Review: Long Emergency

Move over, Malthus. According to suburbia-hater Kunstler (Home from Nowhere, 1996, etc.), the world's going to hell in a handbasket—and in about 15 minutes, too. Aiming at the broadest side of the barn, Kunstler asserts that we're living in "a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War Two." Why so? Well, for one, because the world's population is vastly overextended—never mind that Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich hashed that argument out a generation ago, with Malthusian arguments taking a beating in the bargain. All right, because there's a superplague about to descend on the world, or maybe AIDS in mutated form, or a designer virus unleashed to rid a given polity of its surplus population, the elites having been inoculated beforehand. ("If this sounds too fantastic," Kunstler helpfully adds, "imagine how outlandish the liquidation of European Jewry might have seemed to civilized Berliners in 1913. Yet it happened." No bites? All right, it's because we're about to run out of oil, and there's nothing to replace oil. Now we're getting somewhere—except, oil economists such as Kenneth Deffeyes (Beyond Oil, p. 31) have remarked, the peak in world oil production is probably happening right now, and it will take some time to bleed the pump dry, by which point alternative technologies may have been employed to carry at least some of the load. That presupposes a shared view that the oil-based economy is on the way to profound change and that we're all in big trouble; but we're a delusional bunch, Kunstler avows, content to ugly up and pollute our world so long as we are able "to quickly escape the vicinity in cars luxuriously appointed with the finest digital stereo sound, air-conditioning, and cup holders for iced beverages." Aha. It's the fault of the ice-chewers in this age of global warming. But look at the bright side, Kunstler urges: At least when the air conditioners fail, the mega-churches will have to close down, a death blow to Republican civilization. Cant-filled and overwrought: a crying-wolf approach to real but largely addressable issues, long on jeremiads but absent of remedies.

Go out and get this book. Reading it could change your life. Things Kunstler wrote about in 2004 are coming to fruition now.

Today it is all about climate change, but climate change may just be one symptom of a much larger problem for society, energy consumption. There is a very good possibility that we we are reaching a limit as to how much oil (energy) we can produce. Our society has been built on an assumption of unlimited supply of affordable energy. Kunstler makes a case that this model may not be flexible enough to survive on a limited diet of energy let alone a decreasing supply of fuel. His style of writing is pretty confrontational and uncompromising but in this case I think that might be the right tone. It is worth reading in any case. Even if it isn't happening now, it will happen eventually and we need to be facing its reality. 

Review: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

A wonderful book on the coming apocalypse. The theme of the book is the fast approaching end of the hydro-carbon age and the wrenching transition into...whatever comes next. The end of the hydrocarbon ... Read full review

Review: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

After letting it simmer for a few weeks I think these are the basic irks that converge into JHK's doomed imagined 21st century future: -Mismanaged resources. -Misappropriated space. -Abuse of energy ...

Review: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

From Barnes & Noble According to this fervent jeremiad, the best has already been. Frequent New York Times contributor James Howard Kunstler maintains that the Age of Oil is steadily dripping to a ... Read full review

Review: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

With no mistake, this book is certainly a guide for the present, because it concentrates more about the future. James Howard Kunstler, wrote a book in order to warn us about what is supposed to come ... Read full review

Review: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

The party could end this badly. It depends on variables Kunstler does not see as variables, such as timely energy substitutes and market stability during primary energy transition. The book should temper blind optimism. Read full review

Review: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Excelent historical analisys of the consumtpion of oil t´ill nowadays, and also a good analisys about the renewable energy solutions and it´s problems to become a viable alternative to the oil ... Read full review

Review: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

A sober look at a possible scenario for human civilization. Read full review