In this weeks Green Grapevine, published weekly in the Times Argus, Rutland Herald, and Brattleboro Reformer, Daniel Hecht writes a review of James Howard Kunstler’s 2004 - 2005 book The Long Emergency.

The Long Emergency Predicts a Dire Future

James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency is something like required reading among peak oil activists, and it’s a great primer for those not yet familiar with peak oil’s full ramifications. But I know of no other book so deeply, consistently pessimistic; it’s a vision of a future that resembles Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish depictions of the apocalypse. Or maybe the movie Road Warrior.

But the scope of Kunstler’s inquiry and his scholarship make it uncomfortably plausible.

The book begins with an excellent history of our discovery, use of, and eventual over-reliance on fossil fuels, primarily oil. The sheer quantity of energy that humankind was suddenly able to access, and the changes it wrought, cannot be adequately conceived by those of us who have lived our lifetimes amidst its benefits.

The first well was drilled into a surface seep in Pennsylvania in 1859. With the coal, water, and horse-powered industrial revolution already ramping up, the new energy source was quickly exploited to power new machines of all kinds. The U.S. led world production for over a century, an era Kunstler describes as the “cheap oil fiesta,” when low prices and an apparently inexhaustible supply led us to build a society based on easily-accessible energy. According to Kunstler, the party’s about to end in “a tremendous trauma for the human race.”

Perhaps this will help us understand better why President Bush and Vice President Cheney, The Oil Twins , have put so much stress on getting us into Iraq — and staying there. Could it be about the oil after all? The end of the oil era will also spell the end of the American Fantasy of no limits and no consequences, which ended up with producing the Abu Ghraib events as an expression of its recklessness.

Read the whole review here.

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