THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
A large swathe of the Right has
lost its mind. The warlust runs so deep it's not even
related to any recognizable strategic goal anymore. It's
war as self-expression.
-- Gene
Healy
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.55 pm, 15 August 2006►
PENSÉE
Man proposes; Olmert disposes.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 7.02 am, 13 August 2006►
CHACUN
À SA BÊTISE
A year ago I was commissioned, by one
of the many American magazines with American in its
title, to review Jim Kunstler's book The
Long Emergency. My review did not
appear, as it was found wanting. This was deeply
mortifying, as it had never happened before. I concluded
that my effort must have been pisspoor and then forgot
about it. Then, a couple of days ago, I saw that the
literary editor of the aforementioned American magazine
had praised the efforts of one of my rivals in such terms
that I came to doubt his judgement, if not his sanity. So
I reread the rejected review and now conclude it's not
half bad. In the event, however, I'll let you decide. It
follows below and apart from the correction of a minor
grammatical error has not been redacted in any way.
Good-Bye To All That
The Long Emergency: Surviving The End of the Oil Age,
Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the
Twenty-first Century, James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic
Monthly Press, 320 pages
After reading The Long Emergency, I remembered
Pascal’s Wager. If James Howard Kunstler is wrong, those
who champion him stand to lose nothing more than their
reputations. If he is right, however, those who champion
him stand to gain nothing less than the world -- or what’s
left of it.
Kunstler is a best known as an "urban
ecologist" and critic of suburbia. His argument in
brief: Point 1. The world is running out of oil, now.
Point 2. There are no substitutes to hand and not likely
any soon. Point 3. Modern civilization is impossible
without oil. Point 4. Ergo, behold The End of the
World as We Know It.
Oil reached an all-time nominal high price of $58 a
barrel April 4. According to Goldman Sachs, the U.S. can
shortly expect a "super spike," with oil perhaps
hitting triple digits: up to $105 a barrel (which would
top the inflation-adjusted high of $79).
The Financial Times reported April 1 that the
International Energy Agency has released an emergency
plan. The FT commented, "The figure of 1-2
million bpd [barrels per day of reduced supply] needed to
trigger emergency oil saving policies was much lower than
the [earlier] official threshold of seven percent of
global supply -- equivalent to six million bpd." This
means that even minor disruptions (such as that following
the 2003 invasion of Iraq) would merit shortening the
workweek, cutting speed limits by 25 percent and
instituting mandatory mass transit.
The IEA, while claiming not to have changed its policy,
has adopted Kunstler’s Point 1: the oil production peak
(borrowed from the geophysicist M. King Hubbert,
1903-1989). This occurs when more than half the oil
anywhere has been extracted. Hubbert was ridiculed for his
thesis the world was running out of oil, but his 1956
prediction that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970
proved true.
Hubbert further predicted world production would peak
in 1995. Kunstler believes Hubbert was slightly wrong: the
peak will be between 2000 and 2008. There are at best 37
years of oil left, assuming demand does not increase.
Once production has peaked, however, subsequent
exploitation of supplies is subject to rapidly diminishing
returns. As Hubbert wrote, "So long as oil is used as
a source of energy, when the energy cost of recovering a
barrel of oil becomes greater than the energy content of
the oil, production will cease no matter what the monetary
price may be."
So we are left with the dregs (the ANWR oil is good for
no more than a few months of supply) and well before
production ceases, price spikes will inflict deep wounds.
Those of 1973-74 and 1979-80 engendered unpleasantness in
America (but close to civil collapse in Britain). Then the
North Slope and North Sea discoveries came online,
resulting in a glut that lasted until the end of the
century. A glut that produced, not coincidentally, great
economic growth.
The difference between the price spikes of the 1970s
and those of this decade are that the former were induced
deliberately, by Muslims to hurt America, while the latter
have occurred despite Saudi Arabia’s goodwill. Neither
Saudi Arabia nor any OPEC member has the capacity to
increase production sufficient to keep prices from spiking
out of sight.
So unless you imagine that, as Kunstler mocks, the
earth has a "creamy nougat center" of petroleum,
the 150-year-old oil era is coming to an end. Even those
"cornucopians" who brook no bad news should be
sobered by three facts. The U.S. contains only 3 percent
of known oil reserves. The U.S. consumes 25 percent of
daily oil production. The Middle East contains 60 percent
of known oil reserves.
