically expensive. Even the Canadian government itself has never claimed the tar sands, at their optimum rate, would never produce more than either one and a half or two million barrels a day. This is the situation where the world is using about 84 million barrels a day, the United States alone uses 22 million barrels a day, and the prospects for depletion from the other places where we all get our oil is going to be much greater than anything we've gained from the tar sands.
So, yes, maybe they'll contribute two million barrels of very expensive oil a day in the year 2015, but guess what? In the meantime, our access to 20 or 30 million barrels of oil a day from the world is gone.
Janet Eaton: Well, we've seen that with Katrina, haven't we? When it knocked down a few of the drilling rigs there, and there's stoppage at the pumps. There's going to be more of that, I presume?
James Howard Kunstler: Yes, I think that's a very troubling picture that, not only do we lose a lot of production in oil and natural gas because of Katrina and Rita, but there's the whole idea that, now that climate change is upon us and the ocean temperatures are warmer, and the prospects are for seasons of continued intense hurricanes, can you ask these oil companies to keep on replacing one billion dollar oil platforms only to see them knocked-down eighteen months later, or two years later?
Janet Eaton: So this obviously is going to influence the global trade economy that we have now, where we're trucking, and shipping, and flying things from China to sell in Wal-Mart’s. That's going to be a thing of the past, if this really is reality -- the peak oil phenomenon.
James Howard Kunstler: Well, that's my opinion, I don't think that there's much chance that we're gonna maintain things like the twelve thousand-mile manufacturing supply line between China and the United States. We've had a nice little retail party here in North America: we've been enjoying all these cheap goods for about fifteen or twenty years, and it's been a real fiesta of shopping. But it's not a permanent condition. The chances are that all kinds of things in the economic equation are going to put those operations out of business. I'm thinking here specifically of the national retail chains. Anything that is scaled to the continental or global scale is going to have trouble in an era where trucking is expensive, and there's geopolitical friction over the remaining oil. We have no idea what relations are going to be with China in ten years. We have good reason to suspect that they will have to march into central Asia in order to get a hold of oil supplies.
Because if they don't, they're simply not going to have an industrial economy. They've got nothing. They've got less oil than we do.
Janet Eaton: On the other side of the equation, as we use more oil, as we have used more, we are destroying the climate system. And that's already coming tumbling down with the abrupt change and tipping-point already manifested.
James Howard Kunstler: Yes, and I'm not the first guy whose observed that these things have mutually reinforcing and ramifying effects on each other. The more trouble we get in with liquid petroleum, the more likely it is that we will burn more coal. By the way, we don't have a zillion years' supply of coal, as most people think too. It's much more limited than that. And the quality of the coal that we have left isn't that great.
At any rate, as our liquid oil fuel depletes, we probably going to use more coal, and if we use more coal, we're going to do more damage to the atmosphere, and we're going to… these positive, reinforcing group of feedback is just going to get worse. We'll have a much more violent, turbulent climate change.
Janet Eaton: You get some people talking about renewables, as if we can just keep this global economy going as long as we have some kind of alternative energy source. But, I know that you are also a proponent of talking about small-scale economies as part of that equation. I tend to go to that place myself, so I was wondering if you could elaborate just a bit on where you think we're going to have to go in North America in terms of scaling-down to smaller-scale, more community-based economies?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, first of all, the whole renewable scene is really bizarre.
And it's kind of symptomatic of just amazingly bad thinking at every level in America.
I'm referring specifically to the idea that, whenever you hear people trying to address this set of problems, the answer is always to find better ways to run our cars. "We'll find different fuels, we'll have different kinds of batteries, we'll have hybrids, we'll have bio-diesel…" They never think of anything besides running the cars differently. It's all about running the cars and the trucks.
Janet Eaton: It's sick thinking sort of…
James Howard Kunstler: Well, it's just bizarre. It even comes from places like the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Emery Robbins, who has spent fifteen years and put all of the institutional muscle of the institute behind developing a hybrid car that would get super-naturally great mileage.
