The Rapture

May 9, 2005
     When exactly the American public entered the Rapture is a little hard to say -- maybe as long ago as the Reagan years -- but it is not the same Rapture as the Born Agains are gleefully awaiting -- the absurd cosmic vacuuming up to heaven that leaves behind all the rest of us sinners. No, the Rapture I speak of is the stupendous complacency of a people convinced that the future is going to be just like the past.

     Everywhere I look I see things that are not going to work in the years ahead, and see people making plans for conditions that will no longer exist. State DOT officials in Texas are planning to build a new statewide super-mega highway network just as the global oil peak forecloses a future of easy motoring. Where I live, at the rural edge of New York's Capital District, suburban housing pods are springing up in every cow pasture in complete faith that supernaturally cheap mortgages and long commutes will continue to be the norm. Municipalities everywhere are investing in multi-million dollar parking structures in the belief that we will be using cars in 2019 exactly the way we do now. Even the enviros are enraptured. I get letters every day from bio-diesel fans who plan to run the interstate highway system and Disney World on oil derived from algae farms.

     The collective consciousness is amazingly resistant to the fact that things change. Over in Syracuse, New York, a town sinking into the economic sclerosis of a former soviet-style backwater, the locals have approved perhaps the most idiotic project ever conceived by a free and sovereign people -- a hyper-super-giant-mega-mall to be called DestNY USA (sic) that would include 400 stores, 4,000 hotel rooms, a saltwater aquarium, a 65-acre park under a Biosphere-like dome, and a food court based around a miniature Erie Canal.* The idea is that people will flock to Syracuse by car from places with equally sclerotic economies (Worcester, Mass., Scranton, Pa.) in order to go on shopping sprees for new sneakers and cargo pants, which for some reason may be in short supply where they live.

      The near-imbecile governor of New York, George Pataki, showed up to grandstand at the "groundbreaking" for this dumb-ass boondoggle (which has garnered tons of tax credits and other windfalls), though not a darn thing has been built since that symbolic shovelful of dirt was turned over. The developer behind DestiNY USA, one Robert Congel, was the CEO of a predatory shopping mall company, Pyramid Inc., which raped the local retail economy of many an upstate city since the 1970s. For all of its grandiosity, DestiNY USA is still minor league stuff compared to the plans afoot for Las Vegas, where the Rapture is in its most florid and terminal stage, and aggravated by yet another collective mental disorder: the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing.

     I'd go as far to say that a public as complacent and clueless as America's is these days deserves to be played for fools. It's not pretty, but life is tragic. History doesn't care if we sleepwalk into a clusterfuck. Plenty of other societies have before us. The real sin in the real world is the failure to pay attention to the signals that your environment sends you. The signals aimed at us now tell us the following: the oil age is entering an unstable permanent decline; suburbia and all its usufructs is finished; the blue-light special shopping economy is about to end; easy motoring will shortly be a thing of the past; the middle class will be replaced by a new former middle class; and all bets are off as to how violently American politics will shudder when the fog finally lifts.
     * As reported in Sunday's NY Times Metro Section

Comments

[Ned]

So what's the plan, Stan?

I read your stuff, and especially like your architectural criticism, but I don't see much for solutions, or even suggestions on next moves.

Let's assume that your basic prediction line is accurate, that we're right around oil's peak, and production will be declining for the next 40 or so years, and the pie-eyed idealists will need to confront basic thermodynamics and so on. I'm having a hard time figuring out a good plan to take advantage of this knowledge, maybe I'm just dumb.

I mean, given that, in this scenario, purchasing (and getting into debt over) suburban real estate is a losing prospect, where's the smart play? All the rural and small-town people I know (mostly southwestern NY and central VT) are completely dependent on cars for their non-farming lifestyles. I'm in a town on the edge of the subway for Boston, but real estate prices around here are already out of my range, and if the scenario plays out, housing will only get more expensive, and things like food will follow, as transportation costs will skyrocket.

It just seems that there should be a way to use foreknowledge to gain some advantage, but i just can't figure out a plan that doesn't involve everyone being crushed by all this. All I've managed so far is to get out of debt, run a cheap old car that doesn't owe me anything (rather than mortgaging my future to own a status car), stick close to public transport, get a good bike, etc.

