Peak Everything

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

Praise for
PEAK EVERYTHING

Richard Heinberg brings important news that few will want to hear — the limits we've been hearing about for four decades are really upon us. He also brings a pretty good hint of the directions we might take to escape the tightening knot. An important book from an important thinker.

— Bill McKibben, author of
Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

If humans survive the ongoing catastrophe that is this culture, it will be in great measure due to people like Richard Heinberg, who have the courage to directly face our predicament and the honesty to clearly yet gently describe our alternatives. Heinberg's work is always both inspirational and educational, and
Peak Everything
is no exception. This book should be required reading at all high schools and colleges, for all activists, and for all policy-makers.

— Derrick Jensen, author of
Endgame

There are few harder questions than the ones Richard Heinberg takes on in
Peak Everything.
Fortunately, he addresses them with his customary fearlessness, intellectual rigor and good sense. More than anyone else I've encountered, Heinberg has an answer to the most fundamental question of all; “How shall we go on from here.” Reading this, I can believe there is hope that we can.

— Sharon Astyk, author of
Depletion and Abundance:
Life on the New Home Front
and
Independence Days: A Guide to
Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation

Once again — and with eyes as peeled to the task as a Buddha's — Richard Heinberg jumps into the cauldron of global resource de- cline. This is his most integrated report from the social, economic, and ecological contraction now unfolding, which he delivers with mindfulness, compassion, and a view to humanity's strengths.

— Chellis Glendinning, author of
My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization

Peak Oil is a great threat to our way of life, and Richard Heinberg is one of the world's best-known writers and analysts of the subject. In
Peak Everything,
Heinberg gives us a series of provocative essays about the profound individual and global implications of Peak Oil.

— Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder

With
Peak Everything,
Richard Heinberg is once again on the cutting edge. We are all indebted to him for helping us understand our 21
^st
cenury world.

— Lester R. Brown, President, Earth Policy Institute, and author of
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

Visit our online book club at
www.newsociety.com
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Peak Everything.
Exchange ideas with other readers, post questions for the author, respond to one of the sample questions or start your own discussion topics.

It would be impossible to thank everyone who has helped with this book in some way. The chapters herein developed over many months, during which I was traveling a great deal and speaking to audiences large and small about the problem of oil depletion, its likely consequences, and what we can do to wean our societies from our collective addiction to fossil fuels. I met hundreds of people during these travels whose words and pioneering actions are reflected in these pages.

Once again, I must acknowledge an enormous debt of gratitude to my wife Janet Barocco, who supports and balances me in so many ways as I pursue the rather lopsided life of a writer-lecturer.

This is the fourth book project on which I have had the pleasure of working with Chris and Judith Plant of New Society Publishers. A note of appreciation must also go to Ingrid Witvoet, who shepherded the book through the production process, and Murray Reiss, who copy-edited the manuscript.

My thanks to Jennifer Bresee for research assistance, and to Susan Williamson for general assistance.

As in the past, my students and co-faculty at New College deserve mention for their ongoing support, as do the subscribers to my monthly
MuseLetter
.

Finally, I would like to voice both appreciation and thanks to Julian Darley and Celine Rich-Darley — founders of Post Carbon Institute, and catalysts in the global response to the twin crises of fossil fuels (climate change and resource depletion).

By James Howard Kunstler

 

Back in 2005, Richard Heinberg and I both published books on peak oil and its implications for everyday life in technologically “advanced” societies. We saw the general situation very similarly but expressed our views of it differently. I hugely admired Richard's version of the story,
The Party's Over,
especially the trenchant title. He brought tremendous kinetic clarity to a set of terrifying issues that the best technical guys had previously only been able to present in mind-numbing charts and sludge-like prose. I think both of us set out to shock the general reading public with news that had left us both, personally, deeply shocked as the implications revealed themselves and we realized that the age of Cruisin' for Burgers was coming to an end.

Mostly since then, the public has proved to be unshockable by the news that we're entering a historical period of hardship, that many of the familiar touchstones of daily life — from square meals to daily commutes to the simple confidence that the lights will go on when you flick a switch — will not be with us much longer. I think there was an assumption by Richard and myself and lots of other people thoughtfully observing the scene by then, that our society would take the message, spread it virally (and rapidly!), and that our leaders in business, politics, science, and the media would marshal our people's best efforts to meet these challenges — at least to formulate some kind of consensus for action.

No such thing happened. Some people on the margins took note, but the general public got distracted and deluded. We all know how denial works at the macro level now. Not only was the peak oil predicament broadly misunderstood (as Richard points out, it was never just about
running out of oil
), but a mini-industry of delusion generators sprouted up to refute peak oil, folks like the
espousers of so-called “abiotic oil” theory — the idea that the earth has a creamy nougat center of oil that continuously refills producing oil fields (for which there is no evidence whatsoever, by the way). Worse, the organs of legitimate governance, such as the US Department of Energy, refused to even acknowledge that a) we had a big problem with future oil supplies, and not too far out, either, and b) it had awful implications.

For most of the first decade of this century, the federal government was run by the George W. Bush gang, and it was understood that they operated on a strange ethos of faith-based-Babbittry in which the highest-and-best version of civilization was thought to be credit-card consumerism accessorized by endless happy motoring (all lavishly garnished with Christian prayer). In other words, they had a deep vested interest in keeping all the usual rackets running: suburbia, derivatives-trading, highway-building, strip-mining…. Fittingly, this operating system foundered utterly at the climax of the 2008 presidential election. That's when the Frankenstein monster of
innovative finance
keeled over on Wall Street from an infarction of its mutant heart (the engine of debt), taking down the Lehman Brothers investment bank, the AIG insurance company (insurers to the alternative universe of fraudulent bond derivatives), the two notorious government sponsored enterprises behind the housing bubble, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and threatening more generally to absolutely wreck the entire global financial system. What an autumn that was! Trillions of dollars were dropped by helicopters from the Federal Reserve (into the vaults of the foundering banks) and the financial system stayed on its feet — though it more and more resembled a lurching zombie than a healthy organism.

One result, of course, was the election of Mr. Barack Obama, the appealing young change-agent (I voted for him), who seemed poised to beat an historic new path through these swamps of complacency, decadence, and sheer stupidity into a new era of reality-based, tightly focused collective effort. It hasn't worked out. In fact, Mr. Obama has spent the first two years of his term mainly bailing out banks and the tattered remains of the suburban house “industry” — the car industry, the highway-builders… in short, propping up
all the agents of the old status quo. He hasn't so much as gotten a new choo-choo train running from Chicago to St. Louis.

As Richard sagely observes, where the public is concerned, the ongoing banking fiasco that began in 2008 has been a mighty distraction from all the other resource-and-energy issues that pertain to running an “advanced” economy. Nobody with real influence in this society — in politics or business or in the
New York Times
Op-Ed section — seems to have considered the possibility that we may have to prepare to run something less than an advanced economy. It is my view that we had better get ready for that, in the form of a comprehensive downscaling and re-localizing of all our activities, along with a re-set of what these activities run on and how. And by “activities” I mean all the systems we rely on for daily life, which can be described with precision: food production (farming), commerce, transportation, et cetera. We'll have to do all these things differently, whether we like it or not, if we want to remain in the realm above savagery.