The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
by Jim Kunstler
www.kunstler.com (September 12 2005)
The impediments to clear collective thinking about the problems we face were not washed away by Hurricane Katrina - and may still be there after Hurricane Ophelia romps up the Atlantic coast later this week
One Big Thought making the rounds of the editorial pages is that "fuel efficiency" will be the cure-all for our energy predicament - that if everybody could trade in his Ford Explorer for a Toyota Prius, life in the USA would just purr happily forward. This has been the position of the more metaphysical branches of the enviro sector, as personified by the Rocky Mountain Institute and its preposterous "hyper-car" project.
The truth is that it does not really matter whether the freeways are crammed full of SUVs or nimble hybrid cars. The problem is car-dependency and the infrastructure for daily living predicated on it, not the kind of vehicles we run. I have yet to hear one US senator of either party propose that part of the recent $300 billion highway bill ought to be redirected to rebuilding America's passenger rail system - even after the bitter lesson of Katrina, which demonstrated that people who don't own cars can't get out of harm's way in this country.
Another Big Thought still clogging the collective imagination is the idea that if only we switch to "alternative fuels" we can run the interstate highway system, Disney World, and WalMart just like before. The country is full of people now who want gold stars for running their household car fleet on discarded Fry-Max oil from the local Dunkin Donuts ... or on oil squeezed from hemp seeds. Notice that the premise of a drive-in society remains.
Now the scary part of this is that these ideas are coming generally from the smarter people in our society. The dumb ones are are praying for the Rapture, or waiting for the market to magically fix everything, or sitting around the suburbs of Houston oiling their riot guns in front of the Nascar telecast.
In the background, the US is chugging straight into the Christmas 2005 clusterfuck, which will consist of large numbers of citizens finding themselves financially crushed by the cost of heating their houses combined with the persistent high cost of fueling their cars for all the chores of daily life. More people may die in Chicago as a result of high heating costs this winter than were killed by Katrina on the Gulf Coast.
In the economic sector, the delusion persists that the US Economy will be "unaffected" by the massive losses entailed by Katrina (as the New York Times put it last week). We don't need no steenkin' Mississippi Reever sheeping terminals or oil refineries. It is hard to imagine what species of gnostic theology this line of thinking is predicated on. Or how the economic press figures that price inflation of all ordinary household goods will not shoot up when truckers are paying twice as much this year to move frozen fried chickens from Arkansas to Philadelphia - not to mention the fact that the disposable income previously allocated to Blue Light Special shopping in the chain stores is now being blown out the tailpipes of people struggling to pay for their fifty-mile commutes.
The disruptions now underway will ramify whether further traumas occur this season or not - more hurricanes, terrorist incidents, financial stumbles. People have been e-mailing me to ask if this is the beginning of The Long Emergency. I'm not a hundred percent sure myself, but you can see it from here.
www.kunstler.com (September 06 2005)
We've entered the blame-o-rama phase of Hurricane Katrina. I actually heard Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sparring with NPR's Robert Siegal on the air last Thursday, and a more weasily performance than Chertoff's would be hard to find in any bureaucratic circle of hell. FEMA chief Michael Brown gave new dimension to the word "clusterfuck" by blocking private charity shipments of food and water into New Orleans and making the armed forces "work around" his agency in order to get anything done. And it was revealed yesterday that a navy hospital ship idled with empty beds off the Louisiana coast without orders while old people died slow deaths on the sidewalks outside the Convention Center.
There has already been one proposal for rebuilding the city, from Daniel Libeskind, whose plan for turning the World Trade Center site into the set for a German expressionist horror movie won the hearts and minds of the architectural mandarins in New York. Libeskind said that New Orleans should adopt a jazz theme. Wow! Maybe they should think about serving Creole food to go with it.
The actual tendency in practice, is to build back pretty much what was there before, because the insurance companies demand it. If a strip mall was washed away, then the insurer will only finance the rebuilding of a strip mall. This is most unfortunate, particularly for those places further east of New Orleans along the Gulf Coast, and a hundred miles inland, because they were composed primarily of suburban sprawl. If they rebuild along that template, they will do so in the face of strong signals from reality that the age of Easy Motoring is over. The romance of the car may be too great to overcome in Dixie.