As the crises of the 1970s demonstrated, the U.S. is
absurdly dependent for economic survival on a part of the
world where goodwill cannot be guaranteed. A disruption of
Middle Eastern oil, its diversion to China, or Islamic
revolution anywhere in the region would almost certainly
induce America to "nationalize" foreign
supplies. But the failure of the American occupation of
Iraq is not encouraging in this respect.
Few Americans know it, but their biggest energy
supplier lies to the North: Canada. Kunstler notes that
NAFTA commits Canada to current levels of oil and gas
supply, but I will note that there is nothing to prevent
Canada abrogating the treaty—especially if China offers
more money for Canadian oil and gas or if Canada grows
weary of America’s continued blacklisting of its wood
and beef. Indeed, if goodwill between Canada and the U.S.
continues to dissolve, expect a U.S.-supported
independence movement for energy-rich Alberta and British
Columbia. A "Blue Revolution," perhaps, named
for the color of burning gas.
President Jimmy Carter attempted to persuade his
countrymen they needed to conserve energy. For his pains,
he is scorned as "history’s greatest monster,"
as The Simpsons joked. Conservation is un-American,
was the response to Carter’s MEOW ("moral
equivalent of war.") Back in the 1970s, a few
Americans were reduced to driving pitiful heaps such as
the Pinto and the Vega, but in the 1980s Reagan let the
good times roll again, and from the 1990s onward any mom
who could not afford an armored personnel carrier for her
kiddies considered herself deprived.
The American family now makes a dozen separate
automobile trips a day. And that is just one example of
how oil rules our lives. Kunstler writes, "All of the
necessities, comforts, luxuries, and miracles of our time
owe their origins or continued existence in one way or
another to cheap fossil fuel: central heating, air
conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lighting, cheap
clothing, recorded music, movies, supermarkets, power
tools, hip replacement surgery, the national defense, you
name it." And food. The world has been
"eating" oil for decades. The "green
revolution" and "agribusiness" are wholly
dependent on oil-based fertilizers and pesticides. We’d
starve without them.
Even if Points 1 and 3 of Kunstler’s argument are
true, if Point 2 (no alternatives to oil) is false, then
no Long Emergency is imminent. But Kunstler demonstrates
conclusively (at least to me) that the only practical
substitutes for oil are coal and nuclear. The rest are
either already fully exploited (natural gas, mass-scale
hydroelectric) or chimerical (hydrogen, solar, wind,
biomass and "thermal depolymerization," the last
closely resembling the garbage in-power out contraption
featured at the end of the first Back to the Future
movie).
Coal is readily available but filthy stuff. Nuclear is
clean, highly efficient and safe, yet politically
unfeasible, largely because of another movie, The China
Syndrome. The U.S. currently generates 20 percent of
its electricity with nuclear power, yet even if it were
100 percent, this wouldn’t solve the oil problem. As
Kunstler points out, trucks and airplanes can’t run on
electricity; only 36% of American energy use consists of
power, however generated.
Jerry Pournelle has complained that America could have
built many nuclear reactors for the cost of the Iraq
adventure, but then neither Bush nor Kerry, neither the
Republicans nor the Democrats, not business, academia nor
the media is prepared to admit that America faces even a
potential energy crisis. Let alone the catastrophe that
Kunstler predicts. Declaiming, "We’ll get through
it somehow" solves nothing.
Kunstler’s hypothesis is falsifiable, by the way. If
he is right, expect the following, probably by 2010.
First, the "just in time" or "warehouse on
wheels" inventory system perfected by Wal-Mart will
collapse from both ends. The stores won’t be able to get
their merchandise as fast and as cheap as they did;
meanwhile, Americans paying three, four, five dollars a
gallon for gas will start to ask: are these 12 trips
necessary? Second, suburbia becomes a white elephant, just
like that.
One hesitates to describe just how dystopian Kunstler’s
future actually is. The world now hosts 6.5 billion
people. Kunstler believes that Malthus (like Jimmy Carter)
will be vindicated. If the world could only support one
billion people two centuries ago, and the subsequent
increase of population is due entirely to fossil fuels,
then the resulting subtraction will be genocidal.
Kunstler believes a devastated American people will
have their vengeance on their politicians and oligarchs.
Men on horseback will be everywhere, as will scapegoats.
Ultimately, the U.S. will break up. He rates the chances
of survival highest in the Northeast (despite invasions
from the Orient) and Northwest, lowest in the Southwest.
