Howard Kunstler, over at The Morning News, on the future and energy and the American urban:
His Clusterfuck Nation chronicles can be found on his site here.
Since posting the above, I've been readind some of Kunstler's Clusterfuck posts. Here is the beginning of one from July:
- I had a run-in with bio-diesel enthusiasts in Middlebury [Vt.], and they were incensed that I wasn’t as enthusiastic as they were about it. A lot of them were young. I tried to explore their thinking. And I asked, “Has it occurred to you that as our industrial methods of agriculture fade and fail that probably we’ll have to devote more crop land to the production of human food because our crop yields will go down when we stop pouring fertilizers and pesticides and natural gas-based products and oil-based fuels and so forth on the soil? And so we will have to devote more land for growing food for humans?” And it was, “Oh, dude, we, like, didn’t plan on that.”
His Clusterfuck Nation chronicles can be found on his site here.
Since posting the above, I've been readind some of Kunstler's Clusterfuck posts. Here is the beginning of one from July:
- July 11, 2005
The glamorous Maria Bartiromo was just on CNBC talking globalism (and China in particular) with two Wall Street cretins. China is a great play said Cretin No. 1 because they have 300 million potential middle class customers for America's manufacturers. Excuse me, what do we still make that the Chinese either can't make themselves or can't copy five minutes from now?
As Cretin No. 2 waxed effulgent over China's fabulous prospects for growth, CNBC flashed a bunch of American brand logos across the screen, including Pepsi Cola and Exxon-Mobil. These companies are going to so clean up over there, Cretin No. 1 chimed in, or the shareholders are going to want to know the reason why.
Yeah, soda pop is really hard to make. They'll have to buy it from us. You thought computers were hard? There are four ingredients in soda pop (water, sugar, favoring, coloring ) and you have to get the proportions just right or it don't come out good!
As for Exxon Mobil, they're going to have enough trouble getting oil to their US customers five years from now -- leading us to the central fallacy of all the current cheerleading for the global economy: there isn't enough oil available worldwide to permit the industrialized nations to continue to expand. In fact, the industrial nations of the world will soon be competing desperately, perhaps even fighting over, the world's remaining oil, while all our economies contract remorselessly.