We have as yet no word how the cluster of downtown skyscrapers in New Orleans proper fared, but there is a good chance that some of them will not survive the damage to their foundations. It would be a shame to rebuild priapic towers in a new era when the urban norm probably should not exceed seven stories (the walkable limit for buildings with stairs). All our big cities will be contracting in the years ahead, as the electric grid becomes less reliable, and the demographic trend of the past two hundred years reverses, with populations shifting back to small towns and agricultural regions. It was interesting to see, finally, that the driest place in New Orleans was the French Quarter, the original settlement.
The poor neighborhoods were composed largely of shotgun shacks, little post-war brick bunkers, and government-built housing projects. Virtually all of them appear to be ruined. I'd guess that few were insured, and the insurers will probably try to label it "flood damage", which generally exempts them from paying out. The population that inhabited them is now dispersed, and some of those who feel that they lost everything may not return. These neighborhoods will be blank slates. But they will also remain low-lying in relation to a coastline that is losing its wetland buffers against an ocean that is seeing a cycle of more violent storms, probably due to global warming. Anything new built in these wards will not be insurable.
Meanwhile momentous things are swirling in the background. The price of gasoline may retreat sometime in two to six weeks, but I doubt it will fall below the $2.50 range again. In fact, having gone way above the psychological barrier of $3.00, the gasoline retailers may resist falling below that. There have been no new oil refineries built in the US since the late 1970s. There will be no new ones built now, despite the crunch on refined "product". Why? Because the oil companies understand that they are in a twilight industry and refineries represent huge investments in future activity, which the corporations correctly perceive will be shrinking as global oil production passes peak.
The biggest shock to the public lies a couple of months ahead when the cost of natural gas for home heating (fifty percent of the dwellings in America) combines with stubbornly higher pump prices to whap them upside the head. Natural gas at around $12 is now many times what it cost as recently as 2003 ($3). A lot of Americans will be shivering this winter and some of the weak, old, and poor will die as a result.
President Bush has already taken a hit on his appointees' Chinese Fire Drill response to disaster management. But the toll from the energy problems the whole nation faces will be more insidious. Strapped for cash from filling their gas tanks, unable to buy Christmas presents at WalMart, and huddled around space heaters, the public will be wondering why they were so poorly prepared.
www.kunstler.com (September 01 2005)
Posting a little out of phase due to Labor Day holiday, and will return on Tuesday, but some things worth commenting on about the aftermath of Katrina.
People are emailing me to ask is this the start of the Long Emergency?
It is certainly an event of great significance. The effects of damage to our oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico is already being felt in rocketing gasoline prices and a burgeoning supply crisis, especially in the southeast. The home heating situation is becoming a crisis before householders even turn their furnaces on. Half the houses in America are heated with natural gas, which is now clocking in at $12 a unit (1000 cubic feet). It was $3 a unit in 2003. It could go to $16. Connect the dots.
The crisis at the gasoline pumps will thunder through the economy, most ominously in the bubble suburban sprawl-building sector, which adds up to over forty percent of business activity in the US. How many people will now contemplate buying a new McHouse 32 miles outside Atlanta (or Dallas, or Kansas City, or Washington), and what will happen in the production home-building industry as a result?
What will happen in the financial sector when the no-money-down-interest-only mortgage racket ceases to generate ever more hallucinated tradable debt? What will happen to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two federal government-sponsored entities at the center of that racket, and to their sponsor, whose treasury certificates are held by nervous foreign investors? And finally what happens to a dollar hammered by high energy costs and repatriated treasury certificates?
Turning to New Orleans ... viewing the hurricane damage on TV, it is hard not to conclude that most of the building stock in the city is irreparably ruined. One can't help feeling that the city we knew and love is really gone forever. Some kind urban settlement will remain, but New Orleans' downtown of hotel towers and megastructures may be the first comprehensive ruin of the Modernist city. Much of the stuff just outside New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast, was largely post-war suburban fabric - collector boulevards with their complements of fry pits, malls, muffler shops and subdivisions. We'd hope that the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana will not undertake to rebuild them they way they were. The era of easy motoring is over now, and to rebuild suburban sprawl would be a double tragedy.
