Oil and gas were generally so cheap and plentiful throughout the twentieth century that even those in the lowest ranks of the social order enjoyed it… - James Howard Kunstler
" "Oil and gas were generally so cheap and plentiful throughout the twentieth century that even those in the lowest ranks of the social order enjoyed its benefits—electrified homes, cars, televisions, [and] air conditioning. Oil is an amazing substance. It stores a tremendous amount of energy per weight and volume. It is easy to transport. It stores easily at regular air temperature in unpressurized metal tanks, and it can sit there indefinitely without degrading. You can pump it through a pipe, you can send it all over the world in ships, you can haul it around in trains, cars, and trucks, [and] you can even fly it in tanker planes and refuel other airplanes in flight. It is flammable but has proven to be safe to handle with a modest amount of care by people with double-digit IQs. It can be refined by straightforward distillation into many grades of fuel—gasoline, diesel, kerosene, aviation fuel, heating oil—and into innumerable useful products—plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fabrics, [and] lubricants.
Nothing really matches oil for power, versatility, transportability, or ease of storage. It is all these things, plus it has been cheap and plentiful. […] The lack of these qualities is among the problems with the putative alternative fuels proposed for the post-cheap-energy era. Cheap, abundant, versatile. Oil led the human race to a threshold of nearly godlike power to transform the world. It was right there in the ground, easy to get. We used it as if there was no tomorrow. Now there may not be one. That's how special oil has been.
English
Collect this quote
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.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by James Howard Kunstler
Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized… diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children… survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn’t compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland’s oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. The only comparative advantage that these people possessed was their willingness to work for next to nothing. Cheap oil and free-market globalism turned comparative advantage into a new kind of feudalism, with the corporations as the lords and the overabundant locals as the serfs. And then, when the comparative advantage of cheap labor… of one place, […] was superseded by the cheaper labor… of another place, […] the corporations just moved their operations.
In the Long Emergency schooling will be required for fewer years, and children may have to work part of the day or part of the year. Because everything will be local, the ability to support education will depend on local economic conditions and the level of social stability, and there will be broad variation. Some localities may become so distressed that public school will cease to exist. The more fortunate localities will be those where small-scale agriculture is possible, but more intensive local agriculture by nonindustrial methods implies a much different division of labor, and older children may have to assume more responsibility and grow up faster. The romanticization of childhood may prove to have been one of the luxuries of the cheap-oil age. Basic schooling, in the formal sense, might not go beyond the equivalent of today’s eighth grade. Sorting of children into vocational or academic tracks will probably be based on self-evident social and economic status rather than any formal administrative system. Only a tiny minority of young people will be able to enjoy a college education. Vocational training is much more likely to occur in the context of a workplace rather than the school, as in the apprentice system.
Loading...