Janet Eaton: The whole eco-efficiency movement…
James Howard Kunstler: And, of course, what does that do? It only reinforces the idea that we can continue to be a car-dependent culture, which is insane. These guys are putting absolutely no effort into (inaudible, Arapaho?) communities or small-scale economies, or anything other than keeping Wal-Mart running by other means. I just find it bizarre and insane. The bottom-line is that we are going to have to make other
arrangements. We're going to have to live differently, we're going to have to occupy the terrain of North America in a different way, and not in the suburban pattern. We're probably going to have to return to traditional modes of habitation, namely villages, towns, and cities.
I personally think our big cities are going to get smaller, they're going to contract, because our big cities as they are and as we know them are products of the robust-phase of the fossil fuel part of the industrial age. That's over with. Most of [our big cities] are going to continue to exist in some way. Why? Because they occupy important sites.
They're on special entrances of harbours, they're on strategic parts of rivers, like Detroit. I was reading this asinine article in the New York Times Magazine yesterday, touting this Harvard genius professor urbanist, who was going on about, "most of these cities will simply dry-up and blow away, they have no reason to exist." Well, there's going to be
something in these places, it just won't be the Detroit that we know. It won't be the Cleveland or the St. Louis that we know, or the St. John that we know. But it will be something in [these] strategic places. They are certainly going to contract.
The really big issue for us is that, the combination of depleting fossil fuels and climate change are going to really affect our ability to feed ourselves. We are going to have to grow food in a different way. Industrial, corporate-style agriculture is going to be over with. And that's the Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Monsanto model for producing Cheese Doodles and Pepsi Cola for the masses. That's over with. We're going to have to
grow a lot more food close to home. That implies that we're going to have to have a different idea of what rural land is for. Because, right now, in North America generally, rural land is considered to only have value for suburban development. That's going to be over with. Because if we do any more of that -- and we're not going to be able to anyway -- there will be such overhang of completely insane behaviour, no matter what reality is telling them. We are going to have to conceive of a whole different comprehensive view of what the terrain is for, and what cities are for, and what towns are for, and what the scales of these things are? And my guess is that we're going to see the return of a really productive rural hinterland of our towns, and that the towns and cities are going to be
smaller units, spread out probably a lot more equitably than they are now.
To put it a different way, I think what you will see is the reversal of a two hundred-year trend of people moving from the rural places to the big cities. The whole migration from the country to the big city of the last two hundred years is going to be reversed. You are now going to be seeing people moving from the big cities back to the smaller towns and the rural hinterlands. Why? One reason is that a lot of the vocations and jobs that are normal today are going to be vanishing. There are going to be far fewer public relations executives and marketing directors. At the same time, agriculture is going to require a lot more human labour and human care at all levels. The administrative level, the labouring level, and everything in between.
Janet Eaton: That's what I was saying to that Barrio fellow in Canada -- the new jobs that will have to go along with the down-sizing, because of the lack of fossil fuels. The other thing you've mentioned too is the difference in transportation modes, and the importance of the railways, which harkens back to earlier days as well.
James Howard Kunstler: Right, the railroad is a very important issue. I don't think I'm being sentimental or nostalgic about this. It's simply that we've just gone to far down the highway with the automobile, and now we find that we're screwed. We're up a cul-de-sac, in a cement SUV without a fill-up. We are going to need to restore the North American railroad system. We had a wonderful railroad system here sixty years ago, and we allowed it to disintegrate. It's the one thing we could do that would really be something we know how to do, that we don't have to reinvent. It would have a tremendous impact on our oil use, and the fact that we're not talking about it shows how unserious we are.
When I start hearing the mainstream politicians talking about this, I'll know that something made an impression on them. We need this dreadfully -- it's much, much more efficient and far less costly in money and energy to move goods and people around on trains. We're the only advanced nation in the world who doesn't take railroads seriously.
