Originally published November 15 2005
New book creates apocalyptic view of energy and fuel industries
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
In his book, "The Long Emergency," James Howard Kunstler argues against many current energy solutions, namely hydrogen power, and takes a bleak outlook of the impending fuel crisis.
I don't own a car, and the only one I've ever owned outright was a junk Audi Fox in high school that never ran.
China has embarked on a crash-industrialization program just at the moment in history when industrialization is seriously compromised by the very real and present end of the cheap-oil epoch.
Here's the quick, ahem, drill, as Kunstler describes it.
Oil production in America reached its peak in 1970, the peak being defined as that moment where the amount of oil left in the ground was equal to that which had already been extracted.
Hard to imagine nowadays, but this country's oil industry (which was founded, Kunstler reports, by a group of investors from New Haven who subsidized the nation's first wellhead in Pennsylvania) once produced a surplus.
None of this is news to anyone who follows the oil and natural gas industries; like terrorism, the end of the cheap-oil age is a question of not if but when.
We all know how reliant we are on the stuff, how essential cheap oil is to keeping the economy "growing."
Industrial agriculture, to take but one critical example, is kaput without cheap oil, since oil is a key component of all those fertilizers that are used to ramp up food production.
The crux of The Long Emergency is that the cheap-oil moment was a one-shot deal for human civilization.
This process was exacerbated during the Clinton '90s, when ramped-up oil production led to a glut in the world markets, which in turn led to $10 barrels of crude, which in turn fueled the "housing bubble," which exists entirely as a suburban phenomenon.
As for natural gas: "We're arguably in a more ominous position with our natural gas supplies than we are even with our oil supplies," Kunstler says.
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