THE LONG EMERGENCY

Book Review

Kunstler, J. (2005). The long emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century.  New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 

Reviewed by Prof. Joel C. Snell, Kirkwood College

           Kunstler describes an America in which the oil runs out.  We are sleep walking into the future.  We believe that technology will find more oil and that we will be fine.  He makes the case that we have passed the peak point and it is all downward from now on.  We must give up cars, suburbs, and a cozy lifestyle.  Alternative energy is not enough for the time that we have left.  To get coal and nuclear online is too long.

              Ultimately, we will return to early agriculture or late hunting and gathering societies and be cut off from most of the world and each other.  Imagine that houses have many families in them and that the house on the corner has numerous goods or services to barter.  We will have to learn to grow food again and live off the land.

              The collapse first starts in poor countries and then spreads to the rest of the world.  We need to get energy fast and means are initially expensive because they require oil to harvest coal or nuclear power.  Ethanol is an oil-biomass hybrid and therefore will run out.

              When we go back to our old lifestyle, pollution will still be with us.  We have billions of people burning something to stay alive.  However, billions will also die and we will be involved in numerous wars to get what oil is left.

              Since this was written, there has been a vast improvement of the consciousness of oil loss.  Further, until recently, gasoline was over three dollars a gallon.  After elections, the price should increase again and so energy awareness will continue. There have been vast new findings of oil that can help us until we use more alternative energy as well as nuclear and more coal.  Although it is expensive, coal that is not dirty nor generates heat exhaust is possible in ten years. Additionally, alternative fuels such as solar, wind, and related have increased dramatically.

              This book is a worse case scenario.