For so many other disaster predictions, there's usually an obvious course of action- stronger foundations, more waterproofing, snow tires, a college education in a growth area, whatever. This just seems insoluble.

Maybe that's why people don't want to think about it...

Ned

[speckled_trout]

I'm there with you Ned except that I'm not as prepared as you due to financial setbacks over the last 3 years. I have gotten rid of my second car and have been riding a bicycle everywhere as transporation for 4 years on a daily basis. I see Jim's solution where others don't, live where food is produced locally and where you don't need a car to get most places. While that's just about all there is to it, its certainly not cheap buying into those places. What happens if I buy a house downtown and then my job gets pulled out from under me?...again... I currently live in the Burb's but thats only because the area my employer chose to setup shop in voted themselves out of the regional transporation plan, so I can't even get bus to the largest employer in Austin, TX if I live downtown. The tollroads Jim speaks of in Texas are right out the front window of this shitball stucco apartment I live in. People are aghast, in Texas all roads are supposed to be FREE and widened by 2 lanes every other year. Wait until these bonds default when gas hits $2.50 (according to TxDOT) and they end up paying out the nose by raising taxes. Maybe the tollroads in Central Texas will never quite open due to financial constraints and we get an Ad Hoc bicycle freeway. LOL. Still, I have kids and feel obligated to lean towards the soft-landing theory. I'm sure as heck not going to buy guns and hole up in a shack with a bunch of other dirty hippies thats for damn sure.

[BD]

try this one on...

i would not want to be anywhere near a major city at this point in time...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr05/Bageant0429.htm

[Mike Harrington]

"i would not want to be anywhere near a major city at this point in time..."

Maybe you and Joe Bageant don't, but apparently the people in Houston do:

http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/business/homedata/2005charts/five_year_trend.jpg

http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/business/homedata/index.html

The highest-density population comes from the center-city area. There is a lot of popularity for the seacoast and some other areas, but the real appreciation in real estate is in the central area, where properties are highly concentrated.

Based upon property appreciation, suburban housing in Houston has already died. The cost of living in the suburbs is cheaper, but you'll never get your money back on it.

This trend of building "close in" hasn't occurred *yet* in most other US cities, but it will. This is an historic shift that has never happened before in the US on such a large scale, since the above map references an area with about 5 million people. The end of suburbia? It's already hit Houston, and it's coming to a city near you.

[Stranger]

If Syracuse, New York is anything like Scranton, PA (which I live 15 minutes away from), then you are more right about people living in denial of the future than you know.

From your decription, your DestNY sounds like what we call a "That will Bring 'Em Back to the Area" plan. The idea is the area is dying. People are leaving. Businesses are deserting. So the politicans seeing their city dissappear, rather than face the reality and plan out a sensible future of a smaller but viable community, instead invest tremendous amounts of money that attempt to sell the area (and usually it's soul) in desperate often ludicrous attempts to bring the people back.

Scranton, PA has seen a half dozen of these. For instance, we built a mall where now two of its three anchor stores lie abandoned. There were plans for a major historical park right next to it (SteamTown) that despite millions of dollars invested still seems to be perpetually empty. They built a major highway upgrade so that people could more easily get to the area, maybe even make it into a commuting hub. People are now regularly using it to speed past the area without even slowing down. Now the nearby town of Dickson City which is essentially a collection of block stores like Home Depot and Target is trying to remake itself into yet another Crossings (a semi-major shopping area on the New Jersey border which it would seem every town in the area is trying to duplicate).

All of these plans have one thing in common: to keep afloat something that they know has no future, regardless of peak oil and it's consequences. Talk to people in Scranton. They know the city as it currently exists has no future. Yet the stupidity continues. It's better than just an example of being possibly ignorant about the future, it's example of people being in true denial about the future.

Really, it's the perfect model for what is going to happen to the country as a whole when peak oil really does become evident. Forget any societal plans to mitigate peak oil. They aren't going to happen, no amount of education will break the denial. Instead, everyone everywhere is going to try to solve the problem by investing in completely ridiculous ideas until every city and state in America is exactly like Scranton: pretty much broke and begging for someone else to bail it out by spending their money there.

