James Howard Kunstler Quotes

It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the “affordable” range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy can’t be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite its… technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws.

The rebellion of the hippies… based itself on the notion that abundance was a natural entitlement, and one could "drop out" of an insecure, deadly, and frightening industrial culture to live off the fat of the land. It was inescapably a jejune philosophy, fraught with contradictions. For the hippies, the natural order of things included items such as stereo record players, electric guitars, motor vehicles for adventuring around the country, cheap bulk whole grains, and other products of an… industrial way of life. The hippie platform… with all its mystical incunabula, rested on the platform of “normal” American life and would have been impossible without it.

The failure of the GSEs would make the S&L fiasco of the 1980s look like a bad night of poker. The failure of the GSEs would pose a far graver situation than the LTCM flameout. It could easily bring on cascading failures that might jeopardize global finance. This time, the… public would feel the pain.

Inefficient economies are much more complex than efficient ones. Complexity itself can be deceiving. […] Complexity constrains entropy flows with checks and balances. What we take to be man-made artificial complexity (technology) is, paradoxically, a simplification process that increases flows by editing away inefficiencies. [Because our limited knowledge prevents us to process events on the geologic scale, we think that] The ecology of prairie will keep the soil active and healthy indefinitely [but for how long?], while the ecology of a fossil-fuel-subsidized cornfield will leach the soil of useful nutrients and physically erode it in less than a human lifetime. [We think that] The ecology of a pond, with its diverse hierarchies of life and multitude of biological niches and food chains, is much more complex than the Crown Point, New York, trout hatchery with its monoculture offish, its inputs of manufactured fish food, and its staff of attendants cleaning waste out of the cement hatchery impoundments. The natural pond also has more chance of continuing indefinitely into the future [but for how long?]. The built-in constraints of inefficient… economies reduce the flow of potential, often to the point where systems based on inefficient economies last for geologic epochs, not just a few decades in the case of a fish hatchery. Everything that we identify with nature takes the form of inefficient systems. Biogenic or living systems are self-stabilizing. They are self-buffered. Small differences are dampened out. Entropy is stalled within them. They exhibit negative feedback tending toward long-term stability [but for how long?]. Call this condition "negative entropy." Everything we identify with the man-made substitutes for natural bio-economies, that is, technologies, tends toward positive feedback, which is self-amplifying, self-reinforcing, and destabilizing, featuring the removal of constraints to entropy flows and leading to the certain eventual destruction of that system. Call this condition "positive entropy."

NASA has no next-generation manned space exploration vehicle offstage. Officials have talked about developing a new rocket to put something out there, but the chatter sounds pretty vague and demoralized. I’m not persuaded that it will amount to anything. The end of the shuttle era was a poignant moment in American science, full of sad resonances for dissolving dreams of adventure in other worlds. The government is out of [real] money, and capital will only get scarcer as our fossil fuel energy inputs decline. Space travel will probably prove to have been another product of the cheap oil age, retrograde as that sounds. The truth works backward and forward, and sometimes it hurts.

...Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's [sic] climate is inherently very unstable.

Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohawk River.

Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as a benefit of modern life. All the necessities, comforts, luxuries, and miracles of our time–, , , , , , , , , , surgery, the , you name it–owe their origins or continued existence in one way or another to cheap fossil fuel. Even our nuclear power plants ultimately depend on cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil and gas for all the procedures of construction, maintenance, and extracting and processing nuclear fuels. The blandishments of cheap oil and gas were so seductive, and induced such transports of mesmerizing contentment, that we ceased paying attention to the essential nature of these miraculous gifts from the [deep] earth: that they exist in finite, nonrenewable supplies, unevenly distributed around the world. To aggravate matters, the wonders of steady technological progress under the reign of oil have tricked us... [in]to believ[ing] that anything we wish for hard enough can come true. These days, even people in our culture who ought to know better are wishing ardently that a smooth, seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements... lies just a few years ahead… [but] this is a dangerous fantasy. The true best-case scenario may be that some of these technologies will take decades to develop–meaning that we can expect an extremely turbulent interval between the end of cheap oil and whatever comes next. A more likely scenario is that new fuels and technologies may never replace fossil fuels at the scale, rate, and manner at which the [industrial] world currently consumes them.

