Jon Rynn suggested that this comment to another thread be posted, so, by request, a repeat for the holidays! I would have posted it yesterday but we had a long power outage as a winter storm caused a transformer to blow up, putting several thousand of us without power.
It was a fitting problem to have on the darkest day of the year and in relation to James H. Kunstler, who writes about the increasing trouble we’re going to have managing our complex technical undertakings during the era of "converging catastrophes" (climate change and peak oil) that he has dubbed "the long emergency.”
Bob wrote:
It seems to me that lots of greens are starting with the
proposition that "cars must die" and then look for reasons why. (And I
give K the blame for starting people thinking that way.)
I start from the premise that Americans who have (and everyone else in
the world who has or expects to have) a car will greatly resist doing
away with cars.
This doesn’t compute, to borrow your term. If people love cars so much and will "greatly resist doing away" with them, then either greens aren’t people or your premise is mistaken.
And isn’t it odd that a mere "buffoon" would be able to "start people thinking" in a way that suggests that the "love affair" with the auto is more than anything else a creation of Madison Ave. (plus a remembered affection for a time in the US when the future seemed endlessly bright, resources seemed endlessly available, and hunger was something discussed in terms of China and India).
In other words, if this machine, this chariot of the gods, is so beloved, then why do so many people find that its costs far outweigh its benefits, and why would a mere buffoon find an audience for his jeremiads?
Growing up as a suburban kid in the 60s, I found a small paperback from the 50s called The Insolent Chariots. From the dust-jacket:
"Once upon a time, the American met the Automobile and fell in love.
Unfortunately, this led him into matrimony, and so he did not live
happily ever after."
This is a book about what America and the automobile have done to each other.
Do you ever wonder why today’s cars look the way they do, and why they
cost so much? Is the public at the mercy of Detroit? Or vice-versa? Are
the new highways drawing the nation together—or are they merely
homogenizing it? What goes on behind the facade at your friendly
dealer’s, and when you buy a car do you know how to penetrate the
Byzantine snarl of auto "financing"? Is our marriage to the automobile
part of our greatness, or is it a disaster—and what can we do about
it, anyway?
Wielding a rapier tipped with wit, edged with anger and forged with the
facts, John Keats slashes aside myth and chrome, to reveal the truth
behind our fateful match. Whether you want to get a horse or settle for
a horse laugh—you will never again look at your car yourself, or
your native land in quite the same way ...
Kunstler is not the first to notice that our "love
affair with the automobile" closely resembles Michael Douglas’s
experience in "Fatal Attraction."
Despite reading and enjoying the Keats’ book, I grew up with the typical uncritical acceptance of motorhead, buying my first car before I even had a license using money saved from washing dishes in a restaurant and mowing lawns. I know I sure didn’t start life with a "cars must die" mindset. I grew up in a neighborhood where a teen 16 or older would rather have gone to school naked than in the school bus (a/k/a "loser cruiser").
I took that car with me to duty stations across the country, never quite wanting to notice that the costs of insurance and repairs did more to keep my bank balance on low than anything else I did, including developing a real fondness for bourbon and beer, which I indulged greatly without ever reducing my driving much. I get a pit in my stomach when I think of the number of trips I took home from bars, three sheets to the wind, in the woods over windy rural roads. I easily could have killed someone (other than myself). I’m grateful I didn’t.
Drinking, driving, and dying were a big problem in the military. We had to attend mandatory education about alcohol abuse in those days—which led me to say, "If you’re going to learn about something, learn from the pros," and boy, were we ever the pros of alcohol abuse.
When I got out of the service, I had an experience not unlike that at the end of Lord of the Rings, where the hobbits returning to the Shire can barely recognize it because it had become an ugly wasteland. For whatever reason, I was able to note that essentially all the ugliness in what had once been indescribably beautiful land was connected to the automobile. The land was covered with a scabrous sprawl of concrete; the air was now dangerous (literally) and had a distinct petroleum scent; the water was spoiled at every point, burdened with oil, gasoline, and antifreeze. The first signs of the obesity epidemic were present—between the new "cable TV" and MTV and automobiles, kids didn’t seem to do much involving their own muscles any more.
