The remarkably low fueling cost of the best current hybrids (like the Toyota Prius) and future plug-in hybrids are a major reason why I don’t worry as much about peak oil as some do.
James Kunstler, for instance, argues in his 2005 book The Long Emergency (see Rolling Stone excerpt here), that, after oil production peaks, suburbia “will become untenable” and “we will have to say farewell to easy motoring.” In Rolling Stone, Kunstler writes “Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world” [No -- that distinction probably belongs to China's torrid love-affair with coal power].
But suppose Kunstler is right about peak oil. Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015. That price would still be lower than many Europeans pay today. You could just go out and buy the best hybrid and cut your fuel bill in half, back to current levels. Hardly the end of suburbia.
And suppose oil hit $280 a barrel and gasoline rose to $8 dollars a gallon in 2025. You would replace your hybrid with a plug-in hybrid, and those trips less than 30 miles that have made suburbia what it is today would actually cut your fuel bill by a factor of more than 10–even if all the electricity were from zero-carbon sources like wind power–to far below what you are paying today. The extra cost of the vehicle would be paid for in fuel savings in well under five years.
I expect commercial plug-in hybrids to be available within a few years. And as battery technology improves and gasoline prices rise in the coming decade, plug-ins will become increasingly popular. Growing concern over global warming will only serve to accelerate the transition.
One thing Kunstler and I do agree on:
The widely touted “hydrogen economy” is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells.
But love it or hate it, suburbia won’t be destroyed by peak oil.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
The biggest problem with controlling greenhouse gas related global warming is over coming the fear engendered by thinking about it. The most likely outcome of facing the problem is that our way of life will not be greatly altered and the costs will be far less than everyone now believes. In fact the benefits of introducing a post carbon technologies may so out way the costs, that individual consumers and society as a whole may emerge as beneficiaries from the process, rather than losers.
We are probably not going to wait till 2015 for $160 a barrel oil. $150 is quite possible in 2008. We are in effect already at the de facto oil production peak. Drastic price rises do not draw new supplies into the market. We will see in the short run a move to very small cars, but in the long run plug in hybrids are inevitable. Future urban trucks will simply use battery power. Oil based fuel for long range trucking will simply be too expensive, so most long range shipping will be by electrified rail. I am not sure what will happen to air craft transportation, but it is possible that the whole industry will go away. We can travel inside the country on high speed electrical trains.
fuel prices are all locked together; if oil is $280 a barrel what is natural gas going to be? what is electricity going to cost where when every plugin hybrid and battery powered car is competing for it? The suburbs exist because of cheap fuel both to drive there and to keep warm or cool inside. Crank the cost of heating or cooling a house by the same proportions as you are talking about for gasoline, and it will cost more than most peoples’ mortgages.
The suburbs are also built of vinyl, nylon and tar, all from petrochemicals that will cost three times as much, so the suburbs will no longer be affordable to build.
The suburbs, as currently sized, designed and built, are so dead. It is more than just about cars; you should read the book.
All the more reason to crank up solar, solar thermal, wind, & other sustainable energy resources. Solar Thermal Power
Joe,
The price and availability of oil is really irrelevant. If oil were $2 a barrel, your desire to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations would be the same. Sure, we can wait for the eventual high cost of oil to force alternative energy sourcing. It will happen at some point. Of course if coal gasification and shale are less expensive in the short run, wind and solar will have to wait their turn. They cannot compete now because of the high cost of start up. All efforts should be made to reduce these initial costs. A voluntary national alternative energy funding association should be formed.
