America’s New Religion By James Kunstler

[Demeter]

America’s New Religion
By James Kunstler



....no combination of alternative fuels or systems for running them will allow us to run Walt Disney World, Wal-Mart, and the interstate highway system. We’re not going to run those things on any combination of solar, wind, nuclear, bio-fuel, used French fried potato oil, dark matter, or all the other things that we’re wishing for, or even a substantial fraction of it... One of the main implications of “the long emergency,” therefore, is that we’re going to have to downscale everything we do. So the 3,000-mile Cesar salad will not be with us that much longer...Let’s talk about the thing that the American people really do believe: when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. This is what adults all over America believe. This is a nice thought for children, but it’s not a good thing for adults to believe. So what we’ve got now in the US is a tremendous amount of delusional thinking, especially around the issues of energy, and especially around what we’re going to do in the face of a probable energy crisis. And this delusional thinking is joined by a second idea – many people think that the leading religion in America is Evangelical Christianity, but it’s not. The leading religion is the worship of unearned riches.

This religion has now become normative throughout America. But this is a bad religion. The reason that it’s a bad idea to believe this is because it’s based on the fundamental unreality that it’s possible to get something for nothing. That’s why it has been a very bad idea to promote legalized gambling all over America for the last 30 years. I am not an Evangelical; I’m not a Christian. I’m not a campaigner for social reform, but I believe that legalized gambling is one of the most pernicious things that we’ve done to ourselves in society in my lifetime. It promotes the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing. And when you join that idea with the idea that “when you wish upon a star your dreams come true,” you get a really dysfunctional, delusional country, unable to conduct a coherent discussion about what’s happening to us...One of the reigning delusions is that energy and technology are the same things. If you run out of one, you just plug in the other. I had a very interesting experience about a year and a half ago. I was invited to give a talk at the Google headquarters, and I went down to the Silicon Valley, to the Google suburban office pod. The whole building was tricked-out like a kindergarten. They had the knock-hockey sets and the computer game consoles and the Lucite boxes with the gummy bears and the yogurt-covered pretzels. And you know, the impression I had was, “Wow! This is really a child-like kind of atmosphere!”

And then the Google employees came into the auditorium. These were Google millionaires: young people who had gotten in on the ground floor pretty early: engineers and executives, and had been paid in stock and stock options. And they had become millionaires by the age of 27 and they were dressed like skateboard rats. Their ass-crack was showing; they had the sideways cap on – dressed like nine-year-olds. And I gave my talk and they all got up afterwards for comments and questions. There were no questions whatsoever, just one uniform comment from 17 people, and the comment was, “Dude, we’ve got like technology.” Subtext: you’re an asshole....That experience was very instructive for me because I began to understand a few things about where we are as a nation. What we’ve got at the highest level of American high-tech enterprise are people who believe that technology and energy are the same. (How much trouble does that tell you we’re in?) And I think you can account for this ignorance in the following way: these are people who have become tremendously, personally, successful from moving little pixels around on a screen with a mouse. So they assume that that activity will solve all the problems of the world. But guess what? We’re not going to change out the hardware on the $2.7 trillion dollar fleet of Boeings and Airbuses all around the world. We’re not going to change them out to run on some other kind of energy. We’re either going to run these things on liquid hydro-carbons or we’re not going to run them at all... We have to make other arrangements for living. We have to behave differently in the Western World, but particularly in North America. We’re going to have to do farming differently; we’re going to have to do commerce and trade differently; we’re going to have to do schooling differently; we’re going to have to learn to make some things in our own countries again.

The thing that Thomas Friedman calls globalism and regards as a permanent condition of life: guess what? It’s not a permanent condition of life; it’s a set of transient economic relations that exist because we have been living in a period of extraordinarily cheep and abundant energy and extraordinary relative peace between the great powers. And that’s why we have globalism. When neither of these conditions obtain anymore, we will not have globalism and we will not have those trade relations any more.
...One other thing; we’re going to have to occupy the terrain of North America differently. Suburbia is going to fail. You can state that categorically: It’s going to fail in terms of investment and it’s going to fail in terms of utility.

To be continued…

[Mojorabbit]

1. Link?

He is right. I think we will have some biodiesel, and we will tear up mountains for the last lump of coal and get every last drop we can squeeze from the tar sands but unless there is some huge breakthrough in a new kind of energy, we are toast as far as our way of life.

[Johnny Noshoes]

2. Here's his website

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/

[Demeter]

3. Oops! Here's the Link!

http://www.agorafinancial.com/afrude/2007/09/26/americas-new-religion/

I really ought to eat before blogging--low blood sugar!

[flashl]

4. What about stories like the one below

Original blueprints for 200 mpg carburetor found in England

I have been reading about better carburetors for years and abour Henry Ford's managed to undermine plans of mass transportation systems. We also need to look at the patent office.

[End Of The Road]

5. Bunk

There are plenty of people in America aware of such problems and trying to effect change. At anything much beyond an individual or local level, corporations (and other monied interests - like developers) object to those changes, and the going gets rough. Kunstler wastes everybody's time by spouting superficial doom and gloom crap without offering suggestions for HOW to improve things. There are a bunch of us in the "categorically" failing suburbs who would like to educate him.

[reprobate]

6. Whether or not Peak Oil is true, the biggest problem is atmospheric carbon.

CO2. Carbon Dioxide. Global warming. Arctic and antarctic meltdown. Glaciers disappearing. Ocean warming. Slowing of the ocean recirculating current. etc etc etc.


Yeah, dude. We got technology. And to get us out of the hole we dug for ourselves, that technology had better come up with alternative energy sources and some means of scrubbing the carbon from our atmosphere, and do it in the next decade.

If not, Ghia will finally decide that we - Homo Sapiens Idiotus - are little more than a biological irritant and continue to warm until conditions are no longer life sustaining for us. Earth will continue to survive and prosper, and what animal and plant life we leave behind will prosper and flourish. We, on the other hand, will leave no more than a memory behind.

If I sound like a pessimist too bad. There are already sections of our oceans that are devoid of life because they have become too acidic to sustain the phytoplankton that pump oxygen into the water. Oxygen from these tiny plants gives us more than half of the oxygen we need to survive. Many of the fisheries we have depended on for food are depleted to the point of non-productivity.

I now believe that my grand daughter's generation will be the last to live under the American consumer lifestyle. From there on the planet will be more and more nonsustaining for humans. There is a bright spot ahead then though.

I think we will reach a point where food is harder and harder to acquire because of fewer and fewer viable agricultural zones. We will see evolution at work as those who can produce offspring who can survive on lower oxygen levels will prosper while the rest die out. This will be known to all future generations as "The Great Die Off." My great hope is that the new humans will learn from the stupidity we showed and build an economy based on cooperation, not greed.