[Scpg] Farmers' Status in Community Likely to be Greatly Enhanced in Near Future

[Chrys Ostrander]

Farmers' Status in Community Likely to be Greatly Enhanced in Near Future

"As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based 
inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we 
live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the 
mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not 
information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or 
hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming."

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running
out of cheap gas to guzzle?

By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
[Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long 
Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most 
of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, 
Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of 
newspapers. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday 
Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic 
issues. He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, 
MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has 
appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA., 
and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He lives in Saratoga 
Springs in upstate New York.]

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a 
barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The 
next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times 
business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered 
significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of 
ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred 
points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. 
Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people 
cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge 
your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the 
kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough 
ride through uncharted territory.

It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop 
infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make 
sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of 
everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist 
attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this 
coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no 
exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of
cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the 
necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and 
luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric 
lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement 
surgery, national defense -- you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering 
global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. 
That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having 
severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We 
only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down 
the arc of steady depletion.

The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come 
when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year 
and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually 
represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, 
the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the 
world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but 
there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, 
far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places 
where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a day 
-- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran 
just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas 
condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That 
means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will 
continue to worsen.

The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. 
Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price 
of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, 
frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of 
England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about two decades. 
Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide 
discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 
and 2004.

Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a creamy nougat 
center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields 
of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no replacement 
whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any other 
place.

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of 
when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 
2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and 
revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia 
proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, 
the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur 
that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.

To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at 
five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential 
of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the 
nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the 
acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for 
electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant 
built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated 
with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in 
North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas 
imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees 
Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at 
special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first 
attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are 
such ripe targets for terrorism.

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood 
by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy 
crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of 
climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher 
orders of trouble.

We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the 
way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. 
The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of 
cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading 
many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come 
true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently 
for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are 
not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run 
on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is 
largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other 
way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of 
water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim 
prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are 
also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that 
present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, 
especially in storage and transport.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also 
unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the 
enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require 
substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they 
can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a 
fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to 
generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local 
and small scale.
Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels 
cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are 
currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and 
gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that 
would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy 
loser -- you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the 
biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of 
thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a 
cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant 
supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks 
-- as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming" gases and many health 
and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain. 
You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a 
large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive 
amounts of slave labor.

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have 
to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and 
eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a 
new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be 
beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no 
closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we 
were in the 1970s.

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of 
potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, 
geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has 
already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since 
the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, 
the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, 
opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure 
Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states 
around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have 
been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of 
the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world's 
second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging 
industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are 
counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these 
places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia -- and 
extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil 
in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. 
military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to 
secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, 
unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could 
exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw 
back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world's 
remaining oil in the process.

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this 
predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of 
the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and 
repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report 
that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real 
and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this. 
Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem 
will be pervasive and will not be temporary."

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements 
for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special 
predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the 
twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot 
away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side 
effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will 
come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the 
history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous 
investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it 
has become a terrible liability.

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the 
ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food 
shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to 
stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and 
re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of 
communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we 
work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly 
and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much 
more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, 
whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as 
Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall 
away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic 
losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former 
middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. 
As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based 
inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we 
live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the 
mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not 
information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or 
hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, 
radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the 
reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of 
land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and 
integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of 
readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production 
will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. 
We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring 
class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers 
who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of 
disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those 
who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of 
grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive 
far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such 
a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 
12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by 
military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that 
have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, 
too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the 
disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the 
manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be 
made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once 
had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are 
not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common 
products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of 
oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of 
things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be 
based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to 
result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the 
least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads 
will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the 
public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) 
is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate 
quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are 
either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed 
of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned 
railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no 
long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The 
commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely 
to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify 
the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more 
energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on 
anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far 
more economical to maintain than our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones 
surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally 
sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and 
smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will 
probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and 
tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. 
Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. 
New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied 
with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy 
supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. 
They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that 
will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities 
occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they 
are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century 
industrialism.

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long 
Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it 
prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I 
predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become 
significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well 
as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I 
think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the 
grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the 
delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior 
of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the 
belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor 
recipe for civic cohesion.

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from 
poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific 
Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better 
prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy 
or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best 
social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going 
to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this 
is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees 
by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a 
religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity 
is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming 
our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having 
to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part 
of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful 
social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. 
Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we 
will sing with our whole hearts.

Adapted from his book "The Long Emergency", 2005, by James Howard Kunstler, 
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., publisher.


Chrys Ostrander, Organic Farmworker
1720 Alamo Pintado
Solvang, CA 93463
805-693-5108
chrys at thefutureisorganic.net
http://www.thefutureisorganic.net