I agree that Peak Oil can be well addressed by efficiency. Take Joe’s $280/barrel, $8/gallon 2025 example and match it up with one of Campbell’s Peak Oil predictions (slide 11 of the USGS presentation http://tinyurl.com/l48mg), which shows oil peaking at 26 billion barrels per year and falling to 17 billion barrels per year in 2025. (I believe we are currently at 31 billion barrels per year (84.6 million barrels per day), so Campbell seems to have mis-estimated the peak, but see slides 12-19 for scenarios where that might be explained by sharper peaks.) That’s a 35% reduction in supply. If UN population projections are right, world population will grow by 22% from 6.464 billion in 2005 to 7.905 billion in 2025, so Campbell’s supply reduction translates into 47% less oil per capita. Joe’s example of a plug-in hybrid with 30 miles of electric range easily reduces consumption by more than 47% (I would guess a 75% reduction), so this technology easily keeps residential demand in line with supply. (One wonders why GM and Toyota fight mandates for this technology so hard, since it would appear to be necessary to keep their most profitable customers buying vehicles.)
The Peak Oil issue is then not passenger vehicle travel, since as Joe points out we can simply use more efficient vehicles (the same ones called for by those concerned about global warming) to address the high prices Peak Oil will bring. The issue is the prices of things we consume today which have a strong oil price component. What happens to the price of food, for example? Are there similar efficiency improvements available for long-distance freight (ocean transport, railroads, and trucking) and air travel? I think there are improvements, but perhaps not the factor of 4 that is easily possible for passenger vehicles (electrifying our railroads is one potential opportunity).
Volkswagon had a concept car that got 220 miles per gallon. It weighed 700 lbs, had a diesel engine that had 15 horsepower and tandem seating for 2 people. (one person behind the other) The claim is that it did ‘swim with traffic.’ No hybrid diesel/electric though, this was just a concept car.
Why don’t we see any series gas/hybrid cars? Parallel hybrid is when the engine speeds up with the car. A gas/electric hybrid series is when the engine runs at only the engine’s most optimum speed and the battery just makes up the rest of power needs. After parking the car, if there is discharge in the battery, the engine would keep on running until the battery was charged. Even a car that was mostly propelled from the battery still might benefit from a 15 horsepower engine running all the time to take some of the driving load.
How is passenger heat supplied on an all electic battery car?
“The suburbs, as currently sized, designed and built, are so dead. It is more than just about cars; you should read the book.”
they’ll just build smaller houses, they are already doing it now because of the housing bubble. if you look at the old suburbs, the homes are much smaller than the one’s today.
the average commute is under 30 miles, that will easily be covered in the future on just the charge in the battery. the suburbs have more to fear from the housing bubble right now
Lloyd, U.S./Canada/Mexico natural gas (4% of world reserves) prices will probably increase in the near future until we increase imports from Russia (27% of world reserves), Iran (16%), and Qatar (15%). At some point, as you suggest, high crude oil prices might further increase NG demand via substitution, further raising NG prices. But that does not mean we won’t be able to heat our homes. For example, my home is heated by (1) sunshine (i.e. passive solar design), and (2) an electric heat pump (in the winter it takes heat from the air and produces hot water that circulates through the floor). Much of the energy for the heat pump comes from rooftop photovoltaics (though buying concentrated solar thermal electricity and wind electricity would work just as well).
“The suburbs are also built of vinyl, nylon and tar, all from petrochemicals that will cost three times as much, so the suburbs will no longer be affordable to build.”
where are the numbers? how much more will that cost for siding? oil that is 3 times higher doesn’t mean siding is 3 times as expensive. oil might not be the main costs of siding, it’s probably the labor to make it and the labor to put it up. if siding is too expensive people will move to brick houses or wood siding. kunstler neglects to take into account demand destruction, conservation and switching to other materials.
say I live in a suburb and can’t afford the commute, I just started a car pool with my SUV buddies. instead of me driving my SUV with just me in it, I now have 3 others car pooling with me because of peak oil. I just cut my fuel costs by 75%.
Ronald asks, “How is passenger heat supplied on an all electric battery car?” The best way is a heat pump. For example, that’s what my RAV4-EV uses. It is the AC in summer and the heater in winter. My RAV4-EV gets slightly lower range in the winter when the heater is on, but it is not that large of an effect.
