James Howard Kunstler

Quotes

1. The energy disruptions of the Long Emergency are going to remind us that the skyscraper was an experimental building form. These structures operated successfully during the twentieth century when there was plenty of cheap energy, and after that, they became a problem. Economic disruptions will put an end to many of the large-scale enterprises that remain in our cities, and the megastructures that were built for them. There will be no need for headquarters of national companies because, without cheap energy, continental-scale activities will no longer exist. The companies that service the giant corporations in areas like advertising, marketing, and public relations will also wither. Even operations such as the national media and, yes, book publishing as it is currently organized, may not survive in a nation short of energy, crippled in transport, sinking in production and trade, challenged in food production and distribution, and plagued by political crisis.

   p. 253

2. In the face of the things like the , the scare, the , and other disasters that eroded the notional value of financial paper, homeownership itself was now turned into a magical generator of unearned riches for both borrowers and lenders. It was consistent with the Las Vegas-ization of the national moral sense, chiefly the increasingly popular belief at every level of American life that it really was possible to get something for nothing. Anyone could see this in the easy public acceptance of gambling as okay and the proliferation of casinos everywhere in the land. Not even the evangelical Christians seemed to mind. There is no such thing as intrinsic value in a house. A huge percentage of the public has now put its net worth into something that… isn't an investment. Apart from false econometrics of rising house valuations and the leverage that affords for raising cash within the context of the current lending rackets, a house is much more of a consumer product than an investment, especially the kind of houses built in recent decades in America, namely stapled-together boxes made of particle board and plastic cladding that require continual reinvestment in petty cash and labor for upkeep, and will probably not hold their value, even if well cared for, because of poor locational choices. A house on a one-acre lot in a subdivision in , thirty-two miles from downtown Washington, […] a magnificent thing to behold today, with a soaring lawyer foyer entrance, a restaurant-grade kitchen, and an inground pool out back. But if there is less gasoline to power up the fleet of cars necessary to service it, and no natural gas to heat the thousand-square-foot cathedral-ceilinged lawyer foyer, then chances are that the house is going to be a liability rather than an asset.

   p. 229

3. The circumstances of the Long Emergency will be the opposite of what we currently experience. There will be hunger instead of plenty, cold where there was once warmth, effort where there was once leisure, sickness where there was health, and violence where there was peace. We will have to adjust our attitudes, values, and ideas to accommodate these new circumstances and we may not recognize the people will soon become or the people we once were. In a world where sheer survival dominates all other concerns, a tragic view of life is apt to reassert itself. This is another way of saying that we will become keenly aware of the limitations of human nature in general and its relation to ubiquitous mortality in particular. Life will get much more real. The dilettantish luxury of relativism will be forgotten in the boneyards of the future. [The] irony, hipness, and cutting-edge coolness will seem either quaint or utterly inexplicable to people struggling to produce enough food to get through the winter. In the Long Emergency, nobody will get anything for nothing.

   p. 303

4. The Southwest also faces increasing friction with adjoining Mexico. This is not a racist provocation but a description of reality. No other first-world country has such an extensive land frontier with a third-world country. The income gap between the United States and Mexico is greater than that between any other two contiguous countries in the world.

   p. 275

5. Despite miraculous advances in medical technology, genetic typing, and immunology, …[we] are not much better prepared for a severe flu epidemic than… [our ancestors] were for the 1918 outbreak. Epidemic influenza is extremely difficult to counteract. Flu vaccines developed in any given year are notoriously ineffective against new strains that come along the following year. It takes seven months or more to create, test, manufacture, and distribute a vaccine developed in direct response to a new virus, and by that time the disease can burn through global populations. If a pandemic broke out today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed. Nurses and doctors would be infected along with the rest of the population.

   p. 173

6. In America, globalism meant the accelerated dismantling of the nation's manufacturing base and its reassignment to other countries where labor was dirt cheap and environmental regulations did not apply. It also meant the ramping up of a “service economy” or, more properly, the myth of a service economy to replace the old manufacturing economy. […] It was… absurd. It was like the old joke about the village that prospered because the inhabitants were all employed taking in each other’s laundry. In fact, far fewer actual things of value were being created in the service economy. […] It was assumed, for instance, that computers… boosted productivity. Much of that gain was either illusory or fraught with collateral social and economic losses of other kinds. Companies that reported higher productivity were shedding employees like mad and the entire ethos of work in America was being transformed from one of [the] people having secure careers and permanent positions with reliable companies to one of institutionalized insecurity for… everyone below top management in a new general atmosphere of Darwinian corporate ruthlessness—under the rubric of "free-market competition."