(He wonders if the last will bother to defend itself from
Mexico. George W. Bush has already pretty much raised the
white flag there.) The Midwest and the Southeast will be
in a bad way. The megacities and their skyscrapers are all
doomed.
Communal survival will depend on towns with ready
access to agricultural land and waterpower. Lawyers,
authors and publicists had better learn other skills.
Personal survival will depend on making oneself useful: a
terrifying prospect on a continent where millions of young
people can’t use a stove or a knife and a fork. Firearms
will be at a premium.
Kunstler believes that the Long Emergency will mean the
end of Modernity and bring a return to Medievalism: in
religion and in classes. It will all be so obvious in
retrospect: the Enlightenment was made flesh by fossil
fuels. Kunstler is not callous enough to welcome the
calamity he believes at hand, and yet, "The
state-of-the-art mega-suburbs of recent decades have
produced horrendous levels of alienation, loneliness,
anomie, anxiety, and depression, and we may well be better
off without them."
"Sin is really only another word for
selfishness." So says Anthony Burgess in The
Wanting Seed (a kind of fictional Long Emergency).
We are all selfish (and sinful) now—because we can afford
to be. If Kunstler is right, then the future will be
brutish, poor and short, but not so solitary and nasty. It
will be easier to be good, because life will depend on it.
If Kunstler is wrong, all the above is gibberish. We’ll
find out soon enough, maybe even this summer.
[Editor's note: Ho, ho, ho. Turns out I had
misspelled the name of one of my favourite novelists.
That'll learn me. 4.52 pm]
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.13 am, 11 August 2006►
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Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.16 pm, 3 August 2006►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
(SPECIAL DUBYA'S MIDEAST DILEMMA EDITION)
If you're hanging on to a
rising balloon, you're presented with a difficult
decision; let go before it's too late, or hold on and keep
getting higher. Posing the question, how long can you keep
a grip on the rope?
-- Danny, Withnail
& I (Bruce
Robinson)
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.54 pm, 3 August 2006►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
The puritanical potentialities
of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body
of organized rites, and is established as a religion,
hierarchically organized, things more than anything else
will be done in the name of “decency.” The coarse
fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of
the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which
is so offensive to many women, will be the first things
attended to.
-- Wyndham Lewis, The
Art Of Being Ruled
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.34 am, 2 August 2006►
BLOWBACK
So three years ago I'm at my trad-style barbershop, and
the old Greek who cuts my hair asks me if I've seen Saddam
Hussein on TV. This was something of a surprise, as he'd
never ventured previously into the realm of politics,
restricting his comments to the "More off the
top?" variety. Yes, I say, I had seen Saddam on TV,
referring to the video of American
soldiers pawing at this hair and beard.
"Disgusting," he declares. "I feel sorry
for him."
I'd been thinking about my barber as I contemplated the
Great Moral Question Of Our Age, "How much do you
hate Mel Gibson?" Um, this much? Not sufficient? OK,
how about this much, then? Even paranoids have
enemies, as they say, and those who doubted how much Mel
is hated in Hollywood and by all the great and good
elsewhere can only have been taken aback by the glee with
which his disgrace and ritual humiliation have been
greeted in those quarters.
Saddam, Gibson: Separated at birth?
Far be it for me to take issue with the pleasure of
others, but there is a limit, and I suspect that limit has
been reached. It would be without question a deplorable
development if the dogpile on Mel were to result in
misplaced sympathy for his deplorable words and deeds in
Malibu, but stranger things have happened.
Such were my thoughts last night when a friend calls
and asks me the name of Mel's upcoming movie. "Apocalypto,"
I inform him. "And what's it about?" he asks.
Medieval Mayan mayhem, I explain. "Well," he
declares, "I had no interest in seeing it, but after
reading Hitchens
and Sullivan,
I can tell you I'll be there on opening day with a big bag
of popcorn in my hands and a big smile on my face." I
don't suppose that Abe
Foxman makes a habit of this space, but he
might want to take my friend's resolution to heart and
remember what
happened the last time he
set out to put the kibosh on Mel's
career.
PS: And I don't suppose Don
Feder is a drinker, but he might consider a
stiff belt or two before he essays his
next conspiracy theory.
But
there’s a deeper problem with Gibson’s drunken rant --
a lot of people on the left, and some on the right, really
believe it: That Israel/the Jews are responsible for wars,
famine, economic turmoil and all of the other tragedies to
plague humanity. (If true, we certainly didn’t do that
well for ourselves with the Second World War, unless --
like Hutton Gibson -- you believe the Holocaust never
happened.)