We're really going to have to use a combination of both trains and something else, at the final part of the journey.
Janet Eaton: Well, this trucking system that we're using is totally unsustainable…
James Howard Kunstler: Yes, transcontinental trucking is going to be over with. We're not going to be doing it any more.
Janet Eaton: In fact that was shown, wasn't it, recently, when the oil was scarce at the pump not long ago, those trucks that come from California with the broccoli for the supermarkets in the East, they were all struck down, so you can see that it's not going to take much.
James Howard Kunstler: No, it doesn't take much. When you see this in Europe too, whenever there is a little tweak of the equivalent of thirty cents in the price of oil in the UK, for example, the truckers there have to go completely berserk, and they call strikes and they shut down. It just isn't going to work for us anymore. We're going to have to move so differently, we're probably going to have to have smaller regional and local networks of economic interdependency. We're still going to be getting some stuff from far away, but not everything.
Janet Eaton: Some people have suggested that, right now the global economy is about seventy percent of all economic commerce, and the [rest of] the world is more like thirty.
If we reversed that, it would be more realistic in terms of survival and sustainability.
James Howard Kunstler: I actually think we'll go further in the other direction. I think we'll probably see, at some point, far less international trade, because I think we're going to end up having a lot of political friction with the other nations and large blocks of the world. We haven't begun to see how this is going to shake out.
Janet Eaton: Well, one thing that seems to be happening is that the WTO does not seem to be the effective mechanism for orchestrating global trade, so there's more emphasis on regional trading blocks, hence the FTAA and the whole North American / South American Hemisphere block. But what we are saying here is that that may not even be possible. That's a long-distance -- we may have to be more local. So, it would seem that
we have to re-vamp and revisit the kind of trade agreements that one crafts.
James Howard Kunstler: I agree that Canada has been putting up with NAFTA…
Janet Eaton: Well, this is what I was getting to now…
James Howard Kunstler: Under the terms of NAFTA, Canada is obliged to sell us all of the natural gas that Canada has, and the entire continent of North America is in depletion for natural gas. You tend to get the natural gas from the continent that you're on.
Janet Eaton: How else are you going to get it…
James Howard Kunstler: I'll tell you how else. The reason we get it from this continent is because it all moves around a pipeline network at room temperature, basically. If you get it from other continents, you have to go through the extraordinarily expensive process of compressing it, and liquefying it, and shipping it in tankers to special terminals that cost billions of dollars to construct, that people don't want to have anywhere near them because they're dangerous. The idea that Canada is going to just continue to sell us as much natural gas as we need because we're in shortfall in the United States, I find unbelievable.
Janet Eaton: Well, we seem to be in that mode right now, and some of us feel that, what we call the corporate or business elite have very close ties with our government, and we seem to be not having any vision about alternatives.
James Howard Kunstler: The vision right now is to use the natural gas you've got to process the tar sands, so you can sell it to China and America. You've got to ask yourselves, do you want to sell all of your natural resources off in the twenty-first century and not have any left?
Janet Eaton: From what I've read, we have an eight-year supply of natural gas in the Mackenzie Valley area, and we're using it for that expressed purpose. And I don't know if you are aware but, since NAFTA, we've also recently signed the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or so-called NAFTA-plus in Fortress America. Within that, it looks like we're going to open up even more for shipping oil south, and also our water is on the table. So, there will be that dream as well, without any framework for trying to engage in a sustainable partnership…
James Howard Kunstler: Well, we're talking about your Prime Minister who is from Alberta, and we'll see how long he'll go on doing that before the people back in Ontario and Quebec become displeased by it.
Janet Eaton: Local communities now are starting to realize that this transportation of resources from one side of the border to the other is very unsustainable, and we have the incidence as well of mega-quarries in our province, shipping resources out to the US, to further the urban sprawl and further the growth paradigm, without any kind of a real true
sustainability framework.