I didn’t read or hear of James Howard Kunstler until the late 90s; he didn’t put some weird loathing of automobiles into my head. The only thing Kunstler has done is get a few people to look at all parts of the bargain we’ve struck with automobility and motorhead thinking— the slaughter on the roads, the destruction of the natural and civic environment alike.
What suggests to me that Kunstler is onto something is the rabid scorn he generates from people who disagree with him. It’s always more venomous than simple disagreement merits. It seems people in the First Church of Carburbia hate him because he’s heretical—not because he’s wrong in his critique, but because he’s right.
This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!
Growing up green: How to shop for a green baby
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spaceshaper Posted 12:23 am
23 Dec 2008
On the one hand we see the Kunstlerites extend the analysis more or less as follows: continuing the automobile culture indefinitely is going to be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive (it could even cost us our use of much of the planet); there are excellent modes of development available to us which make the automobile vastly less important in our daily lives; there are immense additional societal positives associated with these alternative development modes; if we make this change of direction early it can be relatively painless; if we procrastinate it will be forced on us by circumstance, probably with great suffering especially to the most vulnerable among us.
On the other hand the anti-Kunstler camp sees the automobile-based development mode either as a wonderful thing that we must strive to preserve or as a bad thing that we are compelled to accept because 'people won't give up their cars'; either way we must figure out a way to keep the cars running no matter what. Anti-Kunstlerites include a wide range of political extremes, from the 'drill, baby drill' right to the 'science will save us' technophiles on the environmental left.
What both camps can easily ignore in the heat of the argument is that the suburb predates the automobile by many centuries. It has existed, and flourished, for as long as we have had towns and cities. Ancient Athens and classical Rome had suburbs, medieval walled cities had suburbs, eighteenth-century London and Paris had suburbs. Keats retreated to London's leafy Hampstead, Kahlo to Mexico City's Coyoacan for a measure of quasi-rural peace within easy reach of the city's bustling resources. Towns and cities of the modern age with major development that took place shortly before the hegemony of the automobile had some very attractive and livable suburbs indeed: Philadelphia and Chicago are prominent large-scale examples in the US but finer-grained examples in smaller towns and cities can also be found across north america. A common characteristic of the best of these is that they provided excellent resources mostly within walking distance to supply the daily needs of their inhabitants: grocery and hardware stores, cafes and restaurants, parks, schools and libraries. Then of course to supplement these local resources there were public transportation nodes giving access to the commercial and cultural resources of the urban center.
We need not fear the anti-Kunstlerite caricature of horses and carts and peasant hovels in the country, teeming tenements in the city and nothing in between. Nor do we need to bother ourselves with the 'environmentalists hate cars' straw-man meme. If we seek a rational way forward we can quite simply look to the best of these traditional suburbs to be our models for new development and for updating the old in a vastly less car-dependent future. The new urbanists seek to do this, as did the Garden City movement of a century ago: there's plenty of excellent literature available on how to achieve the suburb's traditional promise of 'the best of both worlds' with just a modicum of research as well as these excellent built examples. It's not a question of blowing them up but of doing them right.
There remains the huge question of what to do with the large tracts of existing development which if we give any credence to to the Kunstler view may be functionally uninhabitable within a few decades. There is a traditional name for extensive residential developments without convenient access to local resources for daily life: we call them slums. Some of these non-place places may prove redeemable with intelligent retrofit; some will not.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:44 am
23 Dec 2008
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biodiversivist Posted 2:41 am
23 Dec 2008
Bring on affordable neighborhood electric vehicles, put the trains and trolleys back where they used to be and we will be on our way.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 3:51 am
23 Dec 2008
Reducing the number of cars to one third, maybe 100 million and making them plugin hybrids would save maybe 10% of GHG.
Converting work vehicles to plugin hybrid might save another 5%.
Leaving this whole issue a small portion of the change necessary to avert disaster. jim's stuff is mainly about peak oil and the effect of oil dependency on the economy, not so much on curing the climate.
He was a one note guy on Y2K, now he has one note on energy and climate, peak oil. Does he even believe in climate change? I doubt it. He's an oil guy, he made his mark touting peak oil to help out his oil trading friends. That's his focus. His books are pop culture based on peak oil.
Peak oil is mainly a hoax. Bringing it about would wreck the climate.