Of the desperate behavior seen in New Orleans this week, I don't have much to say right now. The significance of it is largely self-evident. The suffering of the people stuck in the Superdome is very impressive, though. One wonders at the failure of FEMA to airdrop water and food to those stuck on highway overpasses and in high-rise buildings such as CharityHospital. On the agenda next, I'm sorry to say: cholera and typhoid fever. I'll be back here on Tuesday.
www.kunstler.com (August 29 2005)
Waiting for Hurricane Katrina to land on New Orleans this morning, the news reports are ominous. But the photo above (posted on Internet news services) says a lot to me about the current condition of the American people. While we know many of those who sought shelter in the New Orleans Superdome are poor and without means of escape, they end up trapped in the high priced seats passively awaiting a spectacle that may destroy their way of life. Fate becomes just another spectator sport.
It seems possible to me that we will be seeing gas station lines all over America within the week.
With that, I yield to this week's excellent guest columnist. {I'll post this tomorrow. Bill}
www.kunstler.com (August 22 2005)
Delusional thinking about oil was everywhere in the media last week - as thick as advertising. Early in the week, Yahoo Finance ran a story with a headline (I paraphrase): "DOW Up Fifty Points as Oil Prices Plunge". The plunge they referred to was oil going from $63.90 a barrel to $63.30. Some plunge. This was after five days of oil ratcheting up out of the high $50s. (It ended the week around $65.)
NPR's Marketplace show and a separate wire story piece on the web offered similar headlines (or lead-ins) which said (again I paraphrase) "US Economy No Longer Affected By Oil Prices". Of course, this is exactly the kind of magical thinking you'd expect to see in a public on extended leave from reality, despite the ubiquity of "reality television". The accepted idea is that since America outsourced most of its heavy industry to China and elsewhere, we now have an economy that runs just fine on Tic-tacs and Diet Pepsi, and oil is not in the picture anymore.
Wrong. America consumes one-quarter of the world's daily production of 84 million barrels of oil. More than half of our share is burned in cars and trucks. In fact, our economy now amounts to little more than running 200 million motor vehicles around the suburban metroplexes in the service of ever more slapped-together McHousing developments, big box stores, and fried chicken huts. That's our economy. That's all we do anymore.
The New York Times chimed in with a cover piece in its Sunday Magazine titled "The Beginning of the End of Oil?" by veteran journalist Peter Maas. It presented a story that has been around the Internet for more than a year, based on investment banker Matthew Simmons' frequent public speeches about the apparent weakness in the Saudi Arabian oil industry (which Simmons published in book form last month as Twilight in the Desert). Apparently the Times editors have been mulling over the oil story for months and months, wondering if there is anything to it, and perhaps the movement of oil prices into the $60-plus range finally prompted them to run with it.
Maas's article is full of howling omissions and delusions. For one thing, Maas omits any serious reflection of the consequences of a global energy crisis, any specters of geopolitical blowback, or potential problems for America's non-negotiable easy-motoring way of life. That omission grows out of the delusional assumption that some magical market mechanism will conjure up a menu of just-in-time replacements for the vanishing oil. These are referred to as "alternative technologies", a term that points to a more fundamental delusion now rampant among the public, namely the mistaken belief that technology and energy are the same thing, that they are interchangeable, that you can substitute one for the other. Out of oil? Get new technology.
Note to public: technology and energy are not the same things, and continuing to think that they are may place our civilization in jeopardy.
The bottom line of the Times Sunday Magazine article is that they are still not convinced that global peak oil is for real, or that we necessarily ought to be worried about it, with all that "alternative technology" banging around out there in the innovational ethers of the magical market. They bring a magisterial cluelessness to the issue - while the back pages of the Magazine are devoted to hawking the glitziest high-end products of the suburban housing bubble.
Finally there was the Sunday Times' editorial, "Foolishness on Fuel", which was really about the editors own foolishness. It essayed to assert that America's oil problem was entirely a matter of vehicle fuel efficiency - with the presumption that our problems would go away if only congress had the spine to mandate higher gas mileage figures from the car industry. The editorial completely failed to recognize that there was any problem with extreme automobile dependency itself, that maybe we should be making other arrangements - say, walkable communities, or railroad service on par with what they have in Latvia, or local economies liberated from the despotism of WalMart.
This week's performance by the media on oil issues shows how America will dissemble its way into a dark era.
