How Do You Like the Long Emergency So Far? Jim Kunstler at TEDxAlbany 2010

um like this tragic and history doesn't care if we make bad decisions and bye-bye life is tragic I mean not that it has an unhappy ending what the bad things happen I mean that it has a beginning a middle and an end and the consciousness of that resounds through our laws as a society we're having a hard time constructing a coherent narrative about what's happening to us and what we're going to do about it I've written a few books about it and I want to talk to you about it right now there there's a horse race going on between three things that can put us out of business one of them is climate change which is going to probably express itself soonest in food shortages and problems with food that's the first way you'll see it the other one of course is the Peak Oil situation which is really the general global energy predicament and the other one is the banking Fiasco which is actually in a position now to win the race to put us out of business because it's so deep and comprehensive and most of us don't really know what it's about we got rid of our manufacturing capacity in the last 30 years and gave it away to other people and what we used to do was make things of value produce things of value and to compensate for the fact that we don't do that anymore we created we blew up the financial system into a giant monster and created a new kind of creative financial instrument or security and it was based not on the idea of producing things of value because you know securities basically represent the hope and expectation that we will have more stuff in the future than we had in the past and that's why things like stocks and bonds have value but when we got rid of our ability to actually make things of value and have more stuff in the future than we did in the past we decided that it would be better to try to get something for nothing and so the two characteristics of these new Frankenstein securities that were created are the parts that have only been discussed very very recently really only in the last few weeks has the words percolated into the press that is swindles and frauds and that's what we did to ourselves and now the the financial system the banks in particular are choking on bad paper bad bad investments money that will never be paid back and the trouble with this is that it represents the disappearance of capital and by capital by the way I don't mean capitalism because it's this is not an ideology it doesn't matter what your political stance is you know compound interest works for communists just as well as it works for capitalist for Western but it's about the operations of money and the acquisition of surplus wealth and accumulation of surplus wealth and how you deploy it for productive purposes and the trouble is that work we have in the process of losing our capital so all the money that we hope would be there to build a post-industrial post-oil economy whatever it was going to be that money is now leaving the solar system and getting sucked into a black hole from which you will never emerge and will never see it again and we're going to be a much more austere and less affluent society than we have been and we don't know that yet we don't really quite understand it one of the ways this will be expressed is the revolving debt economy is over from now on if you run a business or a household or government you're going to have to do it on revenue that's coming in you're not going to be able to discharge your stuff on credit cards that's over I want to talk about the energy situation a little bit one of the lessons of the Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was that we wouldn't be doing that there in those difficult and expensive and dangerous circumstances if there was a lot of cheap easy oil to get the fact the matter is there is and you know I get letters from nutty people every week and one of the because this is becoming an increasingly delusion Society in fact you can state categorically the more economic distress is felt the more crazy the more delusional our behavior gets up and I had a special folder I keep for ideas like this called complete nonsense and this is the idea that the earth is a bonbon with a creamy nougat center of oil it's not true we are we're really in trouble with oil and I'm not going to go through the many ways that we're in trouble and you can read up you can google peak oil on the internet you can find out about it so i bundled these problems into a sort of a comprehensive worldview i wrote a book about it called the lung emergency published in 2005 and the question really is what are we going to do about this you know because the decent these problems have the capability of really thrusting us into a kind of a dark edge so what are we going to do that well one thing is at every college lecture i give some person gets up and says you didn't say anything about population i just want to make it clear it's a terrible problem we've overshot the world's carrying capacity but we're not going to do a darn thing about it okay there's not going to be any protocol there's not going to be any policy you know forget it so let's not even bother yammering about that there's understandably a wish to keep all of our stuff going because we acquired all of our stuff but the important thing to understand is we're not going to run Walt Disney World the interstate highway system the US Army suburbia and Walt Disney World that I say that already Walmart we're not going to run all that stuff on any combination of alternative fuels and the thing that you got to understand and maybe the biggest takeaway from this meeting from this presentation is we're going to be disappointed about what these things can do for we're going to be disappointed about this and we got to make other arrangements for daily life and we don't get it because we think that we're going to run all our on solar wind use french fried potatoes oil dark matter nuclear thorium biomass biodiesel and we're not going to run us even a substantial fraction of our stuff on that but I don't want to be misunderstood we are I'm not against I'm not in vain