The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

From one of our most exciting thinkers, the most prescient and engaging look at the problems we face since Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.

With his classics of social commentary The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great commentators on American space and place. Now, with The Long Emergency, he offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future.

The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind. But the oil age is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance that will collapse. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.

Are we laboring under a Jiminy Cricket syndrome when we tell ourselves that alternative means of energy are just a few years away? Even once they are developed, will they ever be able to sustain us in the way that fossil fuels once did? What will happen when our current plagues of global warming, epidemic disease, and overpopulation collide to exacerbate the end of the oil age? Will the new global economy be able to persevere, or will we be forced to revert to the more agrarian, localized economy we once knew? Could corporations like Wal-Mart and McDonald's, built on the premise of cheap transportation, become a thing of the past? Will the misguided experiment of suburbia — considered a birthright and a reality by millions of Americans — collapse when the car culture becomes obsolete?

Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore. It is bound to become a classic of social science.

Warnings from The Long Emergency:

• The oil age began in 1859 and peaked in 1970.
• The oil endowment allowed us to use the stored energy of millions of years of sunlight. Unfortunately the fossilfuel honeymoon is almost over.
• It has been estimated that without coal, oil, or natural gas, it would take several planets just like Earth to support the current number of humans living.
• World oil discovery peaked in the 1960s. Since 1999, the discovery of large oil and gas fields has collapsed: sixteen in 2000, eight in 2001, three in 2002, and none in 2003.
• There are half a billion cars and trucks currently in use around the world.
• We will not be rescued by the wished-for hydrogen economy. Our daily enjoyment of oil and gas has given us the energy equivalent of three hundred slaves per person in the industrialized nations. No combination of alternative energies will permit us to continue living the way we do, or even close to it.
• All the major systems that depend on oil, including manufacturing, trade, transportation, agriculture, and the financial markets that serve them, will begin to destabilize. The boundaries between politics, economics, and collective paranoia will dissolve.

"The indictment of suburbia and the car culture that the author presented in The Geography of Nowhere turns apocalyptic in this vigorous, if overwrought, jeremiad. Kunstler notes signs that global oil production has peaked and will soon dwindle, and argues in an eye-opening, although not entirely convincing, analysis that alternative energy sources cannot fill the gap, especially in transportation. The result will be a Dark Age in which 'the center does not hold' and 'all bets are off about civilization's future.' Absent cheap oil, auto-dependent suburbs and big cities will collapse, along with industry and mechanized agriculture; serfdom and horse-drawn carts will stage a comeback; hunger will cause massive 'die-back'; otherwise 'impotent' governments will engineer 'designer viruses' to cull the surplus population; and Asian pirates will plunder California. Kunstler takes a grim satisfaction in this prospect, which promises to settle his many grudges against modernity. A 'dazed and crippled America,' he hopes, will regroup around walkable, human-scale towns; organic local economies of small farmers and tradesmen will replace an alienating corporate globalism; strong bonds of social solidarity will be reforged; and our heedless, childish culture of consumerism will be forced to grow up. Kunstler's critique of contemporary society is caustic and scintillating as usual, but his prognostications strain credibility." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[The Long Emergency's] central message — that the country will pay dearly unless it urgently develops new, sustainable community-scale food systems, energy sources, and living patterns — should be read, digested, and acted upon by every conscientious U.S. politician and citizen." Michael Shuman, author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age

"Cant-filled and overwrought: a crying-wolf approach to real but largely addressable issues, long on jeremiads but absent of remedies." Kirkus Reviews

The world is about to leave the relatively happy era of abundant cheap oil and enter into a long emergency in which peaking oil production will interact with other looming environmental and economic difficulties to effectively bring an end to civilization as currently constituted, argues Kunstler (a former editor at Rolling Stone). After describing the likely depletion of oil production in the very near future, he considers how it will interact with oil-driven geopolitics and attempts to burst any bubbles about the possibility of switching the economy to alternative fuels. He then considers looming environmental issues of climate change, epidemic disease, water scarcity, and habitat destruction, as well as the "entropic mess that our economy has become," as part and parcel of the story of the development of oil-based industrialism and its coming end. After describing the chilling political, social, and economic consequences of the end of oil-based industrialism, he considers how Americans should react to the coming disaster, arguing that life will have to become more intensely local, that the economy will have to be structured around food production, that land will have to be reallocated in terms of purpose and ownership (involving the dismantling of suburbia), and people may have to cope with the regional breakup of the United States.
Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The world is about to leave the relatively happy era of abundant cheap oil and enter into a long emergency in which peaking oil production will interact with other looming environmental and economic difficulties to effectively bring an end to civilization as currently constituted, argues Kunstler (a former editor at Rolling Stone). After describing the likely depletion of oil production in the very near future, he considers how it will interact with oil-driven geopolitics and attempts to burst any bubbles about the possibility of switching the economy to alternative fuels. He then considers looming environmental issues of climate change, epidemic disease, water scarcity, and habitat destruction, as well as the "entropic mess that our economy has become," as part and parcel of the story of the development of oil-based industrialism and its coming end. After describing the chilling political, social, and economic consequences of the end of oil-based industrialism, he considers how Americans should react to the coming disaster, arguing that life will have to become more intensely local, that the economy will have to be structured around food production, that land will have to be reallocated in terms of purpose and ownership (involving the dismantling of suburbia), and people may have to cope with the regional breakup of the United States. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life much sooner than anticipated. This title describes what to expect after the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing readers for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.

With his classics of social commentary The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great commentators on American space and place. Now, with The Long Emergency, he offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future.

As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy, we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance over the last 200 years. But the oil age, which peaked in 1970, is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.

Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore. It is bound to become a classic of social science.