[Stranger]

"They built a major highway upgrade so that people could more easily get to the area, maybe even make it into a commuting hub."

Opps, I don't think I used the right word there. The idea was it would be an easily accessable crossroads where all the truckers and travelers would stop.

[Robin the Hood]

Kunstler is on Coast to Coast AM in exactly on hour and five minutes from now. Miss at your own peril.

[hopping madbunny]

Hello Mr. K,

I read THE LONG EMERGENCY. Twice.
It's an important book but I had a few questions to ask you about certain assumptions.

I find it remarkable that the American Northeast appears to be the best one in which to survive the coming 'time of troubles'.

There is the obvious problem of heating the Upstate New York houses in winter. The 'advantages' of living in this area disappear quickly when the winter kicks in.

It's already a cooler summer here than normal (I'm in Rochester.) So if it is true that the Gulf Stream is shutting down and the climate will get colder, all bets are off about the local climate.

The South is not just redneck land; there's a strong local culture, much improved from the situation a few decades ago, and good farming land. They may do better than you give them credit for.

Re alternate fuels: You say that they are hopeless, then contradict yourself in the next sentence.

Thermal Depolymerization seems reasonable, practical, productive and easy to set up with current technologies. It seems to solve a lot of problems at once, since trash is turned into oil and clean water. It has been tested and it works. You claim that even if all trash in the USA went to this source, it's not going to produce enough oil to solve all fuel needs in the USA. Well, so what if you can't run all the cars on the resultant oil? That's a good thing. Gasoline should be used sparingly for ambulances and public transit and shared neighborhood cars (a system that is currently in place in Oakland, CA). But thermal depolymerization could produce enough to heat houses in the winter and run a light rail system in a town or small city. That's certainly something. And I wonder why one can't set a thermal depolymerization plant next to a sewage treatment plant and have the stuff provide the raw material? There is no shortage of sewage and the treatment kills two birds with one stone. And there are no noisome side effects, no radiation.
I don't think nuclear plants are going to be the answer. They lead to bombs and there have been and will be accidents. No one has a satisfactory way of storing the byproducts for millions of years.
And uranium is a finite resource like oil.

You can live better with less. I'm not saying that the next few years are going to be a little slice of heaven, but there are, by your own admission, alternatives that work. Your book seems to revel in the coming breakdown of everything, with no hope for a reprieve.

I also don't think that small town America was as rosy a solution as you think. Local bankers foreclosed on mortgages before the big banks came along. There was no savings insurance or Social Security. My grandfather, who ran a small luncheonette in Ellenville in the Depression, put food parcels on the doorsteps of his out of work neighbors to keep them from starving since there was no local relief. If you want to read about a poor house, read Dickens. He didn't like them.

For the record, I don't drive or own a car, bicycle everywhere I can, carpool everywhere that I HAVE to reach with a car, eat local produce, recycle, use energy saving tools and lights, and live close by all the shops and banks I need to get to.

[kd]

If you visit Austin, take a drive north on highway 183. You'll see it terminate in a great cluster of soaring overpasses under construction. Then drive north on Interstate 35 toward the once small town of Roundrock (now hidden by a sprawling shopping center called, idiotically, La Frontera), & you'll slow down for another maze of grandiose overpasses still in the works. All the way there you'll pass strip mall after strip mall--often the same outlets & chain stores & fast food restaurants over & over again.
Plenty of free parking. All along the horizon lie apartment complexes with inviting, romantic names. Look at the vehicle next to you. It's probably new or almost new, large, with one passenger, the driver, more than likely talking on his or her cell-phone. Yes, there's certainly a feeling of economic/technological Rapture. How soon before it becomes the Rupture?