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary15.html
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
by Jim Kunstler
www.kunstler.com (September 12 2005)
The impediments to clear collective thinking about the problems we face were not washed away by Hurricane Katrina - and may still be there after Hurricane Ophelia romps up the Atlantic coast later this week
One Big Thought making the rounds of the editorial pages is that "fuel efficiency" will be the cure-all for our energy predicament - that if everybody could trade in his Ford Explorer for a Toyota Prius, life in the USA would just purr happily forward. This has been the position of the more metaphysical branches of the enviro sector, as personified by the Rocky Mountain Institute and its preposterous "hyper-car" project.
The truth is that it does not really matter whether the freeways are crammed full of SUVs or nimble hybrid cars. The problem is car-dependency and the infrastructure for daily living predicated on it, not the kind of vehicles we run. I have yet to hear one US senator of either party propose that part of the recent $300 billion highway bill ought to be redirected to rebuilding America's passenger rail system - even after the bitter lesson of Katrina, which demonstrated that people who don't own cars can't get out of harm's way in this country.
Another Big Thought still clogging the collective imagination is the idea that if only we switch to "alternative fuels" we can run the interstate highway system, Disney World, and WalMart just like before. The country is full of people now who want gold stars for running their household car fleet on discarded Fry-Max oil from the local Dunkin Donuts ... or on oil squeezed from hemp seeds. Notice that the premise of a drive-in society remains.
Now the scary part of this is that these ideas are coming generally from the smarter people in our society. The dumb ones are are praying for the Rapture, or waiting for the market to magically fix everything, or sitting around the suburbs of Houston oiling their riot guns in front of the Nascar telecast.
In the background, the US is chugging straight into the Christmas 2005 clusterfuck, which will consist of large numbers of citizens finding themselves financially crushed by the cost of heating their houses combined with the persistent high cost of fueling their cars for all the chores of daily life. More people may die in Chicago as a result of high heating costs this winter than were killed by Katrina on the Gulf Coast.
In the economic sector, the delusion persists that the US Economy will be "unaffected" by the massive losses entailed by Katrina (as the New York Times put it last week). We don't need no steenkin' Mississippi Reever sheeping terminals or oil refineries. It is hard to imagine what species of gnostic theology this line of thinking is predicated on. Or how the economic press figures that price inflation of all ordinary household goods will not shoot up when truckers are paying twice as much this year to move frozen fried chickens from Arkansas to Philadelphia - not to mention the fact that the disposable income previously allocated to Blue Light Special shopping in the chain stores is now being blown out the tailpipes of people struggling to pay for their fifty-mile commutes.
The disruptions now underway will ramify whether further traumas occur this season or not - more hurricanes, terrorist incidents, financial stumbles. People have been e-mailing me to ask if this is the beginning of The Long Emergency. I'm not a hundred percent sure myself, but you can see it from here.
www.kunstler.com (September 06 2005)
We've entered the blame-o-rama phase of Hurricane Katrina. I actually heard Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sparring with NPR's Robert Siegal on the air last Thursday, and a more weasily performance than Chertoff's would be hard to find in any bureaucratic circle of hell. FEMA chief Michael Brown gave new dimension to the word "clusterfuck" by blocking private charity shipments of food and water into New Orleans and making the armed forces "work around" his agency in order to get anything done. And it was revealed yesterday that a navy hospital ship idled with empty beds off the Louisiana coast without orders while old people died slow deaths on the sidewalks outside the Convention Center.
There has already been one proposal for rebuilding the city, from Daniel Libeskind, whose plan for turning the World Trade Center site into the set for a German expressionist horror movie won the hearts and minds of the architectural mandarins in New York. Libeskind said that New Orleans should adopt a jazz theme. Wow! Maybe they should think about serving Creole food to go with it.
The actual tendency in practice, is to build back pretty much what was there before, because the insurance companies demand it. If a strip mall was washed away, then the insurer will only finance the rebuilding of a strip mall. This is most unfortunate, particularly for those places further east of New Orleans along the Gulf Coast, and a hundred miles inland, because they were composed primarily of suburban sprawl. If they rebuild along that template, they will do so in the face of strong signals from reality that the age of Easy Motoring is over. The romance of the car may be too great to overcome in Dixie.