I don’t understand how such a massive adaptive conversion will take place. How many people will be able to afford to dump their old vehicles (for rapidly declining values) and purchase the latest hybrid plug-in? How many people living in MacMansions will be able to afford to tear down half of their houses and live smaller?
If you don’t take into account the many other shifts taking place in the economy, demographics, healthcare, general cost of living and affordability in the future, it’s oversimplifying to say the problem will be solved by more efficient cars. Cost of food and other transportation-dependend goods? Cost of conversion to solar, heat pumps, other heating efficiencies?
And meanwhile, we’re likely to be dealing more widespread disruptions like droughts, flooding, wildfires. I may not agree with all of Kunstler’s predictions, but the suburbs won’t be the same in 2020.
“How many people will be able to afford to dump their old vehicles (for rapidly declining values) and purchase the latest hybrid plug-in? How many people living in MacMansions will be able to afford to tear down half of their houses and live smaller?”
people are already chaging their driving habits, they are buying more fuel efficient cars. people may just have one car, or even two cars as I guess the average household has slightly more than one car. a massive price rise won’t happen at once. we are already starting to adjust.
as for the house, more people will probably live together or rent out rooms. people will turn their thermostats down. people will insulate, they will replace their furnances. they will go to geothermal. they won’t tear down part of their houses, that would probably cost too much, but they will either not heat part of their house or they will find a way(maybe through new technology that happens in response to the increase in fuel prices) to keep rooms at different temperatures.
kunstler does not take into account demand destruction and the innovations that will take place in response to a rise in prices. economies adjust to price increases. suburban homes in as little 5 years may be off-grid. geothermal and solar polar(maybe even wind) could be standard in new developments. peak oil will just green the new developments and some of the old.
“‘The next round of development will absolutely be smaller homes,’ said Alan Nevin, chief economist for the California Building Industry Association.”
“Steve Ruffner, president of KB Home’s Inland Empire division, said whereas KB Home in the past two years built homes sized between 1,800 and 4,000 square feet, the homes in its newest communities range between 1,300 and 2,800 square feet.”
“The turnabout will not occur overnight, say home-building industry experts,
http://www.pe.com/business/local/stories/PE_Biz_D_shrinkinghouse28.20811e6.html
Cliff,
Here’s how the massive adaptive conversion takes place. It will take about twenty years. In 2020, a beater will be a 2007 Malibu Hybrid on its third owner. Individual homeowners even now are increasingly applying energy alternatives. As Joe notes, huge amounts of venture capital is going toward alternative energy and transportation companies. Look at the pace of technological advancement and how quickly new technologies go “worldwide.”
Wow. A lot of comments for a Sunday. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I don’t think oil will hit $280 a barrel in 2025 (you’ll get too much demand destruction and alternatives being economical before then) — I was just saying that in such a worst-case scenario, suburbia can live on.
Also, I expect to see oil prices rising relatively slowly over the next two decades (with spikes), giving people a bit more time to plan on which cars to build and which cars to buy.
Whenever gasoline gets above $4 a gallon for an extended period of time, so that people know it’s not going back down, that will begin the conversion towards much more efficient vehicles.
But more to the point of Climate Progress, well before 2025 we will be so desperate to cut greenhouse gas emissions, that even the U.S. government will be ramping up fuel economy standards and establishing mandates for plug ins and cellulosic ethanol. Indeed, if the next president doen’t take very strong domestic and international action to cut GHGs, then either we get really desperate by, say 2015 (and by desperate I mean a World War II scale effort), or it is game over, climate-wise.
I’ll do another post on this subject shortly, since it clearly interests so many people.
re: GM and Toyota both fighting fuel economy
The best explanation I’ve heard is:
a) GM fights it for the usual reasons.
b) Toyota fights it because they’d rather GM *not* be forced to sell more effiicent cars, thus reducing Toyota’s advantage.
