Before the Long Emergency
James Kunstler’s new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st century, is bold, important, and flawed. His central premise is that the world does not have enough oil to meet demand in the next several decades. This fact, combined with other ecological and economic problems, means that a fairly radical change in how society functions will have to occur. I wholeheartedly agree with this central premise, and I think Kunstler has made a big contribution just by creating such an evocative title, which captures the essence of the monumental challenge of sustainable development. Still, the devil is in the details, and many of them seem problematic.
Kunstler falls into the same trap that other famous ecological writers such as Paul Ehrlich have fallen into: jumping from short-term trends to long-term scenarios too quickly. Generally, short-term predictions are pretty easy to make, as so many drivers can be treated as constants; there are dozens of studies conducted in the last several years, all of which point to demand for oil outstripping supply, and thus to predictably higher prices. From this solid base, Kunstler leaps into an airy discussion of a totally transformed society. As an imaginative exercise, this has merit, but many of the predictions that Kunstler presents as certain are far from it. He also lapses into an apocalyptic tone that will be repellent to those not already in the environmentalist camp. Kunstler may well be right in his pessimism, but it is perhaps dangerous: from Malthus to Ehrlich to the Club of Rome, our predictions of gloom have often been off.
Kunstler’s analysis is also fundamentally conservative, in that he believes that humanity will mostly deal with expensive oil by reverting to technologies common in the 19th century, like electric streetcars and more compact cities. While I agree that some of these technologies will be crucial, I think Kunstler vastly underestimates the degree of hysteresis in socioeconomic systems, in the sense Steve Carpenter uses the term. The future will not look much like the past, even if the suite of energy sources is similar, just because so much has changed. Beautiful historical case studies, such as Jared Diamond pursues in Collapse, can never be any more than loose analogies to our very unique present.
So, what then can we say about the middle ground, before the long emergency? Ecologists must being to study this no-man’s land, for it’s where the best policy-making takes place. For example, I’ve begun trying to study how patterns of urban growth in the developing world will commit those countries to different per capita oil use rates, with global implications. There’s also a lot of room for an enlightened government here, to conduct what in the Pentagon would be called a war game. Get in the same room an oil trader, a global change scientist, a utility company executive, a factory owner, and an urban planner, and ask how they would respond to different scenarios of oil scarcity. The collective impressions that emerge are likely to be far more accurate than the visions of any one man, no matter how wise.