We have as yet no word how the cluster of downtown skyscrapers in New Orleans proper fared, but there is a good chance that some of them will not survive the damage to their foundations. It would be a shame to rebuild priapic towers in a new era when the urban norm probably should not exceed seven stories (the walkable limit for buildings with stairs). All our big cities will be contracting in the years ahead, as the electric grid becomes less reliable, and the demographic trend of the past two hundred years reverses, with populations shifting back to small towns and agricultural regions. It was interesting to see, finally, that the driest place in New Orleans was the French Quarter, the original settlement.
The poor neighborhoods were composed largely of shotgun shacks, little post-war brick bunkers, and government-built housing projects. Virtually all of them appear to be ruined. I'd guess that few were insured, and the insurers will probably try to label it "flood damage", which generally exempts them from paying out. The population that inhabited them is now dispersed, and some of those who feel that they lost everything may not return. These neighborhoods will be blank slates. But they will also remain low-lying in relation to a coastline that is losing its wetland buffers against an ocean that is seeing a cycle of more violent storms, probably due to global warming. Anything new built in these wards will not be insurable.
Meanwhile momentous things are swirling in the background. The price of gasoline may retreat sometime in two to six weeks, but I doubt it will fall below the $2.50 range again. In fact, having gone way above the psychological barrier of $3.00, the gasoline retailers may resist falling below that. There have been no new oil refineries built in the US since the late 1970s. There will be no new ones built now, despite the crunch on refined "product". Why? Because the oil companies understand that they are in a twilight industry and refineries represent huge investments in future activity, which the corporations correctly perceive will be shrinking as global oil production passes peak.
The biggest shock to the public lies a couple of months ahead when the cost of natural gas for home heating (fifty percent of the dwellings in America) combines with stubbornly higher pump prices to whap them upside the head. Natural gas at around $12 is now many times what it cost as recently as 2003 ($3). A lot of Americans will be shivering this winter and some of the weak, old, and poor will die as a result.
President Bush has already taken a hit on his appointees' Chinese Fire Drill response to disaster management. But the toll from the energy problems the whole nation faces will be more insidious. Strapped for cash from filling their gas tanks, unable to buy Christmas presents at WalMart, and huddled around space heaters, the public will be wondering why they were so poorly prepared.
www.kunstler.com (September 01 2005)
Posting a little out of phase due to Labor Day holiday, and will return on Tuesday, but some things worth commenting on about the aftermath of Katrina.
People are emailing me to ask is this the start of the Long Emergency?
It is certainly an event of great significance. The effects of damage to our oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico is already being felt in rocketing gasoline prices and a burgeoning supply crisis, especially in the southeast. The home heating situation is becoming a crisis before householders even turn their furnaces on. Half the houses in America are heated with natural gas, which is now clocking in at $12 a unit (1000 cubic feet). It was $3 a unit in 2003. It could go to $16. Connect the dots.
The crisis at the gasoline pumps will thunder through the economy, most ominously in the bubble suburban sprawl-building sector, which adds up to over forty percent of business activity in the US. How many people will now contemplate buying a new McHouse 32 miles outside Atlanta (or Dallas, or Kansas City, or Washington), and what will happen in the production home-building industry as a result?
What will happen in the financial sector when the no-money-down-interest-only mortgage racket ceases to generate ever more hallucinated tradable debt? What will happen to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two federal government-sponsored entities at the center of that racket, and to their sponsor, whose treasury certificates are held by nervous foreign investors? And finally what happens to a dollar hammered by high energy costs and repatriated treasury certificates?
Turning to New Orleans ... viewing the hurricane damage on TV, it is hard not to conclude that most of the building stock in the city is irreparably ruined. One can't help feeling that the city we knew and love is really gone forever. Some kind urban settlement will remain, but New Orleans' downtown of hotel towers and megastructures may be the first comprehensive ruin of the Modernist city. Much of the stuff just outside New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast, was largely post-war suburban fabric - collector boulevards with their complements of fry pits, malls, muffler shops and subdivisions. We'd hope that the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana will not undertake to rebuild them they way they were. The era of easy motoring is over now, and to rebuild suburban sprawl would be a double tragedy.