Google: Toyota 1/x (of course, just a concept car)
I’m not too worried about suburbia either: there’s a lot of slop to take out; a lot of towns around here are working hard on it, upgrading building codes, figuring out how to do better transport, more eduction on energy efficiency, lending “Watts Up?”‘s around, etc.
On the other hand people commuting 2 hours each way from CA Central Valley to Silicon Vallley by car is going to get tougher, and I’m really not sure about the UK building the 3rd runway at Heathrow for 2020 or 2025 to cope with a big increase in air travel.
What I worry about most is the restructuring of the North American agricultural system, which has evolved for a long time via cheap natural gas [fertilizer] and petroleum [running farm machinery, medium/long-distant transport; after all, half the US fruits and vegetables are grown in California, but half of the US population does not live here.] Electricity works for some of this [like tractors], but some clever solutions will be needed for some of the other parts. There is also the whole issue of water, some of whose solutions use energy, and at least in the West, decreasing snowpacks mean pressure on hydropower.
$180/bbl oil in 2015? $5.00 gas at the same time? This is as wildly optimistic as Wall Street investors bidding up Countrywide stocks 30% over the weekend. I’m telling my audiences to plan on $10 gas when they buy their next car…
$10 gasoline ain’t gonna happen in the U.S. for a long, long time. Economics alone makes it almost impossible (i.e. the global and national economy tanks long before then).
But I’d be up for a bet if you really believe in $10 gasoline by 2015….
Ah yes, Kunstler, the man that caused me to coin the term Apocalypticon, thanks to his predictions (at least two years that I know of) that the DOW would plummet to 4,000 (5,000?), his Y2k doomerism (Google around a bit; it’s enlightening, albeit not amusing), and his claims that wind power won’t work on a utility scale (Rochester-area newspaper interview) and that post peak we won’t be able to maintain wind farms because we won’t have the fuel for the trucks.
If the Linear Extrapolators Club had a Person of the Year Award, Kunstler would win it, hands down.
And just to point out one of the prime reasons why the suburbs won’t go away: Look at the trends already in motion. We’ll very soon begin electrifying transportation (PHEV’s, then EV’s), at the same time that solar power will be getting much cheaper. Who benefits most from that combination? People who drive to work and have the roof (or back yard) space for PV panels–just like all those people living in the suburbs. The suburbs won’t be a victim of peak oil; they’ll be one of the things that help us through the transition by letting people shift oil consumption to cleanly generated electricity. Look at the big picture, and it’s pretty obvious.
Unless, of course, your goal is to sell techno-horror books.
Rejecting Kunstler is trading one Jeremiah for another. The view here of catastrophic high seas, drought, famine and destruction caused by CO2 is equally apocalyptic. Lou is right about the suburbs. They are ripe for alternative.
Paul K: I don’t think it’s a matter of trading one extreme for the other. (If that’s not what you meant, I apologize for the misinterpretation.)
I think the evidence is overwhelming that the climate situation is indeed a worldwide human catastrophe in the making, and that we need to get moving ASAP to head off some truly nightmarish scenarios. I’m also convinced that peak oil (as I say endlessly on my own site) is real, imminent, and an enormous challenge.
My problem with all the doomers, from both the PO and GW camps, is that they either can’t or refuse to see the possibilities. They don’t see the ingenuity and flexibility of human beings, they don’t see the ever-expanding array of policy and technological tools in our toolbox, and most fundamentally of all they don’t see how likely it is that the world will not turn out the way they want, with a crashing of civilization as we know it, but will be a surprise to all of us.
Dealing with GW and PO won’t be fun, but it won’t be “the end of the world as we know it”, either.