[Si]

Jim you said: I'd go as far to say that a public as complacent and clueless as America's is these days deserves to be played for fools. It's not pretty, but life is tragic. History doesn't care if we sleepwalk into a clusterfuck.
That about sums it up where America is and what they have to look foward to. Someone said they would like you to give advise on what to do post peak oil....If they have kept up with your letters you have been doing that...but all in all America just keep screwing itself...the only real solution is a mighty wake up call "ie PEAK OIL" and if Peak Oil never came..Americans would keep on doing what they do and at the same time keep wetting the appetites of those around the world to follow suit behind. History doesnt care about solutions when one make bad choices. Its like this if I had a history of doing drugs and one day while high I killed someone while driving and I get a life sentence for that...history don't care...history could care less where I end up...and low and behold it is in a jail cell...what solution do I have then? I mad a bad chioce ie "Drugs" I got what I deserved--life in jail. Same thing can be said of the USA its made some bad decisions along the way..its made a living arrangement that is 100% dependent on easy-cheap-reliable transport...now its about to have an accident...and who will be at fault...The American people for allowing all this to happen.
When people talk about solutions I laugh anymore its a joke...you should have thought about solution long before you allowed yourselves to get into the mess your in...
Heres a solution for those who want one. Leave...yup Ive know about Peak Oil for some time....for the USA solutions are too little too late. We left that was our only solution to the problem. We been dished out a bad hand in America...the people like Jim talks about above are the one's who contributed to a NO Future in the USA. By the way Jim...The "Bitchslap" is a hair too late...looks like OPEC can't increase production they are pumping flat out.

[Dave]

Ditto for Wilkes-Barre where I live. The Pols only answer to the development dollar and we are now stuck with bailing out the past cons for growth and being asked fund future ones. The clustefuck grows in number and intensity gaining a furor that may better described as a violent gang rape.

Oh yes here is another item to chew on. We recently ran the End of Suburbia for Earth Day. Afterwards a guy I know came up to me who does roofing for a living. He said the following' "You know I wonder after seeing this film how we are going to realize our roofing needs. They are all asphalt and don't really last that long and more and more roofs locally are in need of replacing. Man there is going to one hell of a problem in this area !" So as soon as we are over the cliff roofing materials will not be avaiable and you can expect literally violent struggles over the remaing supplies along with theft of existing roofs that are intact, along with breakdowns of existing housing as roofs collapse and can not be replaced, along with abandonment of McMansions as their acre or two of roofing begins to collapse, the poor will be in tents or worse and we'll all be broke and the skills needed for slate roofing will not be available as they are all dead who knew the art or slate is too dear or will be colonized by the remaining economic elites. Why folks this is a gang bang of the first order and we can thank ourselves for not drawing the line 40 years ago when we were warned of this by the Club of Rome and CIA report to Carter on year 2000. Anybody remember that ?

Oh yes I have a slate roof which the coming Marching Zombies will notice . Maybe I could throw books at them from the 70's That will scare them ! Dave

[Kevin Dayton]

Scranton sounds like Kenai, Alaska. That city thrived when it produced oil. Now that the oil has disappeared, the people are in denial, and they still believe that they can produce more oil. What happened to Kenai? People abandoned it, the world ignored it, and crime rates went up. Kenai still has oil, but the problems began when production declined.

Kevin

[jy]

I have always hated malls, ever since I was a very young child. I never knew why, exactly, until I read "The Long Emergency" and I realized that it was a sort of insinctive repulsion to all the waste, the overheated, oversaturated, bloated excess malls represent. I always stumbled out of a shopping trip exhausted and headachy, with a kind of a consumer hangover. I do sort of relish the prospect of peak oil in this respect, because the beastly malls will vanish, and the long carsick commutes to the beastly malls. On the other hand, I really do like my suburban house, its cleanliness and quiet and privacy. I will miss the privacy and anonymity oil has made possible in our society. I like feeling alienated from other human beings, because, as I may have mentioned, I don't like other human beings very much.
Hopping Madbunny, I think that the small town life we will be forced back into will be pretty ghastly in many respects. But, as Mr. Kunstler has pointed out, we will have no alternative. We can't go on as we are. The long American Dream is in for a rude awakening.
I think the best thing one can do to prepare for it is to learn important skills like how to fix things, build things, make things, grow food, organize people, doctor people and animals. All the stuff in our houses will not help us much. It's the stuff in our heads that will get us through this.