against alternative energy all I'm saying is it's going to be on a much smaller scale than we realize going to be much more modest maybe the household level the district in town level but we're not going to be building dozens and scores and scores of wind farms with godzilla-sized turbines you can just forget about it we don't have a capital in some cases we don't have them even the materials to fabricate the hardware to do it one of the reigning delusions of the day is that technology and energy are the same and if you run out of one you plug in the other it's simply an idea that doesn't comport with reality and we're going to find out the hard way case in point you know we're either going to run these things on things they were designed to run on or we're not going to have in the commercial aviation industry and the likelihood is within 5 years so we're not going to have a commercial aviation industry and by the way one of the great tragedies of our time is that the in the 2008 presidential campaign the issue of rebuilding the American passenger railroad system was not an issue and all that shows really is how unserious we are as a people we're completely unserious we have no idea what is happening to us and no idea what's going to happen to us and the whole peak oil story is not about running out of oil it's really about something totally different it's about the complex systems that we depend on for everyday life and what's going to happen to and what will happen to them is they will become unstable they will wobble they will reinforce each other's instabilities and weaknesses and they they will possibly collapse because of that and you can you know this isn't a metaphysical or abstract thing you can state what these things are with precision the complex systems that we depend on the way we do farm it will produce our food namely industrial agriculture and by the way one of the other huge inputs besides the petroleum and natural gas based fertilizers and herbicides is capital because it could you have to borrow a lot of money to run a big industrial farm and we are running out of capital and we don't even realize how bad that situation is another system that we depend on the way we to Commerce in America we for the last 30 years is big-box shopping okay we're done we don't know that yet but it's over for that the 12,000 mile supply lines for the merchandise for the plastic salad shooters and all that stuff that's not going to go on very much longer we're already beginning to have a trade war expressed as a currency argument with our main supplier China that's going to get more intense so big problem the way we do transportation in America which it comes in two forms happy motoring commercial aviation mainly okay we're done with happy motoring and the American public has no idea how close to the horizon of that we are you know because everything has seemed normal up until now you can still get gasoline when it does when we hit the horizon it's probably going to be a rather sudden horizon and finally the way we inhabit the landscape which for the last 50 years in the USA has been suburban sprawl you know expressed this way and by the way these people are not having a better day because of the Watertown no one's know no one's happier down there on the street and you can describe this with some precision too you know I've had many ways of discussing it but lately the way I describe it is the greatest missile ocation of resources in the history of the world and you can state that because it is a living arrangement with no future we're not going to be able to run it to make matters worse along with inflating the financial system to become something like 40% of our economy over the last 30 40 years you know we diluted ourselves into thinking we had a new economy and we gave it various name if you call it the service economy because it's a post-industrial economy that digital economy and that was all - what it really was was the suburban sprawl building economy okay especially in that in the Sun Belt and that's the reason that their economies are failing at worse than anybody else's okay in Florida Arizona and Nevada California because what this active was was an economy based on building more stuff with no future life is tragic so you know we got it we got to do something and we got to figure out some things to do and get serious and I think the key to understanding where we're going what we're going to do is that we got to downscale everything we got to real oka lies everything the idea propagated by Tom Friedman at the New York Times that the earth is flat is an erroneous idea it is not a permanent installation of the human condition the global economy ok the global economy was a special set of transient economic relations based on special circumstances in the special time in history namely about a century of really cheap energy and about a half a century of the relative peace between large up between the great powers okay and that's why you had globalism the world is now going to get bigger and rounder so prepare for it you're going to live in a more localized patch of it as I go around the country do college lectures and stuff there's a great clamor for solutions give us solutions they all say give us solutions don't be mr. gloom and doom that glass is not half-empty we want solutions and what I've begun to realize is when that's code that's called even coming from the well-intentioned people that's code because what they're really saying is give us a way to keep on living exactly the way we're living without changing you know that's what it really means and I saw this you know firsthand at the the Aspen environmental forum where I went for two years in a row and every time the subject of automobile dependency or our predicament with oil came up this was the cream of the cream of the environmental movement the only thing they wanted to talk about was all the great new ways you can run cars on something besides gasoline didn't want to talk about walkable communities they don't want to talk about public transit they don't want to talk about restoring the American railroad system and if they can have a coherent