Lit | San Francisco Bay Guardian

marginalia by paul reidinger

Manhattan, Part 2

THE DECLINE OF the West is turning out to be quite a lengthy roller-coaster ride, with many a twist and turn and fork in the downward road – though all roads lead, in the end, to America's suburbs, those great lesions of human habitation whose lifeblood, petroleum, has been the principal issue in human conflict for more than a century. From World War I and its Ottoman front to World War II and the crucial importance of oil fields in Romania and the Soviet Caucausus to Iraq and the looming struggle with China, the real issue beneath all the rhetorical bluster, about making the world safe for democracy and expanding lebensraum and liberating the rose strewers of the Middle East, has been the securing of energy supplies.

In toting up the votes as to whether the suburban way of American life is worth fighting and dying for in faraway desert lands, we can definitely put James Howard Kunstler down as a No. Kunstler is perhaps our most amusingly scathing critic of suburbia, its wastefulness and gross ugliness; and his new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Atlantic Monthly Press, $23), is certainly one of the wittiest screeds of the Spenglerian school I have ever read.

Like many analysts, Kunstler thinks we have entered the global oil peak, the height of production, the end of the age of cheap and plentiful petroleum – upon which all our social, economic, and political arrangements have come utterly to depend – and that the opening shots of a twilight struggle for the energy supplies that remain have sounded. Hybrid cars and free bicycles are nice, but they will not, to take a pertinent example, grow and harvest and bring to market the food that the world's bloated human population needs. The problem is potentially that basic, and while human beings have proven ourselves across the ages to be adaptive and innovative creatures, we have grown accustomed in the past 150 years to an energy-intensive way of life that is, according to Kunstler, not only unsustainable but likely to burst like a balloon, with no safety net below to break our fall.

While Kunstler's post-petrol apocalypse is not implausible and not even without its dark attractions – he thinks, for instance, that all the Wal-Marts and other big boxes will become soggy ruins when the petroleum products needed to keep them adequately roofed are no longer available – he is in the end a polemicist, and it is the business of polemicists to go entertainingly too far. It is true that, aside from the possible crisis of peak production, petroleum's time has passed: it is too dirty and too bound up in radioactive geopolitics to be any longer an acceptable, let alone the chief, source of energy for industrial societies. We should break up with it before it breaks up with us, and if fears of the global peak provide the necessary shove, so much the better.

Our new arrangements should be the energy equivalent of polyamory, and the suitors are already all around us. We might wonder about "clean" coal, nuclear power, and compressed or liquefied natural gas – pluses and minuses for each – but the means are at hand to generate green electricity with wind, sun, and tide. Cars can, with some modifications, be run on straight ethanol (a green fuel obtained from agricultural leavings) or, if equipped with a modern diesel engine, on biodiesel, which is essentially vegetable oil. All Volkswagen/Audi diesel engines from model year 1996 can be run without modification on straight biodiesel – they do not need petroleum at all – but this fact has been little publicized and the cars themselves imported in small numbers, while our government does nothing to encourage people to buy them or the energy industry to produce biodiesel for them. Could this be in part because our own auto industry has neglected the diesel? Or because the true believers in Washington, D.C., truly believe that pumping a few billion barrels of oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve will actually make a difference?

What is needed to avoid the Kunstlerian night is a Manhattan Project for energy, an unswerving commitment on the part of government to develop by a date certain the array of clean and renewable energy sources that will not only conduce to domestic tranquillity – huge new industries with countless new jobs, a reliable energy platform for the society at large – but break our policy-warping addiction to petroleum. This means everything from underwriting research to giving tax breaks to nascent production facilities and buyers of specified goods to fleet purchases of government autos, and perhaps many other things. Mostly it means determination.

