Kunstler – the Paul Revere of Peak Oil

James Howard Kunstler continues to sound the alarm of of how radically Peak Oil will change America. Unfortunately, too few people are listening.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

• The way we produce food.
• The way we conduct commerce and trade.
• The way we travel.
• The way we occupy the land.
• The way we acquire and spend capital.
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another.

Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending.

These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

I’m not as alarmist about Peak Oil as Kunstler is. Nonetheless, I’m more alarmist than many of the people who he finds are still asleep at the switch.

It’s sad that the college students in many of his lectures still appear to believe in American exceptionalism. So much for social conservatives bete noire of the “liberal academia.” Would that it were liberal enough to actually challenge such beliefs.

Then, you have folks like Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute. I criticize Lovins for something else than Kunstler does, namely, his wide-eyed optimism for the hydrogen economy.

What both Lovins and too-wet-behind-the-ears college students either fail to, or refuse to, recognize is that empires have fallen in the past and ours is no different.

That’s unless we, as a society, officially withdraw the statement our leaders made at a U.N. conference, and accept instead that the “American lifestyle” HAS TO BE up for negotiation.