intelligent conversation who depend on the people who voted for for Jim DeMint in South Carolina because they're not going to generate an intelligent conversation so what I you know what what I really urge people to do is not Yammer about solutions and start cutting stead talking about intelligent responses to the problems that we have and by the way and I mentioned this to somebody in the audience oh wow one of the biggest problems that we're having right now in the United States is a mental disease of techno grandiosity techno triumphalism we're sewing statue ated with our technological achievements because we've created little devices that glow and you can touch and things happen okay so now we've diluted ourselves on the thing we're going to solve the set of solve the set of problems and keep on living exactly the way we're living because we can do that and this is believe me this is a a mental illness it's related to another one that's that I've noticed lately it's really bugging me I call it statistical analysis grandiosity and it's the idea you know we're bombarded with studies and statistical analysis and what I realize is that we think that just because we can measure stuff we can control it okay we got to make other arrangements so you know one of the obvious solutions one of the obvious responses to the problems of automobile dependency and not having enough oil to run suburbia is to live in walkable communities again and to do everything we can to make every policy possible to encourage that to happen and you know we're not interested we're not talking about it we're going to have to grow our food differently closer to home probably requiring more human attention probably requiring much smaller scales of operation we barely begun to think about that in the United States and the places that do not exist in proximity to good agricultural land are going to be in real trouble we're going to see a lot of demographic shifts but you know the idea that if suburbia fails everybody will move to the city that's an erroneous idea because most of our big cities are metro plexus are not scale to the energy realities of the future and they're going to fail to in a different way for example the places that are overburdened with skyscrapers scribe skyscrapers are a building type that have no future and we don't know that yet we're still building and we're still putting up 30-story towers we we in fact a guiding the New Yorker wrote an article that said the greenest way to live is on a in a giant skyscraper in the city and we're going to discover and the reason by the way that the skyscrapers are going to fail is not just because of the energy problems is because of this they will never be renovated ok we're not going to have the capital we're not going to have the synthetic modular fabricated materials to rebuild them so we're done the places that probably have a future are going to be the small places that are scaled to the energy realities of the future lots of them in the upper mohawk and hudson value valley is waiting to be reactivated we can't afford this anymore either ok especially men men got a man up ok stop dressing like babies and plants i want you to notice something about the reason that that young men are wearing these clothes where you know the shorts come down here and the shirt comes up here is a sideways hat is because they don't feel like men they feel like babies so 20 year old kids are dressing like four-year-olds and notice that there's no analogue to dissing female behavior the females are dressing like hyper sexualized adults and the men are dressing like babies so if we continue to do that you know we're going to be in a lot of trouble home oh I'm sorry I got a rush through it this is usually a two-and-a-half-hour College lecture so I'm kind of rushing but it's important to know it's important for you to know that you are the generators of the hope it's not going to be conferred upon you like pixie dust you have to generate it inside yourself and the way you have it generated is by discovering that you're a competent person that you can understand the signals that reality is sending to you and that you can respond intelligently and when you do that you will automatically understand that you that you're capable of feeling hope so we have a huge to-do list we got a lot of things we got to do got to rebuild commerce agriculture transportation the human habitat and lots of other things medicine education because they're not going to work out the way we think either and we don't have time to be crybabies we don't have time to wring our hands you know we just got to put our shoulders to the wheels and get it done you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 48,133

Rating: 4.7430658 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talks, ted talks, tedx, environment, green, ted, ted x, oil, ted talk, tedx talk, peak

Id: -zluPQEcK0Y

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

What he's prognosing for the longer term future doesn't seem that disturbing.

I'm personally worried what happens when the consumers realize that the system is coming to an end. What happens when the 20-somethings realize that their iphone-prius future is vanishing before their eyes? What happens when they have to pick up a hoe and go farm some carrots? I think the mental adjustment is going to be harsh and worse than the actual materialistic adjustment.

The techno-utopians will feel as if the base for their "religion" is falling away. A generation of people will become completely disillusioned. That is the fuel for misguided revolutions. What Kunstler said about jetliners in one of his earlier speeches seems to sum up the psychological problem pretty well: "Fill'er up with, uh... Technology!"

[u/VerbalJungleGym]

Great vid.

[u/permanomad]

I'm looking for something lengthier with this guy in it... any vids out there anyone might know about? Maybe a podcast or two for listening at work?

[u/[deleted]]

Kunstler is amazing. I think he underestimates the possibility that renewable energy can bring us back to globalism in some respects, but I'm certainly awaiting a bumpy landing as he's described it.