James Howard Kunstler: I wouldn't expect the people running quarries to have much vision about… they don't really care about anything except selling crushed-stone, I mean, that's all they do. But the fact is that the living arrangement in North America, which our government has called non-negotiable, that simply doesn't have a future. We are not going to be able to run it without enormous supplies of cheap fossil fuels, and we're not going to have those. The conclusion is: we're not going to be running it. So, it represents a tremendous liability, and the fact that we now have ramped-up an entire economy that depends on building more of it is especially tragic. The whole process entails this psychology of previous investment, which does not allow you to imagine letting go of what you've put all of your national wealth into. We put all of our post-war wealth into
building freeways and the suburban sub-divisions, and all the furnishings and accessories of the suburban way of life. We can't imagine reforming it, or letting go of it, or stopping creating more of it. And it's a terrible, tragic predicament that we find ourselves in.
Because the world is not going to let us make more of it. When someone like Dick Cheney says the American way of life is non-negotiable, he's leaving something out.
What he's leaving out is the fact that, if you -- Mr. & Mrs. America -- don't want to negotiate this, you will find that you have a new negotiating partner who will do the negotiating for you. It's called, reality. That's your new agent. And they will be deciding how you're going to live, and they will be deciding what kind of decisions you'll have to make. We're going to have to change our behaviour whether we like it or not. One of the funny things about that New York Times magazine issue was that it was totally devoted to the American housing bubble, and in a very peculiar way. They were still cheerleading for it. They were willing to sell ads to the real estate investment trusts, and the condo hucksters, and the homebuilders' association, and the home furnishing guide. The whole idea of this thing was that there was no problem with the housing bubble -- it's just going
to keep on going. Part of the reasoning that you've seen for the last ten years about suburbia comes from the New York Times. It comes from David Brooks, the columnist, who has used this kind of logic. He says that suburbia is great because Americans seem to like it. That's the reasoning that's going on there -- just because people like something that means its OK. That means that the world will like it, and will continue doing it. It
means that your own health will continue to support it. That, of course, is not true for heroin addicts, necessarily, right? That's not necessarily a good situation to be in. And we are in a comparable situation: just because we like getting high behind the wheel, doesn't mean that the world is going to continue to let us drive around on $2.50 gasoline.
It's going to change everything, and we don't understand that. The public doesn't get it, the American government and business leaders don't get it, and we're just sort of cruising into a real calamity.
Janet Eaton: Have you given any thought to the kind of sustainability frameworks that we could be using as governments or as communities to help us think through this tunnel, to plan a different kind of economy? I mentioned to you that I was looking at the Natural Stepism model, to at least give us some guidelines to make those decisions as to why maybe we don't want the mega-quarry, we want a small-scale economy, or…
James Howard Kunstler: I believe that economies and social organizations are largely emergent in nature -- self-organizing. They’re not necessarily dictated by central planners or policy wonks. But I think that there is also a coherent view of what an intelligent response to this set of issues would be. Now, people are often disappointed by this, because they want a "rescue remedy," or they want to be told that there's some magical
substance that will allow you to get a million miles to the gallon in your car. They don't want to hear that there's a coherent view for making other arrangements. And that's what we've got to do -- we've got to down-scale all of the major complex systems that we've currently rely on for everyday life. We're going to have to do agriculture differently, at a
small-scale, at a local-scale, at a human-scale, probably requiring more human labour.
We're going to have to do commerce differently -- we're not going to have twelve thousand-mile supply lines to Chinese and Asian factories making plastic cuckoo clocks for sale in Toronto. That's going to be over with. We're going to have to make some of our household products here, and we will probably have far fewer of them. Shopping is no longer going to be in the forefront of our lives as a twenty-four, seven recreation -- it
is going to retreat into the background of our lives. Things like hard work will be in the foreground of our lives, perhaps working shoulder-to-shoulder with our neighbors will be more in the foreground of our lives, activities that are truly meaningful for our survival and our everyday prosperity… So, we're going to have to down-scale agriculture, we're going to have to down-scale commerce, we're going to almost certainly have to change the way we do schooling. The big, centralized school that depends on these fleets of yellow school buses -- they are not going to work in an energy-scarce world. It's also very likely that the enormous public universities are probably not going to be functioning the way they have been designed to.
