BIKE: Repost: Review of Kunstler's new book

[Roger Baker]

This quick review is fresh from the energyresources yahoo groups list.

Kunstler has such a fresh and irreverent style of delivery that he's 
becoming a new media star on the peak oil topic. He's fun to read 
telling unpleasant truths to a nation of rapidly awakening fossil fuel 
junkies. You can watch him in "The end of Suburbia" video but he was 
just in Rolling Stone and draws large college audiences to his 
speeches. -- Roger

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Well I managed to get my hands on a copy of James Howard Kunstler's
latest non-fiction book "The Long Emergency - Surviving the
Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century" and I'm about
half-way through it.  All of you on this list will be happy to know
that the "die-off" crowd led by Jay Hanson and the website
www.dieoff.com gets a mention, as does Matthew Simmons, Walter
Youngquist, Colin Campbell among others.  The only cornucopian that
gets mentioned is Julian Simon.  So far there is nothing in the book
that has not been discussed on this or other related lists.  There
are a few technical details that to me seem incorrect, like the
claim that hydrogen's temperature increases when it decompresses, or
that liquid hydrogen is held in a pressure vessel under great
pressure, but overall most of the technical details are spot-on as
far as I can tell.  Kunstler makes the claim that he is somewhere in
between the cornucopians and the "die-off" crowd in his
prognostication, but closer to "the die-off crowd" than the
cornucopians.  He claims there will be a "die-back" not a "die-
off".  I think that's a distinction without a difference, but he may
be doing that to position himself as a reasonable voice between two
extremes.  So far in reading the book, I think he is far closer to
the "die-off crowd" than he let's on.  Of course he mentions his
favorite prescription to the problem, namely the reorganization and
rescaling of American life around traditional towns and cities.  He
may be right, but I don't think many of my fellow countrymen will
heed his advice until it is too difficult or too late to do anything
about it.  I think suburbia and its associated lifestyle of easy
ubiquitous motoring are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche,
that we are as likely to give that up as the Greenland Norse were to
give up cattle centered pastoralism.  It's part of our modern
identity.  Then again, I may be wrong.  To paraphrase Winston
Churchill "Americans will do the right thing, but only after
exhausting all other alternatives".


Michael Velik

somewhere in Penn's Woods