Lou,
I too am a believer in the human spirit. I am not a believer in any apocalyptic view including the one that underlies this site. I don’t need to accept AGW to think it vital to replace carbon as our energy source.
from greg greene, director of END of SUBRBIA and ESCAPE From SUBURBIA:
it certainly looks like we won’t have to wait too long to see the effects of peak oil. the process of breaking our “addiction” to oil (thanks for that dubya) is not likely to be pretty in north america. we are on our way to developing all these new low-carbon technologies, but we have waited far too long to transition smoothly. the bubble economy is coming to an end (through the same hubris that has prevented our elites from recognizing peak oil), and with it any hope of the financial stability necessary to finance the kind of large-scale sustainable energy solutions we will soon be requiring. shifting climactic patterns will undoubtedly strain this transition further. i think kunstler, for all his bluster and fear-mongering, is right on the money here: the “long emergency” is a far likelier scenario than those of techno-optomists thomas friedman and amory lovins.
in the process of making our new documentary ESCAPE From SUBURBIA (part two in the END of SUBURBIA trilogy) it became clear to me that FOOD is the elephant in the room here. low-carbon energy solutions are one thing, but much of the world is already locked in to the globalized, energy-intensive agri-business model. will we be growing crops to run our “E85″ adapted SUVs, or will we continue to feed the world (especially the most at-risk groups in the developing world. we have already seen food riots in mexico city this year, and the ethanol revolution has barely begun)? i think we all know the answer to this…
global grain production has been declining for the past 8 years or so, and when you connect energy-scarcity with already declining food stocks (and catastrophically declining global fish stocks) the picture grows more ominous.
we need to start focusing on strategies for local and regional agriculture with the same intensity and sincerity with which we focus on energy alternatives.
greg greene,
Suddenly, there’s a disaster around every corner. It seems peak oil isn’t so much about how much is in the ground as it is production capacity. Statements have been made that current peak demand already exceeds production. Your scenario is very unlikely, especially over the next hundred years. Over that time oil and other fossil fuels will be replaced by cleaner alternatives, not because of unavailability, but because the alternatives are simply better. Wide scale use of new technology is growing. I appreciate your concern about agriculture. I don’t think we need chase the PO or the AGW demons. Work to ensure clean air, clean water, fertile land and replacing carbon based energy and those other demons will, like the boogie man, fade away.
Markets are unlikely to give up on economic sectors as long as economical substitutes can be found for rare commodities, It is far wiser for governments to encourage markets to offer low cost substitutes, rather than face the disruptions caused by the collapse of significant sectors of a nations society and economy collapse. We still have options for facing peak oil, and AGW without enormous social and economic disruptions.
right. good luck on that boys…
you know i don’t mean to be spoiling for an argument here; it seems to boil down to a difference in perception, or confidence, in large institutions to navigate these looming problems. i hope paul k. and charles b. are correct, that there is still sufficient time, but my sense is that we are approaching limits to the kind of growth we have built the foundations of industrial society on. it is going to be an interesting ride though, and a very interesting time to be focused on the solutions, regardless of our differences in perception.
[JR -- Fixed]
greg greene
The last commenter’s info appearing in your reply box is an idiosyncrasy of ClimateProgress.
Paul K.
[Work to ensure clean air, clean water, fertile land and replacing carbon based energy and those other demons will, like the boogie man, fade away.]
But China and India will not. And that makes your optimism over the top.
China, India and Russia do have to be on board for cap & trade to work. It could be years away. Is a solution possible without it? I think so. I don’t think it is overly optimistic to identify the best case scenario and work to achieve it.
About food. If we all ate vegetarian and used good production methods, we could feed everybody in the United States with the land that is lawn right now. You might like not having to mow and the food right out your front door and golfers would be mad, but it could be done that way. We’ll have fat and active rabbits and maybe some areas will have their food stolen, but that’s about how much land is needed. (I didn’t do the calculations, but I did read it in a gardening magazine)
Maybe what will happen in suburbia is the house prices won’t go up as fast as other less energy usage areas, but they still will be here.