   p. 220

7. One final thing worth noting on the subject of rail: From 1890 to about 1920, American localities managed to construct hundreds of local and interurban streetcar lines that added up to a magnificent national system (independent of the national heavy rail system). Except for two twenty-mile gaps in New York state, one could ride the trolley lines from New England clear out to Wisconsin. The story of the conspiracy by General Motors and other companies to destroy the U.S. interurban system is well documented. The salient point, however, is how rapidly the system was created in the first place, and how marvelously well it served the public in the period before the automobile became established.

   p. 268

8. […] 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. 204

9. Did Americans sell out their towns, their neighbors, the memory of their ancestors, and the future of their grandchildren because they were helplessly in thrall to the blandishments of a cheap-oil economy? I honestly don’t know, though I tend to view the outcome as the result of many collective bad choices made by the public and its leaders. But were those choices inescapable? Certainly, the process was insidious and played out over several generations.

   p. 189

10. The supernaturally low-interest rates provoked an orgy of buying and the orgy of buying bid up the prices of the houses, and as the prices of the houses levitated, the owners entered another new and strange zone of hallucinated wealth accumulation using the latest contrivance: the refinanced mortgage. Re-fis allowed house owners to use their houses as though they were automatic teller machines. Say a person bought a house in 1999 for $250,000 and the house was appraised in 2003 at $400,000; that person could refinance with a substantial "cash out" privilege, converting the imagined increase of value into disposable income, which could then be used to buy [stuff like] motorboats, home theater plasma TV screens, or trips to Las Vegas. Refinancing prestidigitated an estimated $1.6 trillion for the American economy over a five-year period, and much of that "money" was deployed purchasing "consumer" goods—mostly made outside the United States. From 1999 to 2004… a third of all house owners indulged in cash-out re-fi mortgages. […] Behind every extravagant cash extraction lay the belief that at some future date, the house would be worth a lot more than the re-fi price and could be readily flipped.

    p. 231

11. [Everything, and not just] all human enterprise can tend toward diminishing returns and unsustainability, but some modes have far more long-term prospects than others and some are socially suicidal, even in the short term. Many civilizations, from the Sumerians to the Maya, have faltered when overinvestments in the scale and complexity of food production produced ruinous diminishing returns. On American farms in the early 1800s, the balance between calories expended and calories produced as [the] food was about even. This occurred as tools reached a high stage of refinement but before machines replaced human labor and traditional knowledge. It implies a distinction between tools and machines, between work done with tools and work done by machines. Production improved while entropy was kept to a minimum. Under the current industrial farming system, it takes sixteen calories of “input” to produce one calorie of grain, and seventy calories of input to produce one calorie of meat. A hundred years ago, just before the introduction of… fossil fuel-based technologies, more than 30 percent of the American population was engaged in farming. Now the figure is 1.6 percent. The issue is not moral, academic, or aesthetic. […] It’s a matter of those ratios being made possible only because cheap oil and automation made up for so much human labor. We did what we did in the twentieth century because we could. Of course, not all farm labor amounts to slavery or serfdom. Depending on how farming is organized, it can result in a very satisfactory way of life and rewarding social relations. Agriculture in the United States was organized very differently in Pennsylvania and South Carolina 150 years ago, and not simply because of climatic differences.

    Farmers had quickly become addicted to a new debt system of annual operation, mortgaging their farms to raise cash to pay for new machinery and fertilizer—literally betting the farm on a good crop. With prices chronically depressed, mortgages could not be paid off. Farm foreclosures soared in the mid-1920s. Another unanticipated consequence of mechanized farming was the destruction of [the] soil. The tractor and its implements were machines that no one had previously experienced before, and it was some time before farmers noticed the insidious effects of soil compaction, rutting, and erosion that occurred. This would combine a few years later with an extended drought to produce the additional hardship of the .

    p. 241

12. After air conditioning became widely affordable, southerners hardly went outside anymore, unless it was in a motor vehicle. Anything about southern vernacular architecture that once had been graceful in adapting to the climate was cast aside for the pleasures of air conditioning and [the] cheapness of construction.

    p. 283