A Drop of Rain

The Geography of Nowhere

The Rise and Decline of America’s Manmade Landscape
James Howard Kunstler
Simon & Schuster, 1993

While I’ve read a few other of Kunstler’s books (The Long Emergency, Home From Nowhere), I hadn’t gotten around to reading his first major non-fiction work, The Geography of Nowhere until last week.

Some of you may not be familiar with Kunstler, who is fast becoming a major spokesman for the post peak, long emergency world that is already now becoming increasingly obvious. A good place to start is his blog, named, typically abrasive Kunstler, ClusterFuckNation. While his polemical style doesn’t always work, it’s usually not that far off target, and he’s proving himself to be right far too often to just dismiss his thoughts out of hand.

To get a sense of how he thinks, check out a recent (March, 2007) talk he gave at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club.

You can also read a transcript of a 2005 [Matt] Simmons-Kunstler interview. Matt Simmons is a well respected oil industry investor who wrote a seminal book on the coming decline of Saudi oil production (read it if you haven’t, it’s great) Twilight in the Desert. Simmons, like Kunstler, seems able to engage in critical thinking, and is able to look at reality without falling into fantasy, so it made some sense for them to do this interview together.

Overview

From the author’s own site:

my first non-fiction book on the tragic sprawlscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside where we live and work. I argued that the mess we’ve made of our everyday environment was not merely the symptom of a troubled culture, but one of the primary causes of our troubles. “We created a landscape of scary places, and we became a nation of scary people.”

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Interesting times, more and more people are starting to do the unthinkable: tell the truth. Well, ok, ignore his ridiculous babble about Large Oil Companies being better at extracting oil than Large Oil Service companies like Halliburton, Schlumberger, who do most of the advanced oil field work for many of the planet’s biggest oil producing nations.

Ok, he’s also unable to say the words: peak oil, and prefers to try to blame the producing nations for not pumping enough rather than admit the far simpler reality that they simply are experiencing finite geological constraints (pdf, new by Matt Simmons) that limit their ability to create higher flow rates.

In addition, politicians throw red meat to the crowd by promising to punish the oil industry for its huge profits, overlooking the small problem that much of this profit is not even made in the United States. In fact, it is not the oil companies, but producing countries like Venezuela, Mexico, Iran and Russia that are provoking the pending production crunch through lack of investment. National oil companies now control nearly 80 percent of worldwide reserves, leaving major Western multinationals with full access to only 6 percent.
[...]
Politicians have embraced ethanol as a policy that is good for consumers, the environment and farmers. Let’s be honest: ethanol is a great farm-subsidy program, but it is a multibillion-dollar distraction as an energy solution, and a mistake for both food prices and the environment. Corn prices have more than tripled since the end of 2005 despite record harvests, and ethanol’s net environmental benefits look increasingly dubious when we examine the large amounts of energy, water and fertilizer our farmers use to produce corn. Yet Congress—like King Canute commanding the tides—now wants biofuels production increased from seven to thirty-six billion gallons per year. Regrettably, we do not have the technology, land or water to produce that volume.

The brutal fact is that we do not know how to offset oil with other fuels on the scale that is required. Let me repeat this: there is no alternative energy elixir just waiting in the wings. So, if we cannot increase the supply of oil, then we must cut demand—ideally through efficiency and conservation.

But once again we see politics trumping economics. Government policy should encourage outcomes, but not mandate specific solutions and technologies—especially not those pushed by lobbyists.
J. Robinson West: former assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior, chairman of PFC Energy, Inc.

So finally people are beginning to understand the enormity of the crisis. Too bad they didn’t listen to Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s, who understood the long term repercussions of the energy problem back when it would still have been easy to fix it!

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SuperCapitalism
The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Author: Robert B. Reich
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

It was hard to not pick this book up, it’s by the former secretary of labor Robert Reich. I like seeing how people in the system think about things, although I have to admit I’ve been avoiding the more classical liberal material, since there’s so much stuff that’s even more critical of the current system coming from what used to be called the ‘right’, but which now is starting to sound almost sane. Books like Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean, come to mind, for example.

Although the preface almost made my put the book down since it wasn’t very promising, with some pretty serious distortions of our currrent realities, like pretending that our media isn’t dominated by 5 large conglomerates, once the book actually started, it got increasingly more interesting, although sadly it also becomes increasingly more obvious why the Democratic party has so little of substance to say. Reich, as a party insider, shows us just what the Democratic party is missing today: a sense of outrage, coupled with a willingness to fundamentally question the status quo.

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