Book Review

Living in the Long Emergency

By Jon N. Hall


If Americans are concerned about energy prices and shortages, not to mention the end of civilization as we know it, then they might want to read James Howard Kunstler’s 2020 essay collection Living in the Long Emergency. In “Hey, What Happened to Peak Oil?” and “The Alt-Energy Freak Show” and “Money, Oil, and Their By-Products” (chapters 1, 2, and 13), Kunstler gives us his take on fossil fuels and their supposed replacements: renewables, i.e. wind and solar. He also analyzes the financial industry’s role in energy. Here’s a bit:

The shale oil “miracle,” therefore, was a very impressive financial and technological stunt. In practical terms, it provided a means to pull forward from the future the last dregs of recoverable oil, so the US could live large for a few years longer. As independent oil analyst Arthur Berman put it: “Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry.”

 Kunstler contends that shale oil, which has recently accounted for more than half of our petroleum production and which made America “energy independent,” is not a viable business under “normal” interest rates. (By the way, the U.S. hasn’t had normal interest rates for more than twenty years.)

I’ve not yet gotten into e-books, but I noticed when using the “Look inside” feature in the above link that the hyperlinks in the footnotes are clickable, making it easy to access an author’s sources. Also, buying an e-book doesn’t require burning fossil fuels in the Amazon Prime delivery van, (nor when harvesting trees for paper). Plus, at $9.99 the Kindle e-book costs less. Other e-book formats are available from the publisher, BenBella Books, at the same price.

I highly recommend Kunstler’s book. Part Three features some excellent essays that aren’t about energy, including compelling ones on Jacobin wokeism and America’s decaying culture. Kunstler’s Personal Coda is also great stuff.

What got me to read Mr. Kunstler’s book were his recent appearances on Doug Casey’s Take and on Keiser Report where he explained the economics of shale oil mining and fracking. Then I started noticing his regular articles at LewRockwell (archive), which in time got me over to Jim’s website. There I did a search on “peak oil” and got a bunch of podcasts on the subject.

My introduction to James Kunstler may have been the 2011 History Channel documentary “Prophets of Doom.” It featured several fellows who each had a different idea about what might bring about mankind’s undoing, our doom. I’ve embedded the video below and set it to start at 37:40 and to end 13½ minutes later at the 51:07-point. The aforementioned Casey and Keiser appearances are also below, and they’re also excellent, but much more wide-ranging.

Jim Kunstler’s is a voice more Americans need to hear.


////

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Senseless Census: A Solution By Jon N. Hall May 26, 2010 The original purpose of the census was apportionment -- the drawing of congressional districts so that each would contain roughly the same number of Americans. To do this, the census must count heads and get their addresses. This has not been a mystery since the advent of computers. Computers are used in statistical sampling. Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at UW-Madison, made an impassioned plea for using sampling in the census on May 1 in The Washington Post . It was titled: “The census will be wrong. We could fix it.” But in Department of Commerce v. United States House of Representatives (1999), the Supreme Court ruled against the use of sampling in the census. Justice O’Connor delivered the Court’s opinion : “The District Court below examined the plain text and legislative history of the [Census] Act and concluded that the proposed use of statistical sampling to determine population for ...
Read more
  So You Think You Understand Language By Jon N. Hall   The mathematician John von Neumann once said: “Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.” The same sort of thing might also be said about language -- you don't understand language, you just get used to it.   But with language, it may be even more the case than with mathematics. That’s because folks often have to invert the true meanings of words in order to grasp what they’re hearing, i.e. what’s intended. When one thinks about it for a bit, language itself can seem rather mystifying -- better to just use it, right?   Not if one is trying to be exact. It is for the sake of exactness and precision that we create “usage rules.” But we Anglophones need better usage rules for some of the most common words in English: conjunctions. Conjunctions can create ambiguity , and in some arenas of contemporary life, like law, ambiguity can’t be tolerated. Sad to say, but w...
Read more

A Nation of Queuers Cannot Stand

… They also serve who only stand and prate By Cedric Trevelyan, K.C.B.   I am not usually of a humour to give consequence to the middle classes taking their leisure, nor indeed am I even likely to encounter such creatures, given my more rarified social circles. But occasionally of late, whilst standing in line to procure my afternoon libation at one of the trendy coffee shops that have begun to dot my adopted homeland, I find myself rubbing shoulders with those beneath my station, and I cannot help but wince as I perceive how passively these humble folk, our good proles, endure the abuse dished up to them by certain surly concocters of caffeinated refreshments who, despite being only a missed paycheque away from penury and usually of a lower class than that of those upon whom they wait, nonetheless feel it their birthright to banter and visit amongst themselves at insufferable length before deigning to sullenly acknowledge the presence of their customers patiently standing be...
Read more