I’ve converted one room in my house to winter use. Super insulated (did it this summer R60 in the roof, R35 walls and floor), gas fireplace. The rest of the house can ‘go cold.’ No extra heating needed. Only when we have gatherings or when we just want to will we heat the rest of the house. All pipes are insulated for the cold. That’s not unreasonable for other people to do in large heated houses if they wanted to do it. I worked in construction for a time and worked on those big houses, what a heating bill.
Paul, you said:
[China, India and Russia do have to be on board for cap & trade to work. It could be years away. Is a solution possible without it? I think so.]
You cannot be serious. Or, am I misreading that comment. The OECD nations could go to near-zero GHG emissions and that would not be THE SOLUTION unless China, India, Indonesia, Russia make dramatic GHG cuts as well.
John McCormick,
My meaning was that without China, Russia, India and Indonesia as well Cap & Trade will not work. My point is those who are waiting for an effective government solution will wait too long. I am very interested in replacing carbon based energy. I can give you several good reasons why this is vital, none of them is AGW. Frankly, I don’t give rap about CO2 emissions, but the surest way to reduce them is to stop using so much coal, oil and natural gas. Maximizing efficiencies and a greatly increased use of current technologies is possible now without much government action. I hope Joe will continue to highlight innovations in these areas.
All forecasts are inaccurate because the global energy needs are growing by factors of four or five folds/year. Because the USA has false fears of “NUKE” power plants we must use COAL or gas for electric power generation.
Wind, Solar, Wave, Geothermal can not provide more than 20% because they are very unreliable on a 24/7 basis. This does not even include the hugh operation and replacement costs. Even the City of Davis California gave up on a Solar requirement some 20 years ago; it was a complete failure and was abandoned.
Hydrogen will not replace oil because it requires a lot of electrical power to free the hydrogen atoms. So unless we use nuke generators or the scientists solve the fussion problem we will not have the required energy to produce hydrogen.
nuke has big problems as pointed out else where on this blog site. It is also non-sustainable.
The equation is simple – the cost of energy is going to be high (for the next 75 or more years) whether it is from oil or renewables (or nuke). This means our standard of living is going to come down (quite rapidly) in – terms of material wealth. As long as we (the majority of the world) can feed itself then we should be OK, but that is very questionable at the moment.
At the rate it’s going now, gas is headed to $5 per gallon well before 2015. Try 2010. And by 2015, try $10 per gallon. That is, if it continues on its present course, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t.
The biggest single reasons for the skyrocketing price of oil are:
(1) China. Out-of-control Chinese demand for oil is being spurred by out-of-control U.S. demand for Chinese-made consumer products, which are foisted on U.S. consumers by greedy American middleman companies, which, instead of employing Americans to build sh*t, want to import it from cheap-labor China, feed their economy, and impoverish Americans in the name of “consumer choice”. The chickens of laissez-faire capitalism WILL come home to roost.
(2) The Iraq War. The biggest single strategic blunder in the history of American foreign policy has spurred fear of terrorist activities in the Persian Gulf, which has caused shipping insurance rates for global oil tankers to skyrocket, thus pushing up the price of oil even further.
These two combined causative factors have been either caused by, or egged on by, the Bush Administration every step of the way, with their phony-baloney pro-corporate policies.
Something’s gotta give. But until then, watch those gas prices just keep rocketing upward with no end in sight.
The thing I hate most about sprawl is how it duplicated what already existed in my city. Now my city is a ghost town and I have to go out 12 miles from where I live to shop and work.
The good news for me about high energy costs is that it will be more expensive to wastefully duplicate then abandon what is already built like this. (I don’t think hybrid technology can do much to lessen energy costs for bulldozers and cranes, the things sprawl is built with.)
I agree that the driving costs of sprawl could easily be much less than they are now, more than making up for huge gas price increases.