The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar... voices... were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation.

... I had a pistol every bit as lethal tucked in the rear of my belt, next to my skin, underneath my shirttails. I'd been carrying it [for] so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in.

Peak [living] human population will… lag… peak [extraction of] oil and peak [extraction of other] mineral resources until these conditions express themselves as food shortages. This means that the human population will continue to rise for a while, even as we begin to encounter these... limits. It’s not possible to estimate how much the [living] population will increase because the relationship between energy and mineral resources and food production is a very fragile equation, subject to any number of discontinuities. To these, add the complications of weather disasters arising from climate change, including drought, the spread of plant diseases, and so forth. This lagging further rise in [the living] human population will only make the inevitable contraction more acute once food shortages begin. […] We're putting a strain on everything the earth has to offer us. While the combination of peak stuff and… billion[s of] [living] humans is forcing the issue, ...the truth is that circumstances will now determine what happens, not policies or personalities. [...] Population overshoot is therefore unlikely to yield to management. Rather, the usual suspects will enter the scene and do their thing: starvation, disease, [...] violence [...] [and] death [...].

Our brains are really not equipped to process events on the geologic scale—at least in reference to how we choose to live, or what we choose to do in the here and now. Five hundred million years is a long time, but how about the mad rush of events in just the past 2,000 years [of written history] starring the human race? Rather action-packed, wouldn’t you say? Everything [that was recorded in written form] from the Roman Empire to the Twin Towers, with a cast of billions—emperors, slaves, saviors, popes, kings, queens, armies, navies, rabbles, conquest, murder, famine, art, science, revolution, comedy, tragedy, genocide, and Michael Jackson. Enough going on in a mere 2,000 years to divert anyone’s attention from the ultimate fate of the earth, you would think. Just reflecting on the events of the twentieth century alone could take your breath away, so why get bent out of shape about the ultimate fate of the earth? Yet I was not soothed by these thoughts... because I couldn’t shake the recognition that in the short term, we are in pretty serious trouble, too.

The entropy produced in World War II was much more widespread and profound than that of World War I. In World War I the action had taken place… entirely on rural terrain, classic battlefields. In World War II, much of the warfare was urban. The long-range bomber had reached a high stage of refinement in the twenty-plus years between world wars. None of the major capitals had been damaged in World War I. In World War II, hundreds of towns and cities were destroyed in Europe and Asia. Berlin was reduced to gravel; London was badly mutilated; and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive ashtrays. The casualties of World War I had been enormous, astonishing, [and] appalling beyond civilized peoples’ wildest dreams, but the victims had been overwhelmingly soldiers. The casualties in World War II were overwhelmingly civilians and in much greater aggregate numbers.

I’m aware of having already lived more than a half-century through the greatest fiesta of luxury, comfort, and leisure that the world has ever known. I enjoyed central heating, air conditioning, cheap airfares, cable TV, advanced orthopedic surgery, and computers.

The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper hand against the age-old scourges of disease. We have enjoyed the great benefits of antibiotic medicine for... a half-century. Penicillin, sulfa drugs, and their descendants briefly gave [hu]mankind the notion that diseases caused by microorganisms could, and indeed would, be systematically vanquished. Or, at least, this was the popular view. Doctors and scientists knew better. The discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, himself warned that antibiotic misuse could result in resistant strains of bacteria.
The recognition is now growing that the victory over microbes was short-lived. They are back in force, including... old enemies such as tuberculosis and staphylococcus in new drug-resistant strains. Other old diseases are on the march into new territories, as a response to climate change brought on by global warming [caused by the burning of fossil fuels]. In response to unprecedented habitat destruction by humans and the invasion of [what we call] wilderness, the earth itself seems to be sending forth new and much more lethal diseases, as though it had a... protective immune system with antibody-like agents aimed with remarkable precision at the source of the problem: Homo sapiens.