Pat
Buchanan is much smoother than Mel in his cups.
Instead
of Jews, Buchanan says "neo-cons." Thus, the
neo-cons have hijacked U.S. foreign policy. The
neo-cons are whispering in Bush’s ear.
The neo-cons are responsible for our disastrous
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The neo-cons are
plotting war with Syria and Iran – all to benefit
Israel. (Nobody else is threatened by whack-job mullahs
with nuclear weapons, you understand.)
Soon,
Pat will be warning us that the neo-cons are poisoning
wells, spreading the plague and using the blood of
paleo-con children to bake their Passover matzah.
Wow. Not sufficient? How about this, then: Wow.
PPS: And I see that Andy
Sullivan believes Mel Gibson is a
"religious fundamentalis[t]." Does Andy know anything
about Catholicism? I also see that
Andy's motto is from the much-abused George Orwell:
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a
constant struggle." Perhaps one day someone will
explain to Andy that the term "religious
fundamentalism" signifies something more than -- as
Orwell noted of "Fascism" in "Politics
and the English Language" --
"something not desirable." OK, so how about this, then: The only
thing Andy Sullivan can see is whatever is in front of his
schlong.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.29 am, 2 August 2006►
MORE WHEN DRINKING DRIVERS ATTACK!
My link to ICBC's
CounterAttack "Walking" ad got a gratifying
response. If you haven't viddied it yet, you really
should; it's the funniest use of obviously fake violence
since SCTV. But wait, there's more! "Walking"
is one of three new tut-tuts -- sorry, "hard-hitting
CounterAttack ads" -- that began airing last month. According
to ICBC:
The target audience for the new
ad campaign is males aged 21 to 35 years old. The
hard-line approach to the messaging and a more visceral
experience are aimed at changing the social behaviour of
this target group, who traditionally are more prone to
take risks while driving.
According to ICBC focus testing
with this target audience, messages based in reality with
real victims was [sic] preferred.
Waaalll, judge for yourselves, but I was once a young
male aged 21 to 35 years old, and, unless this cohort has
changed a great deal in the last generation, its reaction
to "Curve"
and "Mini
Van" is likely to be fists pumped in
the air. Last time I checked, men (and especially young
men) don't like being scolded by women, and so seeing
these harridans being rewarded for their whining by being
pulverized will be especially gratifying.
Besides, how stupid does does a (non-drunk) female have to
be to get in a car driven by drunk driver and then proceed
to bait him ceaselessly?
I must point out, however, that CounterAttack's bathos
is directed not against "drunk driving" but
against "drinking and driving" (which is not
quite the same thing) and that its planted axiom is
straight out of the MADD
Canada playbook:
Driving while under the
influence of alcohol or other drugs is a terrible crime
that touches all of our lives and it is an irresponsible,
dangerous and intolerable act.
Every claim in the above statement is demonstrably
false. MADD should drop the pretence, ignore the middleman
(the drinking driver) and go back to busting
up saloons and chopping
down apple trees.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.51 pm, 31 July 2006►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
"But how can I say that
this dress makes me look fat?" she had patiently
asked him. "How can I know? How does anyone know? If
it's something that fills you out, that gives no place for
any other thought, something that rolls you out like a --
like a fat machine so there's nothing left of you, no
wish, no sense, then this dress makes me look fat, but it
doesn't make me happy, it's like doom, like Krispy Kreme
icing melting into eternity and I don't want to lose
myself in the gooey goodness -- I don't, Andy, I don't.
How do I know this dress is making me look fat? It
couldn't be making me look fat, darling, to make me so
lost, so lonely, so corpulent, so blind and deaf. I can't
see St. Thomas' spire -- I can't see trees in the park or
the sky, I can’t see my feet -- I can't read -- I can't
hear Tony playing, for it’s everywhere, all about me. Is
that my dress making me look fat? Isn't there some way of
a dress making one look fat and being oneself too? I don't
like to be so lost, so drowned, so hippy -- no, darling,
if this is making me look fat, then I don't want it, I
don't like it, I'm afraid."
-- Katie Hawthorne, Continued On Page 94
Hawthorne: Nothing in her appearance suggested a master
of prose
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.30 pm, 20 July 2006►
DRINKING AND DRIVING IS
HILARIOUS
Hey man, don't hate the player, hate the game -- in
this case, the Insurance
Corporation of British Columbia's.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.40 pm, 20 July 2006►