[Andy R]

jy,
I can totally relate to your appreciation for the isolation to be had at home, although I see it differently for myself. I think I tend to like other human being s more becasue I am albe to be away from them in my home environment. If I lived in a townhouse-type environment, I may not feel that way, but of course it would depend on who my neighbors are.
Of course, this is viewd in the context of the environments existing currently in America, where carboard townhouses and condos with paper-thin walls are what's available for those wanting to live in a densley populated area where a car can be optional.
Some friends of my wife's family live in Pamplona, Spain (the newer section) in a beautiful, spacious 3 bedroom apartment (which they own).
That place is built like it could stand for 500 or more years and is within walking distance of everything. No noises from the neighbors either.
That's the paradigm we should look towards if change is to be bearable here in the States.

[kd]

Yesterday was Mother's Day. I saw armies of shoppers fill the malls & strip centers. Crowd the "nicer" restaurant chains. Cars fill the parking lots. Here, in Texas, lots of trucks. Bigger than ever. Many of the people overweight. Soft, kind people. Friendly. And, it being Mother's Day & Sunday, it seemed that most were smiling. I thought: "What's going to happen to all these soft, gentle people, made weak & dependent by a consumer lifestyle, when the Long Emergency comes? What if it's really bad--what if it's a Great Dying?"

I lived in rural south India for some years.
Electricity was expensive, & unreliable. Most of the year, we had "current" for only 5-7 hours during a 24 hour period. Sometimes we'd be without any for up to three days. I spoke with a friend recently who lived in South America for a year. She said the same thing--lots of "power cuts".
In India, the government tried to regularize it (& were to some degree successful), & used the term "load shedding". I wonder how long it will be before we're doing the same in the U.S.? Not just to private homes, but to industry/offices?

Many middle-class Indians I knew hoped to privitize electricity. Others said that would drive the price up even higher. "Yes, perhaps" they said, "but part of the reason we don't have enough is because the poor are stealing it, & the government, which is leftist, turns a blind eye. The government is corrupt. Electricity should only go to those who can pay for it. If you can't pay, then you must suffer. Besides, if we privitize, things will be more efficient--like America!"

Cheap electricity, petrol, jobs. Going. Going. Gone.

Can our small towns withstand the flood of urban refugees that are sure to arrive when the Long Emergency comes to pass?

[seebee]

There are always predictions of massive amounts of refugees, or worse, pseudo-barbaric hordes or professional bandits when "TSHTF" scenarios come up. I'm trying to figure out how that's going to happen.

For one, the U.S. is huge geographically. Granted, parts of it are fairly dense with population, but more places are not, hence the "need' for the car to get around.

Also, were we, say, the people of ancient Sparta, I would be pretty concerned about an overwhelmingly expert warrior-class + American greed country breaking apart. Instead, I see a lot of out-of-shape (including yours truly) if not obese individuals firmly living in a couch to car to desk job and back lifestyle, with fattening meals thrown in the mix. These people are somehow going to be transformed into hardened survivalist-zombies that can cross the country like hyperspeed-locusts. Huh?

What I'm saying is, while I can certainly imagine riots in some larger cities, and I can also imagine some refugees making it to small towns, the idea that barbaric hordes are going to be getting far out of major cities, especially in the hordes' weakened, no-caffeine nor protein state, is a little overblown.

Barring a massive attack on oil infrastructure, I think the "crash" will be slow (maybe something like five years' time), and that things will sort themselves out in ways that we currently can't imagine, perhaps in a good way... yes, even with the majority of consumerist, jingoist 'Mericans. That doesn't mean it won't suck to be alive at various points along the way.

In any event, I'm going to hope and pray that it works out better than Mad Max. Otherwise, I might as well build my bunker and get as many high-powered weapons and food rations as I can. Doesn't sound like a pleasant way to live, though.

[jy]

When societies suffer major collapse, there is always a massive exodus out of the cities (Rome, the Maya, etc.) This migration doesn't have to happen quickly, or violently, but happen it will. When our giant cities can no longer feed or water or warm themselves with the aid of cheap oil, they will empty out, and we who live outside them will have to find ways of absorbing the city dwellers into our communities. Which brings up a solution to the McMansion problem--shore up these big, cheap shacks, of which there are many in my neck of the woods, and turn them into multi-family housing for refugees. That is, if the Uzi toting roof bandits don't get at them first.
By the way, one cannot underestimate the motivation that hunger and desperation can give to even the most slothful creature. Anyone who has worked with lab rats knows that reducing them to 1/3 of their body weight can inspire astounding feats of mental and physical agility, and agressiveness too. Hunger and desperation fueled the Rwanda genocide. It doesn't have to happen that way here, but it could if we don't take care.

