Kunstler's Petrocollapse remarks

[4dsc]

http://www.kunstler.com/spch_petrocollapse.html

For those who missed it!! Kunsler has a way of making you look at yourself, in ways you haven't thought about previously..

What is important?

We've entered a permanent world-wide energy crisis. The implications are enormous. It could put us out-of-business as a cohesive society.

We face a crisis in finance, which will be a consequence of the energy predicament as well as a broad and deep lapse in our standards, values, and behavior in financial affairs.
(snip)

The housing bubble has virtually become our economy. Subtract it from everything else and there's not much left besides haircutting, fried chicken, and open heart surgery.

And, of course, as the housing bubble deflates, the magical mortgage machinery spinning off a fabulous stream of hallucinated credit, to be re-packaged as tradable debt, will also stop flowing into the finance sector.

We face a series of ramifying, self-reinforcing, terrifying breaks from business-as-usual, and we are not prepared. We are not talking about it in the traditional forums - only in the wilderness of the internet.

[Missy M]

1. Great article everyone in this country should read....

I would love to be able to commute on a train system that barely exists in this country. I would love to be able to walk to the local butcher, baker and small grocer. It is not possible because they have been taken over by the mega-super markets, I have to drive to get to. I wish I never saw another Walmart built from this time on. I am very happy with the small house I live in and people always think I'm crazy when I say I wouldn't want a brand new McMansion. I could go on and on but I won't.

[reprehensor]

2. Thanks for posting. nt

[blindpig]

3. kick

[OneBlueSky]

4. kicked and recommended . . . n/t

.

[SupplyConcerns]

5. Kunstler: An all-American man of the 21st century

I recommend people read this guy's fantastically important and well-written books. The Geography of Nowhere is a good start; skip straight to The Long Emergency if you already know where suburbia came from, and why you hate it. Kunstler is the kind of thinker the Democrats, not to mention Americans as a whole, need to welcome into the fold.

[Tace]

6. I Attended The Conference -- He's The Real Deal

I heard his address and spoke with him at a news conference afterwards, along with Mike Ruppert and several other Peak Oil biggies, many of them well-regarded experts in their fields.

I've been a Peak Oil proponent for a while now, but this conference blew my socks off. They are all expecting the collapse of the dollar, the world economy, and all of society, a process well underway right now, not in some distant future.

It's NOT bullshit. It's very, very sobering stuff.

Here's a recent short piece he wrote about what to expect this winter. His Clusterfuck Nation site is down right now, so I'll provide a link to the first part of the story through the WNT site, which links to the rest of the piece on Clusterfuck.

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=1094

[Pooka Fey]

7. I love Kunstler. Thanks for posting this link. Nominated.

[Tace]

8. Actually, Here's The Kunstler Piece I Was Thinking Of

Another Country

September 19, 2005

Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 - 6, we're going to be another country. The reality-oblivious nation of mall hounds, bargain shoppers, happy motorists, Nascar fans, Red State war hawks, and born-again Krispy Kremers is headed into a werewolf-like transformation that will reveal to all the tragic monster we have become.

What we will leave behind is the certainty that we have made the right choices. Was it a good thing to buy a 3,600 square foot house 32 miles outside Minneapolis with an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage -- with natural gas for home heating running at $12 a unit and gasoline over $3 a gallon? Was it the right choice to run three credit cards up to their $5000 limit? Was I chump to think my pension from Acme Airlines would really be there for me? Do I really owe the Middletown Hospital $17,678 for a gall bladder operation that took forty-five minutes? And why did they charge me $238 for a plastic catheter?

All kinds of assumptions about the okay-ness of our recent collective behavior are headed out the window. This naturally beats a straight path to politics, since that is the theater in which our collective choices are dramatized. It really won't take another jolting event like a major hurricane or a terror incident or an H4N5 flu outbreak to take things over the edge -- though it is very likely that something else will happen. George W. Bush, and the party he represents, are headed into full Hooverization mode. After Katrina, nobody will take claims of governmental competence seriously.

The new assumption will be that when shit happens you are on your own. In this remarkable three weeks since New Orleans was shredded, no Democrat has stepped into the vacuum of leadership, either, with a different vision of what we might do now, and who we might become. This is the kind of medium that political maniacs spawn in. Something is out there right now, feeding on the astonishment and grievance of a whipsawed middle class, and it will have a lot more nourishment in the months ahead.

more

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2005/09/another_country.html

[Dogmudgeon]

9. If only he wasn't such a f*cking elitist

Every paragraph bristles with his scorn for what was once called "The Great Unwashed". It is difficult to read any piece he has written without thinking he's infinitely more upset with the ugliness of the world than the injustice and cruelty of it.

So many good insights, so much wisdom sacrificed in the name of esthetic pique.

--p!

[democracy eh]

10. I agree

his book "The Long Emergency" and contribution to The End of Suburbia, are 90% excellent, but then he always ruins if by including a smug little comment about how everywhere is fooked except for his little corner of the northeast and his chosen circle of petro righteousness.

and I do agree with him

[Dogmudgeon]

11. "Our Area" will be in halfway-decent shape

The Northeast, after decades of abuse by the Federal Gummint, will be one of the least hard-hit by a petrocollapse. We still have a lot of local food production, our utilities are smaller and less distributed, there are still areas where the railroads haven't been dismantled, and there is a 300-year-old social infrastructure (in theory, at least).

If there is a thermohaline current collapse in the Atlantic, it will get colder here, but it would take a few hundred years for any ice-sheet formation to start south of Quebec's Laurentide plain, and well over a millenium for it to form south of New York state. However, "colder" also means less susceptible to global warming fallout, unless you're talking about snowfall.

But if Kunstler thinks he's going to be sitting pretty, he's mistaken. A world economic system sustaining millions, or billions, of deaths may allow the remaining petroleum to be used for a longer time, but the world will be a smaller, meaner, and more frightened place.

And worse, there will be too few poor people to knock down the Wal-Marts that are so offensive unto his cultured eye.

--p!