Ground source heating/cooling with solar cogeneration could eliminate 36% of GHG. Distributed renewable smart grid power generation and storage could get rid of another third. Wind power could get rid of most of the rest, other than GHG related to transportation like air travel and vehicles that can't be electrified.
Even with all this change, which seems to have zero chance of even getting started in the first term, given Obama's choices for his team members, it would take the next 20 years at least.
Peak oil fantasies, like Jim and his fans are so enamored over, are not only irrelevant, but actually divert attention from the real problem and the obvious solutions.
The possibility of enough change in a short enough time span looks dim if this is the best political action can acheive.
Given the new data on methane release and ice melt, Jim's diversionary fiction of a return to feudal agrarian life due to the onset of peak oil is worse than ludicrous.
We are in a world of hurt, maybe geo-engineering can save us. It doesn't look like the triumvirate of mass delusional media, corporate corruption, and political pandering are going to do the job.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:26 am
23 Dec 2008
Second, I know you disagree, but there are certainly plenty of other people besides Kunstler worried about peak oil.
Third, I don't know if he's quite medieval, he constantly calls for more trains.
Finally, the GHG problem. In 2004, according to the IPCC, the global manmade ghg emissions, in CO2 equivalents -- that means, 1 ton of methane is counted as over 20 tons of carbon dioxide -- was 49 gigatons, that is, 49 billion tons (metric tons).
Of that, according to the EIA, which the IPCC uses, 10.9 gigatons was from coal, used mostly for electricity, and 10.2 from petroleum. Strangely enough, transportation used a little less than half of petroleum, generating 6.3 gigatons of C02 equivalent, and about half of that is cars and light trucks. Then 5.3 gigatons from natural gas (the fossil fuel figures are from this way cool diagram in an IPCC report, pdf, page 259).
OK, about 56% of ghgs are from fossil fuels, which unfortunately leaves 44%. Here's another way cool diagram,pdf, page 105, which shows that 17% is from deforestation and burning and decaying, 13% from agriculture (mostly fertilizers and belching cows), and then some methane and co2 from some industry and landfills. I'm working on making this clearer.
Anyway, you're right that transport is not a huge emitter, relatively, although petroleum is -- much of its emissions coming from electricity generation and household heating. But a good 33% of total ghg emissions come from the use of land for agriculture, forests, and garbage -- and by the way, since we're on the topic, Kunstler talks a lot about agriculture, and Astyk in particular is focused on this one.
If petroleum gets scarce, people could start using more coal, which would be worse for emissions, or more biofuel, which would be worse for the ecosystems (and emissions), so if petroleum supply is a problem, as Kunstler proposes, then things get worse for ecosystems. However, considering the state we're in, all of this stuff has to be eliminated (even the belching cows?). So it doesn't matter if something is "only" 10%, it all has to go.
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amazingdrx Posted 6:07 am
23 Dec 2008
Jim and his fellow peak oilers ought to start writing about that tippong point. I agree though, peak oil still gets a lot of attention. my feeling is that it is a diversion.
Ground source heating/cooling at 36% of GHG is a good solution that politics could focus on next. Cars not so much, oil is mainly used in transportation. That will remain a problematic, marginal source of GHG savings until government directed manufacturing policy starts up, if it ever does.
Wind is aready increasing rapidly, and smart grids are starting to be developed. Solar PV is dropping in price.
Plugin hybrids will appear on the scene in fractional numbers in 2010. Rail upgrades could take a decade ot so.
The frightening aspect of this looming depression is that the resources for a green stimulus may not be available, even with the ability of the fed to "print" electronic money.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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JMG Posted 7:32 am
23 Dec 2008
http://is.gd/dcSN
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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Bart Anderson Posted 8:15 am
23 Dec 2008
If you stick to the issues, then we can all learn something.
I've been following Jim Kunstler's work for years and am a fan.
One has to understand that he is a visionary, not a scientist. If you recall your prophets from the Bible, you'll know that they are not always the easiest people to be around. They tell uncomfortable truths when everyone around them is fat and happy.
Jim's gift is that he wraps the truths in wordplay and sardonic humor. His work is not to everyone's liking, but he has attracted a huge audience, and like the Energizer Bunny, he keeps going and going ... with essays and books and lectures.
When people criticize Kunstler, I've found that it's usually on account of the uncomfortable truths. As a culture we prefer happy-talk and happy endings.
