James Howard Kunstler

Quotes

1. At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by President Reagan and his advisors) that would be called “globalism.” It was not so much a new idea as the logical and inevitable result of mature self-organizing systems elaborating themselves under the influence of renewed, immense energy inputs—the ultimate cheap-oil way of doing business in the closed system [in respect to matter] that is the planet Earth. It entailed the maximization of short-term profit and the minimization of care for future generations. It was the ultimate generator of entropy.

   p. 219

2. Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By “oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By “corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a “person,” with “rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, “a corporation… is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance… It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

   p. 186

3. It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the “affordable” range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy can’t be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite its… technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws.

   p. 194

4. In the Long Emergency schooling will be required for fewer years, and children may have to work part of the day or part of the year. Because everything will be local, the ability to support education will depend on local economic conditions and the level of social stability, and there will be broad variation. Some localities may become so distressed that public school will cease to exist. The more fortunate localities will be those where small-scale agriculture is possible, but more intensive local agriculture by nonindustrial methods implies a much different division of labor, and older children may have to assume more responsibility and grow up faster. The romanticization of childhood may prove to have been one of the luxuries of the cheap-oil age. Basic schooling, in the formal sense, might not go beyond the equivalent of today’s eighth grade. Sorting of children into vocational or academic tracks will probably be based on self-evident social and economic status rather than any formal administrative system. Only a tiny minority of young people will be able to enjoy a college education. Vocational training is much more likely to occur in the context of a workplace rather than the school, as in the apprentice system.

   p. 272

5. Climate change, competition for water, and polluted water sources will also be exacerbated by failures in the electric grid caused by oil and gas supply disruptions. Even if water is available, localities may lack the power to push it through their treatment plants and municipal pipes.

   p. 166

6. Because… systems are self-organizing in the face of circumstance, the big questions are how much disorder must we endure as things change, and how hard will we struggle to continue a particular way of life with no future? […] The… economy of the decades to come will center on farming, not high-tech, […] “information,” or “services,” or space travel, […] tourism, or finance. All other activities will be secondary to food production, which will require much more human labor.

   p. 239

7. Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized… diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children… survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn’t compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland’s oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. The only comparative advantage that these people possessed was their willingness to work for next to nothing. Cheap oil and free-market globalism turned comparative advantage into a new kind of feudalism, with the corporations as the lords and the overabundant locals as the serfs. And then, when the comparative advantage of cheap labor… of one place, […] was superseded by the cheaper labor… of another place, […] the corporations just moved their operations.

   p. 187

8. The entropy produced in World War II was much more widespread and profound than that of World War I. In World War I the action had taken place… entirely on rural terrain, classic battlefields. In World War II, much of the warfare was urban. The long-range bomber had reached a high stage of refinement in the twenty-plus years between world wars. None of the major capitals had been damaged in World War I. In World War II, hundreds of towns and cities were destroyed in Europe and Asia. Berlin was reduced to gravel; London was badly mutilated; and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive ashtrays. The casualties of World War I had been enormous, astonishing, [and] appalling beyond civilized peoples’ wildest dreams, but the victims had been overwhelmingly soldiers. The casualties in World War II were overwhelmingly civilians and in much greater aggregate numbers.

   p. 212

9. Banking also regained respectability after the calamities of the 1930s. Federal deposit insurance, which had been instituted in the depths of the Great Depression, and only for deposits under $2,500, was raised to $10,000 in 1950, and the middle class was induced to feel confident about keeping its money in banks again. Interest rates remained modest, but so did inflation. The influx of savings made money available in capital markets to invest in new ventures. It was real money derived from work already done, pay already earned, true capital. Before the great orgy of mergers and consolidation that began in the 1970s, retail banking was… local and community-centered. Bankers made loan decisions based on firsthand knowledge of projects going on in their communities—not, as today, based on bundling and selling clumps of mortgages for generic suburban developments they have never laid eyes on.

   p. 216

10. I’m aware of having already lived more than a half-century through the greatest fiesta of luxury, comfort, and leisure that the world has ever known. I enjoyed central heating, air conditioning, cheap airfares, cable TV, advanced orthopedic surgery, and computers.

    p. 304

11. Even if we can’t get all the tools and the products we currently enjoy, we will retain a lot of basic knowledge that the people of Jefferson’s day just didn’t have. For instance, we will still understand that infections and many diseases are caused by microorganisms, not bad air, phases of the moon, or evil spells, and that knowledge alone confers powerful advantages in daily living.

    p. 258

12. We should… conclude that the abandoned big-box structures will not last more than one generation under any circumstances. […] The same thing can be said about malls, strip malls, and chain restaurant buildings. Eventually, they will be the salvage yards and mines of the future.

    p. 261