21st-century possibilities

THE LONG EMERGENCY: SURVIVING THE CONVERGING CATASTROPHES OF THE 21ST CENTURY

By James Howard Kunstler

Atlantic Monthly, $23, 307 pages

$60 a barrel oil. China poised to pounce on hapless Taiwan. A Chinese oil company, China National Offshore Oil Corp., bidding for ownership of Unocal. These are just a few of summer 2005’s news items, the first fat raindrops of an oncoming deluge of bad news. The newswires throb with tension from the weight of pending catastrophes.

Americans can finally see the end of endless bounty, and of its attendant luxury of taking human progress for granted. No longer will our political discourse be shaped around issues of class entitlement, affective discourse and all of the other rancid tropes that were unavoidable at the end of the last century. We now live, in the Confucian sense, in “interesting times.” Or to put it another way, as widely published social commentator James Howard Kunstler does in his most recent book, we face the opening salvos of a “long emergency.”

Driving this emergency or, as Mr. Kunstler’s subtitle would have it, the “converging catastrophes of the 21st century” is global demand for petroleum. Relentlessly, Mr. Kunstler argues that global supply is waning even as demand in places like China and India intensifies by the month. Two facts that may interest domestic observers: the first, that the United States only has 3 percent of the world’s claimed oil reserves at present; the second, that if current trends of declining supply and escalating demand for oil hold, then China’s demand for oil in itself will equal the available global supply for export within the next decade.

Mr. Kunstler comes from the left side of the political spectrum. But an especial strength of this book is its break with some of the more pernicious strands in the contemporary left, specifically the left’s kneejerk rejection of America acting militarily in its national interest.

The assertion of President Truman when he was in office that effective control of the Middle East and its resources was central to the American global mission seems to be accepted by Mr. Kunstler, who discusses the invasion of Iraq not as an “elective” enterprise, but as a necessary by?product of America’s inability during the last century to conserve its resources and move toward certain alternative fuel sources, most specifically, nuclear energy.

A central theme of the book is the inextricable intertwining of the post-World War II American suburban lifestyle with petroleum itself. Repeatedly, Mr. Kunstler makes the case that the creation and maintenance of suburbia itself was a hopelessly extravagant waste of resources that compromised the future in favor of a present tailored to the whims of marketing and finance companies. Perhaps inexorably, attacking suburban development leads the author to hit “big box retail” on utilitarian grounds, pointing out its endemic inefficiency. The global supply chains preferred by such retailers stand as a convenient totem for a squandering of resources that, in Mr. Kunstler’s reckoning, hasten the demise of the just-passed gilded age.

There are hints of Malthus here, and of Oswald Spangler’s “Decline of the West” as well. Mr. Kunstler’s book is a jeremiad, driven by authorial presence. Pithy, entertaining descriptions of historical phenomena like the Soviet Union — “a Ponzi scheme driven by cheap oil and slave labor” — enliven the text, allowing the veteran commentator to expound on themes that might read leaden by a less facile wordsmith.

The author’s historical insights are idiosyncratic, especially regarding the recent past. Mr. Kunstler depicts President Nixon’s Watergate scandal as a distraction from a more relevant drama: the American loss of the ability to set the market price for oil from 1973 on. Along those lines, Mr. Kunstler attributes the prosperity enjoyed during the Reagan/Thatcher years to a glut in the oil market courtesy of exploration in the North Sea that was ramped up in a response to OPEC depredations and a concomitant decline in petroleum prices.

The book is not without flaws. The lack of an index is an egregious oversight that should be rectified in subsequent editions. Similarly, in the latter part of the book, the author’s broad generalizations about the effect of the “long emergency” on various regions of the United States fall flat, predicated as they are merely on broad caricatures of each region’s defining characteristics.

The sheer weight of the material and concepts here likely demanded a more earnest, scholarly final edit than Mr. Kunstler offers. But in the final analysis, this is not intended to be a scholarly text, and the book succeeds as an accessible primer to a looming crisis that could end the American way of life.

A.G. Gancarski is a freelance journalist working on a book about the 2004 election in Florida.