[…] The… oil-fueled boom that energized the suburban expansion of the 1920s brought turmoil and trouble to… — James Howard Kunstler
[…] The… oil-fueled boom that energized the suburban expansion of the 1920s brought turmoil and trouble to the farm economy. Thirty percent of the U.S. population still lived on farms in the 1920s. U.S. farmers had done well during World War I, exporting grain to a Europe that had become a shell-blasted battlefield. By the early 1920s, though, Europeans were able to feed themselves again. Meanwhile, the introduction of the tractor and the mechanization of farming in the United States led quickly to [the] massive overproduction of grain. Unable any longer to pawn off the surplus on Europe, America suffered a crash in grain prices. The farm depression, which preceded the financial depression by half a decade, was a self-reinforcing feedback loop. As the market prices of corn and wheat plunged, farmers desperately tried to make up for low prices by producing more, which the domestic markets could not absorb, leading to even greater surpluses and more depressed prices.
p. 204Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
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
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
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