Kunstler suggests the bell has already tolled for us, but his forecast strikes me as too gloomy. American optimism can seem silly, especially in a historical moment when we obstinately keep our eyes squeezed shut to the hard truths all around us, but it also suggests a confidence that the great intellectual and imaginative resources of this land can and will be put to work to address our problems, as has been done in the past. Since the Democrats have nothing better to do these days, perhaps one of their number will pick up on this idea and run – for president – with it. Quickly, though, before St. Jeb stirreth!

marginalia by paul reidinger Manhattan, Part 2 THE DECLINE OF the West is turning out to be quite a lengthy roller-coaster ride, with many a twist and turn and fork in the downward road – though all roads lead, in the end, to America's suburbs, those great lesions of human habitation whose lifeblood, petroleum, has been the principal issue in human conflict for more than a century. From World War I and its Ottoman front to World War II and the crucial importance of oil fields in Romania and the Soviet Caucausus to Iraq and the looming struggle with China, the real issue beneath all the rhetorical bluster, about making the world safe for democracy and expanding lebensraum and liberating the rose strewers of the Middle East, has been the securing of energy supplies. In toting up the votes as to whether the suburban way of American life is worth fighting and dying for in faraway desert lands, we can definitely put James Howard Kunstler down as a No. Kunstler is perhaps our most amusingly scathing critic of suburbia, its wastefulness and gross ugliness; and his new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Atlantic Monthly Press, $23), is certainly one of the wittiest screeds of the Spenglerian school I have ever read. Like many analysts, Kunstler thinks we have entered the global oil peak, the height of production, the end of the age of cheap and plentiful petroleum – upon which all our social, economic, and political arrangements have come utterly to depend – and that the opening shots of a twilight struggle for the energy supplies that remain have sounded. Hybrid cars and free bicycles are nice, but they will not, to take a pertinent example, grow and harvest and bring to market the food that the world's bloated human population needs. The problem is potentially that basic, and while human beings have proven ourselves across the ages to be adaptive and innovative creatures, we have grown accustomed in the past 150 years to an energy-intensive way of life that is, according to Kunstler, not only unsustainable but likely to burst like a balloon, with no safety net below to break our fall. While Kunstler's post-petrol apocalypse is not implausible and not even without its dark attractions – he thinks, for instance, that all the Wal-Marts and other big boxes will become soggy ruins when the petroleum products needed to keep them adequately roofed are no longer available – he is in the end a polemicist, and it is the business of polemicists to go entertainingly too far. It is true that, aside from the possible crisis of peak production, petroleum's time has passed: it is too dirty and too bound up in radioactive geopolitics to be any longer an acceptable, let alone the chief, source of energy for industrial societies. We should break up with it before it breaks up with us, and if fears of the global peak provide the necessary shove, so much the better. Our new arrangements should be the energy equivalent of polyamory, and the suitors are already all around us. We might wonder about "clean" coal, nuclear power, and compressed or liquefied natural gas – pluses and minuses for each – but the means are at hand to generate green electricity with wind, sun, and tide. Cars can, with some modifications, be run on straight ethanol (a green fuel obtained from agricultural leavings) or, if equipped with a modern diesel engine, on biodiesel, which is essentially vegetable oil. All Volkswagen/Audi diesel engines from model year 1996 can be run without modification on straight biodiesel – they do not need petroleum at all – but this fact has been little publicized and the cars themselves imported in small numbers, while our government does nothing to encourage people to buy them or the energy industry to produce biodiesel for them. Could this be in part because our own auto industry has neglected the diesel? Or because the true believers in Washington, D.C., truly believe that pumping a few billion barrels of oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve will actually make a difference? What is needed to avoid the Kunstlerian night is a Manhattan Project for energy, an unswerving commitment on the part of government to develop by a date certain the array of clean and renewable energy sources that will not only conduce to domestic tranquillity – huge new industries with countless new jobs, a reliable energy platform for the society at large – but break our policy-warping addiction to petroleum. This means everything from underwriting research to giving tax breaks to nascent production facilities and buyers of specified goods to fleet purchases of government autos, and perhaps many other things. Mostly it means determination. Kunstler suggests the bell has already tolled for us, but his forecast strikes me as too gloomy. American optimism can seem silly, especially in a historical moment when we obstinately keep our eyes squeezed shut to the hard truths all around us, but it also suggests a confidence that the great intellectual and imaginative resources of this land can and will be put to work to address our problems, as has been done in the past. Since the Democrats have nothing better to do these days, perhaps one of their number will pick up on this idea and run – for president – with it. Quickly, though, before St. Jeb stirreth!