Janet Eaton: We might have some models in areas like Atlantic Canada, where I come from, where the University of Newfoundland has had its outreach program to service small communities and to remain small-scale, but to deal with the rural populations.
James Howard Kunstler: Well there are many ways that we can organize these things. There's certainly not just one. We have been doing it in a certain way for fifty years, we just may not be able to do that anymore. What's more, the specialists including the Ph.D.s in microbiology are suffering from such hyper-specialization that they are having a hard
time even becoming part of the big picture. But you know I get letters from these techno-nerds everyday who take great offense at my point of view and for one thing, it never occurs to them to factor in the potential for social disorder that were facing. They think there's going to be some kind of absolutely sanitary segue between where we are at now -- living with Wal-Mart and Walt Disney World -- and moving along to whatever's next which might be kind of tough.
Janet Eaton: They don't realize the extent of the eco-system collapse that's going on and the millennium assessments and reports that show the climate change -- you add all that together, and it doesn't look very hopeful. Which brings us back to "community" as one of our survival mechanisms for the future.
James Howard Kunstler: It’s only that our local communities have been so systematically devastated by the very forces of globalism that we've been talking about. A community is largely about having economic roles which are reinforced by social roles. If you have people who perform a certain economic function in the community, but they also performa series of social functions. They take care of their fellow townspeople, they employ them. They have to care about them to some degree because they live near them, and they have to suffer the consequence of making them miserable if they do. They generally are people who own more than one piece of property in town, so they are taking care of more than one piece of property. This is what you see all the way up and down this part of up-state New York which used to be the industrial region of the Hudson Mohawk River Valley. And you see all over that the towns are just standing in utter desolation and ruins.
The residential neighbourhoods are ruined, and the industrial districts are ruined and devastated. That's because there is no one in there running that stuff and taking care of it, and living in it. All you get is this pipeline of merchandise coming in from distant places and going into the big-box stores, and that's it. But these local chains of economic interdependence actually create a tremendous amount of social capital. One of the great
tragedies of national-chain retail was that it destroyed a whole class of people who were, in essence, the caretakers of our towns. The people who sat on the library boards, and the school boards -- these were the merchant middle-class of these towns, and they have been removed completely.
Janet M Eaton: Well, this might be a good place to wrap it up. One of the things that I wanted to mention was that, the part of the world were I come from is where we've been working for years to really create small-scale communities. We've had fishermen who have seen the collapse of the fisheries, working together, forming cooperatives to manage their own fisheries, because government didn't do it for them. We've got a special emphasis on eco-tourism and education and awareness and small IT and tourism businesses. Now we have a large mega-quarry coming into this small-scale economy which could actually devastate it. Its going to spread across this whole peninsula, and whose going to want to come there for eco-tourism when you've got a mega-quarry going night and day. The sad part of it is that they've got the ground, to truck it off down here [to the US], to further that kind of economy that's already in decline. But how can a small community stop that now if government is still pushing this kind of an economy? We're at that interface now, where we need to find the ways to create an awareness of the new reality, so that when we have something that could be a model for the future -- a small-
scale model economy, a post peak-oil model economy -- why would we want to destroy it?
James Howard Kunstler: The answer to that question is not a happy answer. The answer is that life is tragic. If groups of people prone to make to wrong decision, make bad decisions, then tragic things happen. If your government wants to continue behaving that way, and the public can't do anything about it, then they will suffer tragically. In the United States, we're going to suffer tragically from defending to the last breath our suburban economy and our suburban living arrangements. Every day that we spend not making plans to do something differently is going to be another day that we are going to suffer from not having made other arrangements.
Janet Eaton: Thank You.