FSO Transcription – James Howard Kunstler “The Long Emergency” October 1, 2005
An interview with Kunstler about peak oil, hurricane impacts and the future.
I don’t believe any combination of alternative fuels, or systems for running them, will allow us to run things the way we’re accustomed to running them in America, or even a substantial fraction of them. All of them share the same central liability, which is that it takes more energy to get these things in play – whether it’s biodiesel, or hydrogen, or solar, or wind – than you get from the energy that these things produce.
When I go and give a college lecture, people get up in the audience, during the question and answer period, and they say things like, “Oh, you’re so pessimistic, you don’t have any solutions.†And it’s true, I don’t have any magic bullets myself. I don’t offer any magic bullets, but I think that there are intelligent responses to what we’re faced with, and they’re pretty straight forward. There’s nothing really that abstruse about them. For instance, we are probably going to have to downscale everything we do in everyday life. We’re probably going to have to resize, and right size, and rescale all of our activities, from farming, to the way we do schooling, to the distances that we live from things, to the way we conduct retail trade, from the way we conduct manufacturing. And we can do these things. But we’re not prepared to think about them.