Of the desperate behavior seen in New Orleans this week, I don't have much to say right now. The significance of it is largely self-evident. The suffering of the people stuck in the Superdome is very impressive, though. One wonders at the failure of FEMA to airdrop water and food to those stuck on highway overpasses and in high-rise buildings such as CharityHospital. On the agenda next, I'm sorry to say: cholera and typhoid fever. I'll be back here on Tuesday.
www.kunstler.com (August 29 2005)
Waiting for Hurricane Katrina to land on New Orleans this morning, the news reports are ominous. But the photo above (posted on Internet news services) says a lot to me about the current condition of the American people. While we know many of those who sought shelter in the New Orleans Superdome are poor and without means of escape, they end up trapped in the high priced seats passively awaiting a spectacle that may destroy their way of life. Fate becomes just another spectator sport.
It seems possible to me that we will be seeing gas station lines all over America within the week.
With that, I yield to this week's excellent guest columnist. {I'll post this tomorrow. Bill}
www.kunstler.com (August 22 2005)
Delusional thinking about oil was everywhere in the media last week - as thick as advertising. Early in the week, Yahoo Finance ran a story with a headline (I paraphrase): "DOW Up Fifty Points as Oil Prices Plunge". The plunge they referred to was oil going from $63.90 a barrel to $63.30. Some plunge. This was after five days of oil ratcheting up out of the high $50s. (It ended the week around $65.)
NPR's Marketplace show and a separate wire story piece on the web offered similar headlines (or lead-ins) which said (again I paraphrase) "US Economy No Longer Affected By Oil Prices". Of course, this is exactly the kind of magical thinking you'd expect to see in a public on extended leave from reality, despite the ubiquity of "reality television". The accepted idea is that since America outsourced most of its heavy industry to China and elsewhere, we now have an economy that runs just fine on Tic-tacs and Diet Pepsi, and oil is not in the picture anymore.
Wrong. America consumes one-quarter of the world's daily production of 84 million barrels of oil. More than half of our share is burned in cars and trucks. In fact, our economy now amounts to little more than running 200 million motor vehicles around the suburban metroplexes in the service of ever more slapped-together McHousing developments, big box stores, and fried chicken huts. That's our economy. That's all we do anymore.
The New York Times chimed in with a cover piece in its Sunday Magazine titled "The Beginning of the End of Oil?" by veteran journalist Peter Maas. It presented a story that has been around the Internet for more than a year, based on investment banker Matthew Simmons' frequent public speeches about the apparent weakness in the Saudi Arabian oil industry (which Simmons published in book form last month as Twilight in the Desert). Apparently the Times editors have been mulling over the oil story for months and months, wondering if there is anything to it, and perhaps the movement of oil prices into the $60-plus range finally prompted them to run with it.
Maas's article is full of howling omissions and delusions. For one thing, Maas omits any serious reflection of the consequences of a global energy crisis, any specters of geopolitical blowback, or potential problems for America's non-negotiable easy-motoring way of life. That omission grows out of the delusional assumption that some magical market mechanism will conjure up a menu of just-in-time replacements for the vanishing oil. These are referred to as "alternative technologies", a term that points to a more fundamental delusion now rampant among the public, namely the mistaken belief that technology and energy are the same thing, that they are interchangeable, that you can substitute one for the other. Out of oil? Get new technology.
Note to public: technology and energy are not the same things, and continuing to think that they are may place our civilization in jeopardy.
The bottom line of the Times Sunday Magazine article is that they are still not convinced that global peak oil is for real, or that we necessarily ought to be worried about it, with all that "alternative technology" banging around out there in the innovational ethers of the magical market. They bring a magisterial cluelessness to the issue - while the back pages of the Magazine are devoted to hawking the glitziest high-end products of the suburban housing bubble.
Finally there was the Sunday Times' editorial, "Foolishness on Fuel", which was really about the editors own foolishness. It essayed to assert that America's oil problem was entirely a matter of vehicle fuel efficiency - with the presumption that our problems would go away if only congress had the spine to mandate higher gas mileage figures from the car industry. The editorial completely failed to recognize that there was any problem with extreme automobile dependency itself, that maybe we should be making other arrangements - say, walkable communities, or railroad service on par with what they have in Latvia, or local economies liberated from the despotism of WalMart.
This week's performance by the media on oil issues shows how America will dissemble its way into a dark era.
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary15.html
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
posted by Bill Totten at
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