Death of the Automobile Culture

I’ve  blogged before about James Kunstler’s weekly essay on Clusterfuck Nation (A clusterfuck is, originally, a military term for an operation in which multiple things have gone wrong). What Kunstler defines as our national clusterfuck is our dependence on oil to run our cars, trucks and airplanes and our naive belief that the way of life the automobile has manifested in America can continue forever. In the most recent issue of  Orion Magazine Kunstler states his case again offering “a wake-up call to a citizenry in the shadow of oil scarcity” in an article headlined “Making Other Arrangements.” He pops the balloon of hope that leads us to believe that alternative technologies will save the day.  “We are going to have trouble feeding ourselves in the years ahead, not to mention the many nations who depend for survival on American grain exports. So the idea that we can simply shift millions of acres from food crops to ethanol or biodiesel crops to make fuels for cars represents a staggering misunderstanding of reality.” The article is a terse summary of his writing and thinking on this very depressing subject. Kunstler does paint a picture of what we need to do and what our future might look like. It’s a very local picture. For he suggests that we will have to live locally and spend more time living where we are at. We will have to bring food growing back to the center of economic life and reorganize retail trade by rebuilding local economic interdependence. We won’t have the fuel to support the 12,000 mile Wal-mart supply line from China to Kansas City. We won’t be able to ship fresh lettuce from Salinas to Newark. In  fact, we’ll have to make other arrangements for transporting goods. Kunstler advocates bringing back the railroads and electrifying them and increasing maritime trade on a local scale using rivers, canals and waterways. We’ll have to give up suburbia. It won’t work without cars:  “We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future.” Political power, thinks Kunstler, will devolve to the local level and the Federal Government will be lucky to be able to “answer the phones” let alone exert any kind of big brother tyranny. He says that, “Further along in this century, the real political action will likely shift down to the local level, as reconstructed neighborly associations allow people to tackle problems locally...” like education which will not be able to rely on a fleet of buses. As always, Kunstler is worth studying and thinking about. These people  are thinking about a world without petroleum in Y2K fashion. I blew off Y2K without stocking a single gunny sack of rice. I’ve decided not to blow off peak oil.