Meanwhile, global energy demand keeps rising. If oil production can't keep pace, as surely it cannot, and if a Plan B isn't developed rapidly enough, then in the gap between supply and demand is serious social and economic unrest.
This energy pickle, of course, is entirely our doing as well. Kunstler described our century-long national energy policy this way: burn it up as fast as possible.
In the 1950s, the United States was the top producer of oil globally (Saudi Arabia was just coming online). We explored, drilled, pumped, refined, and burned up our own oil at a breakneck pace, assuming (I suppose) that the oil fields would never run dry. Imagine our surprise, then, when in 1971 domestic oil production peaked - as predicted by a maverick geologist named M. King Hubbert. It has been a slow but steady decline ever since.
It wasn't just America. The rest of the world also tapped; this fabulous source of prosperity and progress and promptly burned it up as fast as possible. This was entirely understandable, especially as the munificent benefits of oil became quickly evident. Unfortunately, the negative effects of the fossil fuel bonanza are proving to be equally immense, and no less consequential. They just took longer to manifest themselves. One example is America's love affair with suburban sprawl, which Kunstler harshly, but probably accurately, judges as "a landscape with no future" and "the greatest misallocation of wealth in human history."
When I finished The Long Emergency, I took a long walk through the canyons of Manhattan.
When I returned to the hotel, I made a quick list of fossil fuel pros and cons: cheap food, easy mobility, quick wealth, resource wars, rising standards of living, reduced poverty, air pollution, clean water, toxic wastes, penicillin, national parks, Superfund sites, the family vacation, the strip mall, bed and breakfasts, Las Vegas, air conditioning, air travel, global warming, obesity, imported coffee, exported jobs, medi-vac helicopters, the Hummer, the Internet, corn syrup, skyscrapers, disposable diapers, globalization, democratization, desertification, restoration, deforestation, and Saran Wrap - which the comedian Mel Brooks once declared as the great invention in human history.
Time may prove him to be more prescient that he realized.
Clearly a second warning light - in the shape of a 'low oil' pressure gauge - had appeared in the collective dashboard of our speeding vehicle, alongside the noisy thermometer.
As I sat in the dark theater that summer day, listening to Mr. Gore lecture us about our responsibilities and watching the charts and maps of our discontents, I suspected we were seeing only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It wasn't just global warming and peak oil - a great deal more lurked, unseen, below the rising water line. So when Mr. Gore quoted Winston Churchill as describing the run-up to World War II as an "era of consequences" - because Hitler's rise was another unhappy pickle of our own making - I immediately thought of the phrase the "Age of Consequences."
I mentioned it to Gen as we approached the car after the
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