Right now, Kunstler's batting average is pretty high: economic downturn, suburban woes, Republican dysfunctionalists (the "party that wrecked America" he calls them).
I'd mostly use Kunstler to get the thought processes started though - not as the final word.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:41 am
23 Dec 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 3:57 pm
24 Dec 2008
I guess my point is that we ought to go for the big savings we understand how to get while we are still debating transportation issues, how much car, how much train? It looks like transportation progress might be very slow, with manufacturing crippled by capital shortage.
Well I never have looked into Jim's life too far Bart. The peak oil lecture at an oil industry conference part was something I read. And his wrong headed take on Y2K, which he failed to recant even after the fact. I did read a chapter or two of "World Made By Hand", it seemed to take an I told you so smirk at the brutal feudal nature of post oil-pocalypse civilization.
Anyway looked him up on wiki, I can see now where he's coming from.
It still strikes me that his peak oil extrapolation closely resembles his Y2K. I don't sense that he is all that interested in scientific and technological questions. It is more social commentary, seemingly misinformed by his shallow understanding of the scientific principles behind the headlines.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 4:05 pm
24 Dec 2008
I prefer "Bonanza". It's like oil and water. He is still stuck on oil. The world has moved on to water, this century's "oil".
He's just not cool.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bart Anderson Posted 9:50 am
25 Dec 2008
There are several ways to criticize Kunstler, some more productive than others.
Personal criticism. This is easy but not too useful. Like all of us, Jim Kunstler is human. It becomes a matter of personalities. But I really think this is beside the point, because ...
The most meaningful criticism is about his ideas and worldview. He's one of the most "out there" of the peak oil people and thus is the target of a lot of criticism.
But his ideas are not unique. Many are shared by more mild mannered writers like Richard Heinberg, Matthew Simmons, Sharon Astyk, ASPO-USA writers ... as well as several posters here at Gristmill (including me!).
The ideas are all fair game. There is a logical argument, each step of which can be criticized. For example,
Hubbert's curve and peak oil.
Various estimates when the peak will take place.
Skepticism about technology as THE solution (I'm guessing this is where you most disagree).
Judgment that the situation is grimmer than most Democrats and environmentalists think.
Emphasis on relocalization, resilience and community.
Where I disagree with Jim Kunstler is when he gets going on the economy. If he has to choose between a funny line or accuracy, he opts for the first.
Keep in mind too that he loves to shock and outrage. A healthy society needs truthtellers like Kunstler who push us out of our comfort level.
I find him wickedly funny and I admire his fearlessness, but probably one Kunstler in the peak oil community is enough!
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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amazingdrx Posted 4:08 pm
25 Dec 2008
I don't really want to personally insult him. Actually he is kind of an icon for all bloggers, his musings are actually influential.
He is getting up there with Ariana Huffington.
I wish he would account for the Amish solar energy wave though, hehey.
What does he think of cloud forming human weather control? As a means of couteracting climate disaster? There's a good question for him.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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JMG Posted 6:13 pm
25 Dec 2008
See his 12/23 guest post from Michigan:
http://is.gd/dxaZ
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:28 am
26 Dec 2008
But they aren't low and haven't been so far. Economic shock caused by unregulated, manipulated markets for credit and commodities, combined with auto/oil industry corporate political corruption caused the Detroit area crisis.
The commeter from Michigan puts it in a frightening perspective. A region used to high wages and benefits and full emplotment now dying. GM killed the electric car, that's when the death knell for Michigan was sounded, but no one heard it over the rambling of the idiot warrior president and his cadre of tyrants. This (from JMG's link) is worth excerpting:
In the last few years, roughly half of my neighborhood has gone up for foreclosure, and I live in a middle class neighborhood. I am still haunted my the memory of a neighbor down the street driving away with her 3 children, tears streaming down her face. She was a victim of the auto layoffs. I learned later that she stated that she had nowhere to go. Just a few months ago, the street was alive with the sound of children playing. Then the streets became silent. Homes that went up for sale are just sitting there, not being sold.
Many others are moving back in with parents, relatives, friends or family. Those who do not have such resources head for the homeless shelters, which, like the soup kitchens here, are bursting at the seams. Many people, when asked, will state with utter despair that they never thought they would have been in this predicament just a few months ago.
This IS the new great depression already, at least in the rust belt.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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