But another thing so unfair about sprawl in America is that its the only game in town. Except in about four or five cities, it is not really possible to live car-free, yet this is supposedly the land of choice and opportunity. We subside road building with gas taxes but think of paying for buses or trains as socialism. If energy costs make us FINALLY start examining sprawl critically, that’s the big plus. We can continue to have sprawl for those that love it. But perhaps we can finally pay attention to how many people are hurt because sprawl is all we have anymore, and many of us do not want to live and work and shop in it.
I read, and like Kunstler, because he writes so well, and he is, even in his direst moments, so damned amusing, sometimes you have to laugh out loud. He can nail the most massive hypocrisy or puncture the most bloated statement or skewer the most preposterous argument with a few beautifully crafted bon mots. He is also, for the most part, right. He may not have been right about a crashing stock market so far, but heck, it still could happen, he may have underestimated the sheer bravado of so many investors. His predictions about the credit crunch for instance, the unadulterated criminality of business leaders and politicians in allowing the vast hyperinflated universe of derivatives, hedging funds, subprime mortgages and all the other nonsense of unrestricted capitalistic greed, have proved pretty accurate (recall he’s been warning about these stupidities for several years now – he’s had very well tuned antennae for the real value of so much of suburbia, as it his been his interest, and his loathing admittedly, for an even longer time).
It is true, he is dismissive of technology coming to the rescue, and this article is an attempt to redress the balance. But I have some sympathy for Kunstler even here, because it is the misuse of technology that has got us where we are; we could have used the technology we already have so much more wisely, it was our choice not to do so; so it is something of a leap of faith to suggest that we are suddenly going to change and use this and future technology wisely. It’s not the technology that’s the issue, it’s us.
And in this regard, again, Kunstler seems to have us spot on – we are, collectively, not half as clever as we think we are.
The equation is simple – the cost of energy is going to be high (for the next 75 or more years) whether it is from oil or renewables (or nuke). This means our standard of living is going to come down (quite rapidly) in – terms of material wealth. As long as we (the majority of the world) can feed itself then we should be OK, but that is very questionable at the moment.
The dollar was up to its armpits in quicksand, and oil prices had crept stealthily into the death-to-airlines range, and if, in the old slogan, what’s good for General Motors really is good for the USA, then destiny was dealing a harsh lesson to The Land of the Free — while I made a drive on Thursday (in a Japanese rent-a-car) through the remotest ends of upstate New York State into the province of Ontario, Canada, to see what I could see. What I saw was pretty scary.
You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses report that you have entered something like an HP Lovecraft story, where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are not where they’re supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the towns all have eleven fingers…. Even though I’ve seen plenty of desolation like it in other parts of the country — the back roads of Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock — I’ve never encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.
The most striking feature is how all the things once so “modern,” all the roadside business enterprises designed along “space age” motifs — the car dealerships with boomerang-shaped signs, the rocket-ship-style food huts, the schools that look like atomic power installations — all teeter now in sublime decrepitude. The reversal of spirit from childlike exuberance of the 1960s to the senile sclerosis of today said everything about where America is at. Much of what existed before the space age is not even there anymore, bulldozed decades ago in our haste to erase pre-drive-in living, as if it branded us a lower life-form than, say, our arch-enemy, the Soviets. I’ve wondered for many years what Modernism would be like when time finally passed it by, when it was no longer the sole thing it declared itself to be, up-to-date — and there it was smeared all over the landscape like so much road kill.
The most horrifying part of the trip was the old city of Watertown, a short hop shy of the Canadian border.
Named after the many falls located on the Black River, the city developed early in the 19th century as a manufacturing center. From years of generating industrial wealth, in the early 20th century the city was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. Residents of Watertown built a rich public and private architectural legacy. It is the smallest city to have a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated landscape architect who created Central Park in New York City. — Wikipedia
All that industry is gone now, apparently, and all that’s left of the town’s economy is whatever it gets from nearby Fort Drum, the giant US Army installation. Nineteen year old soldiers-in-training are not so impressed by Olmsted parks and the civic embellishments dreamed up by timber magnates, bankers, and the owners of piano factories. The humanity visible on the downtown streets of Watertown looked like extras who wandered away from the latest Road Warrior location shoot — semi-hominid creatures with strange loping gaits, arresting hair-dos, and enough tattoos to qualify them for harpoon duty on Herman Melville’s Pequod. You passed by groups of them on the streets and wanted to make sure the car’s doors were locked.
