James Howard Kunstler, Redux
Robert Birnbaum, Morning News
In a wide-ranging discussion, our man in Boston, ROBERT BIRNBAUM, talks with novelist and skeptic James Howard Kunstler about life as it is, life as it could be, and life as we may encounter.
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James Howard Kunstler is cheerful and fearless about delivering the bad news to his fellow Americans—not that he exhibits any jingoist plumage.
… James Howard Kunster is an amusing and engaging observer and polemicist and the terrain he surveys is unforgiving and perilous. It would be an encouraging sign if there were functionaries in this young Obama administration who availed themselves of the maps which Kunstler is helping to chart. That they don’t seem to be is to our peril.
(9 February 2009)
Long interview.
End of Consumption
Hans Noeldner, Entropic Journal (blog)
Set aside conventional wisdom for a moment, and consider a possibility with ramifications so disturbing that America’s leading politicians, economic experts, and media talking heads refuse to acknowledge them in public. To wit: the present economic implosion really WAS caused by inadequate consumption rather than the usual suspects – inflation of the money supply, precipitous suppression of the prime rate, reckless expansion of credit, aggressive promotion of patently untenable mortgages by government, the repackaging of said toxic mortgages by a host of corporate accomplices, the viral spread of risk, astronomical increases in leverage, and computerized hyper-chicanery by our financial “creative class”. This isn’t to say these factors did not complicate or exacerbate matters, but they are not the root cause (indeed, some are symptoms). Rather, it was the beginning of the end of the age of the consumption that made the collapse inevitable.
Yes, despite Herculean efforts to consume faster than ever before, American shoppers just couldn’t keep pace with what was needed for “healthy” economic growth. Thanks to unprecedented levels of productivity, the output of McMansions and Escalades and ARMs overshot the abilities of our seemingly-insatiable markets to absorb them. Was it because too many consumers still cling to antiquated concepts like “frugality” and “modesty” and “thrift”? Certainly not! Having been incontrovertibly discredited by modern economic theory, such incendiary notions have been almost entirely expunged from our national consciousness, and fortunately no one listens to the handful of contrarians who profess them. So we must not let their censorious rantings about the evils of greed distract us from grasping the real catastrophe: in practice if not in spirit, Americans are falling ever further behind in the never-ending race to consume more than enough.
(8 February 2009)
A new game
Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute
… Listen to recent debate about the $800+ billion federal stimulus package and you hear two strong underlying assumptions: the economy will recover within a few years, and it will function pretty much the same as today (except perhaps for some more wind turbines, more solar panels, and a dazzling new selection of fuel-efficient family cars).
And yet, the same leaders and pundits that purport to solve the economic crisis with more spending and tax cuts increasingly acknowledge that we face immediate energy and climate crises of monumental proportions. That is, the problems at hand require not a few trillion dollars thrown at them but fundamental changes in how the modern industrial world works.
I think what’s happening is a mental disconnect; it’s a failure to put three things together:
1. Our immediate experience of the current economic crisis. Companies are going out of business, public budgets are being slashed — something needs to be done and soon.
2. Our awareness of impending energy shortages and climate changes. The basic debates about both climate change and peak oil are essentially over, even in the mainstream media.
3. The reality that business-as-usual economic growth completely depends on affordable and available fossil fuels. This is rarely discussed, but it’s hardly debatable.
This mental disconnect means we’re not diagnosing the problem correctly, and we’re not pursuing the correct solutions. We’ve essentially failed to recognize that the game has changed.
I’ve started to think of the Summer of 2008 as signaling for the American economy what events like Pearl Harbor or the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled for American foreign policy. They were big turning points that occurred outside our frame of what we thought possible. They signaled that the world was no longer working the way we expected, and the old way of doing things no longer applied.
(9 February 2009)
Kunstler: Poverty of Imagination
James Howard Kunstler, blog
… So far — after two weeks in office — the Obama team seems bent on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all the impossible things listed above. Mr. Obama is not the only one, of course, who is invoking the quest for renewed “growth.” This is a tragic error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities, and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a level of decreased complexity.
… Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don’t know anyone who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for has reached the end of the line. We seem to be learning a new and interesting lesson: that even a team that promises change is actually petrified of too much change, especially change that they can’t really control.
… If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there’s a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don’t focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don’t get started on this right away, we’re screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the scale represented by General Motors.
The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses. It’s a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again. We’ll see a striking illustration of “phase change” as the public mood goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage.
(9 February 2009)