[Andy R]

I hear you seebee. While pondering the "WTSHTF" scenarios can be enjoyable (in a perverse kind of way), beyond a regimen of personal conservation, which would be healthy in any time, the rest is pretty much out of the control of any single person.

Got my vegetable garden started - just like last year, with a decent amount of storage crops (winter squash keeps well in a cool dry place for months after harvest.)

Oil inputs are: my 40+ yr old roto-tiller.
All other inputs are fecal-based. [:-p

[seebee]

jy,

I agree. In fact, I felt like I sort of "over-addressed" the previous post. But there seems to be an survivalist mentality within some of the peak oil movement with a very "us against them" twist. I'm sure there will be refugees streaming out of cities over months... years... decades. There will certainly be displaced people and chaotic migration, to some extent. But I also wouldn't underestimate the power of belief in the current clusterfeck, and the government's abilty to fix it. I have a hard time imaginging that cities are gonna empty out as if they're evacuating for a hurricane, which is the picture that some in the PO movement paint.

I'm hoping that neither the 60 pound, Uzi-toting roof bandits nor Mad Max will show up in my neck of the woods. Maybe I'll just jump into that giant, underground shelter that The Elite have awaiting such a disaster, loaded with decades worth of food and water to wait out the zombie horde.

[Joe]

Frankly, I think I'm planning for the future quite well. Doing security studies, with an emphasis on China -- and some Russia as well. Also learning to speak Japanese (Where arguably things are built such that life would be easier without cars than most other developed places on earth), and hopefully Mandarin soon, too.

Skillsets that should allow me not to worry, no matter which way things turn.

[Weaseldog]

Wow, all the bases are already covered!

I agree on skillsets.

The model I'm looking at as far as what we might have to go through in the US is the Soviet model. In the 80s after the USSR broke up, a lot of life's daily necessities were unavailable in the states that formally made up the USSR.

My best guess is this is an example of the kind of change we'll see in the US.

As to new skills, I've kept chickens for a full year now. Never had any experience with them before. I have a chick I've hand raised, that's now a month old. It's suddenly devloped that habit of climbing onto my head everytime I let it out of it's pen.

I've got a small vegetable garden going. In the fall, it will be expanded. Going a little at a time to let my wife get used to the magical disappearing yard. I've had a garden most years, but have let it get overgrown in the between times.

My fruit trees and blackberries are all going strong.

Wonder what I should tackle next?

[Voima Ytimen]

Especially previous post depated about the nuclear waste, so I'm little late, but
allow me to inform you, that there are some plans for nuclear waste here in Finnland.

http://www.posiva.fi/englanti/

Plans are to store radioactive waste about 600m deep in to the bedrock. Finnish parliament give permission for this at 2001. Project is currently at research stage and final disposal facility should be up and running on 2020.

As far as I know, this is first permanent nuclear waste storage to be build.

Cheers,

[hopping madbunny]

Voima,

That's nice to know except:

it takes a lot of oil to ship nuclear waste across the Atlantic to Finland

Ships can sink or be blown up.
Or there can be accidents when handling the nuclear waste--how much of it has been 'lost' over the years?

[Teräs Koura]

I don't think nuclear waste should ever be stored permanently. High-level nuclear waste is way too valuable a source of energy to be left unused. We are going to have to reprocess our high-level nuclear waste into as much fissile or fertile material as possible, otherwise we're going to be flat out run on empty. In the long run, say 50-100 years, we will have no other choice because even coal is going to become scarce.

[Brautigan]

Why the bust on biodiesel? As far as I can see, it may the only real viable solution available to peak oil. Algae, soybeans, hemp - doesn't much matter, oil can be extracted from hundreds (if not thousands) of different crops. And it uses technology (diesel combustion engines) that's proven and reliable. What's so loony about that?