Read this for a Look at the Future
The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler, was written in 2005, but its shrewd author foresaw the financial meltdown that was looming even then. And he sees a whole lot more, set down in a clear, almost chatty style that holds you riveted. Kunstler, an American of the kind you don’t hear much about, unrolls a persuasive scenario for the future. Oil, he points out, is already more than half used up. Within the next twenty years, we are going to enter an emergency that will not be a matter of weeks but a permanent thing.
The US, with its massive sprawl of comfortable suburbs, depends totally on goods being available through the supermarket chains, notably the super-powerful Walmart – but what will happen when air freight is hit by the growing scarcity of oil? The kerosene-powered jet engine is the only known way to get a big aeroplane into the sky, and scarcity of this fuel will first produce colossal price rises then an actual scarcity. The implications are immediate. Imported goods will dwindle to virtually nothing, and road transport will be increasingly impossible.
The mind boggles uncomfortably at this scenario, and the temptation is to ignore it or deny it. Surely there’s something we can do? Shale oil is being explored, isn’t it? Yes, but the trouble is, the costs of getting some kind of oil out of shale are very high. There is also the small inconvenience that the process leaves vast areas inundated with polluted and highly toxic water – not to mention the other basic fact, that water itself is a finite commodity, not entirely to be relied on.
Kunstler is not entirely downbeat, however. He hold that the coming emergency is going to mean that everything will get much more local. We’ll have to rediscover old skills and be prepared to do a lot more manual work, as we used to before the short-lived oil age of the 20th century snatched us all into its comforts, from which it will drop us as it withers. Communities are going to matter in much more than the woolly way sketched by Westminster’s current leader. Scotland, in fact, is making the best possible start with its determination to move into 100% renewable energy. The movement of wind and water is inherent in the way of the world, and using it involves no burning of ancient subterranean resources. Here on Arran, our topography could not be better. Our hills and tides, wind and rain, are all blessings that may keep us going while cities founder and governments try to think of something sensible to say.
Wha’s like us, indeed.
James Howard Kunstler The Long Emergency, Atlantic Books paperback. £12.99, but you can pick it up on Abe Books (www.abe.books.com ) second-hand section, for half that.