At the heart of the old town, everything possible had been done to erase the vestiges of pre-automobile living. I suppose this is because the first thing many young army recruits did until fairly recently was buy a car. If having to join the army (because there are so few other jobs) buys you a ticket to The American Dream, then getting a car is the consolation prize — even if you have to make four years of “easy monthly payments” on it. Very little of the town’s physical history was left standing, and most of it stood in isolation, devoid of context, awaiting the next parade of the front-end-loaders. What was left of “the action” had shifted to a ghastly franchise strip along the Route 3 connector to I-81. This stretch of highway was clearly where all the money had gone since, say 1976, though mostly to the pavement itself and its heroic furnishings of signage, light poles, multiple turning lanes, and curb cuts. The buildings were little more than packing crates with a few plastic doo-dads stuck on. You had to wonder if all this stuff would ever see another iteration of repair and restoration. I doubt it.
Burger King was doing some kind of promotion in its Watertown huts and the marquee in their several parking lots proclaimed — I swear to God — “Ask us about our Angry Burger.” WTF? Is the rage of lumpen America so repressed now that it can only be expressed in menu items that turn people into hulking four-hundred-pound monsters?
It was, I’m sad to say, a relief to cross the border out of my own country. Once you got off the main highway of Canada, 401, along the north side of Lake Ontario, the landscape presented a disturbing contrast to what you saw on the American side. Unlike the slovenly, failing farms of New York State, the farms of Ontario looked successful and prosperous. The barns did not tilt at weird angles and the roofs were intact. The farm houses were freshly painted and the grounds generally not strewn with the sort of dingy plastic effluvia Americans like to deploy around their dwellings to give the impression of plentitude. You wondered: how did all the IQ points below the Great Lakes somehow migrate over to the Canadian side? Had they invented some kind of quantum spirit vacuum, run perhaps on dark matter, that sucked all the vitality out of their neighbor-to-the-south? (If so, maybe Canada should take over our dreary duties in Central Asia.)
All this was occurring against the background of General Motors looming bankruptcy, an epochal moment in US history, like losing a limb or a loved one. The US Government has decided to drive a Chevrolet off the cliff Thelma and Louise style. We were heading there anyway, so why not make the trip in air-conditioned comfort, with plenty of room for all the family members, and on-board video entertainment for the little ones. In fact, it may not be the bankruptcy of GM itself that will amaze and appall the other nations of the world, so much as the US government’s pretense that the company can return to health in just a little while and pay back all the money that the citizenry has allowed to be sucked into its black hole of losses.
My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas. The innocence of all that is truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now in a major way. The tectonics of history are taking us to a strange place. Maybe Mr. Lovecraft had it right.
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My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.
The main issue here is that $200 a barrel oil when it comes is a economy wrecker. The recent issues with the US economy were to some degree responsible at $4 a gallon fuel and at double that it is an issue. The other idea of plug in hybrids and somehow the USA replacing all of its small vehicle stock with them can only compound the problem to some degree as where does the USA replace existing electricity from fossil fuels and add in car energy. Its a massive ask especially as countries want more energy over time and not less.
You are forgetting that most Americans are not and will not be able to afford hybrids (until they get frequent enough to be a common used car on the market) and that suburbs are ugly and depressing and that no amount of hybrids or cheap gas will save us from traffic jams. Americans deserve transportation choices.
[JR: Kunstler's vision is $10 gasoline, so Americans will have plenty of choices for high-efficiency cars, thanks to Obama.]