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Because the oil peak phenomenon… cancels out further industrial growth of the kind we are used to, its implications lie radically outside… [the] econ… - James Howard Kunstler
" "Because the oil peak phenomenon… cancels out further industrial growth of the kind we are used to, its implications lie radically outside… [the] economic paradigm. So, the oil peak phenomenon has been discounted to about zero among conventional economists, who assume that “market signals” about oil supplies will inevitably trigger innovation, which, in turn, will cause [something] new… to materialize and enable further growth. If the market signals are not triggering innovation, then the problem must be overstated and growth under the oil regime will resume—after, say, a normal periodic downcycle. This is obvious casuistry, but casuistry can be a great comfort when a problem has no real solution. […] Our investment in an oil-addicted way of life… is now so inordinately large that it is too late to salvage all the national wealth wasted on building it, or to continue that way of life more than a decade or so into the future. What’s more, as we have outsourced manufacturing to other countries, the entire U.S. economy has become more… dependent on continued misinvestment in… suburbia and its accessories. No politician wants to tell voters that the American Dream has been canceled for a lack of… resources. The U.S. economy would disintegrate. So, whichever party is in power has tended to ignore the issue, change the subject, or spin it into the realm of delusion.
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About James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler (born October 19, 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger.
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The current urban population of the world… is greater than the entire population of the world in 1960. Seventy-eight percent of the urban dwellers in the so-called developing world live in slums. From the West African littoral to the mountainsides of the to the banks of the , the , the , and the Irrawaddy, new gigantic slums spread like immense laboratory growth media, waiting to host epidemic disease cultures. , Nigeria, for example, grew from a city of 300,000 in 1950 to over ten million today. But Lagos, writes Mike Davis, "is simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from to : probably the biggest continuous footprint of urban poverty on earth." Most of the world's new, exploding slums have only the most rudimentary sanitary arrangements, open sewers running along the corridor-like "streets." In the slums of Bombay, there is an estimated one toilet per five hundred inhabitants. Currently, two million children die every year from waste-contaminated water in the world's slums. The enormity of this urban disaster is poorly comprehended in advanced nations like the United States, where the drinking water is still safe and even the poor have flush toilets connected to real sewers. But the slums of the world will… be the breeding ground of the next pandemic, and chances are, once it is underway, […] [we] will not be spared.
After air conditioning became widely affordable, southerners hardly went outside anymore, unless it was in a motor vehicle. Anything about southern vernacular architecture that once had been graceful in adapting to the climate was cast aside for the pleasures of air conditioning and [the] cheapness of construction.
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