The soft landing. Kunstler has a telling brief passage about technological optimism that ought to give pause to anyone who thinks we can innovate our way out of the Long Emergency:

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume contra Kunstler that there are technical solutions near to hand that would allow us—not to fully balance the energy deficit that declining oil production will create in our economy, much less to extend the regime of unlimited growth in consumption—but that would allow us with minimal disruption to bridge the gap that separates our current economy from the low-growth, sustainable economy that pretty much has to succeed the fossil fuel age, now certainly drawing to a close. A soft landing, to coin a phrase, though hardly onto a feather bed. Let's say that the challenges facing us are challenges of scale more than challenges of technical innovation, challenges of organization and investment and of social will. Let's say that what faces us is something like the man-on-the-moon challenge, though one really dwarfing it in technical and social complexity, and likelier to require twenty years rather than ten to meet.

The question is, how lucky do we have to be to find our way to that soft landing?

Let's start with the fact that we can't have just any sort of trajectory of oil decline. Oil production will have to continue to increase—i.e., not reach peak—for a substantial part of the next quarter-century: the rate of increase will slow, of course, and will begin to fall well behind the rate of increase of demand, which comes now not just from the United States but from China and India. The energy supply gap will become more and more painful: but it will have to become not too painful at any given point, and not too suddenly. Global competition for oil must be conducted rationally, if not cooperatively, without any of the main players giving in to the temptation to undertake military adventures. Oil producers will have to be honest and transparent in their statements of reserves—rather against their own interests—and the production curve will have to be such that there is general consensus (general political consensus, not just, as in the case of global warming, scientific) on the fact and the timing of the coming oil peak, and the speed of the subsequent production falloff. There will have to be widespread public awareness of, and urgency about, the fossil-fuel transition, but that urgency must never be allowed to tip over into panic.

Telford's Jesse accuses Kunstler of a species of bad faith, for constructing a doomsday scenario by "assuming the worst [outcome] at each turn on the path to the depletion of oil." On the contrary: I think any soft-landing scenario requires that we be maximally lucky, maximally resilient, and maximally wise in negotiating that path. Look at it dispassionately: just how much give is there in the system? The American financial house rests, as Billmon frequently reminds us, on a narrow and shrinking base. (The fact that the chief prop of what Billmon calls "ODIC," the Organization of Dollar Importing Countries, is China, which just happens to be our chief emerging oil competitor, doesn't exactly make the setup any less shaky.) Our political, media, and corporate elites are in the aggregate more parochial, less rational, less capable of foresight and self-sacrifice than at any time since the end of World War II. Many of them regard environmentalism as a form of criminal conspiracy against their interests. Our populace as a whole is sunk, by the deliberate and long-term practice of those elites, in indolence and hopeless fantasies of wealth. A significant proportion of that populace is committed to a crypto-fascist ideology of religious and national particularism, and has had its civic instincts relentlessly (and again deliberately) brutalized by violent, eliminationist rhetoric for most of the last generation—believes, in fact, that any political repudiation it suffers can happen only through the agency of treason.

Is this the description of a polity that can meet the challenge of transitioning its entire economic base away from the energy equations that have grounded it for more than a century? Technical solutions to social problems are never merely technical solutions. The technological optimism that sees a soft landing ahead depends on unspoken assumptions about social and political normalcy—about our capacity as a society for large-scale undertakings and what might be called organized selflessness—that are no longer safe to make. No doubt that capacity still exists, even at our current low political ebb. But the capacity for social violence exists, too: and it's at a dangerously high level. And our heedless profligacy has strained us to the limits; we have little margin for error. All it's going to take is a couple of good, hard knocks—a quick drop in the dollar, a sudden, sharp (and lasting) upward correction in oil prices, an avian flu pandemic, a significant homeland terrorist strike—and we're likely to find that we've swung into a period of wild instability if not active each-against-all struggle.

I can't say it's going to happen. (And I sure as hell don't want it to.) I can say that if it happens, and to the extent it does, we're that much less likely to find the path to the soft landing. With the best will in the world, time isn't our friend: and the best will may be very hard to come by. This is the worst moment in our history to be faced with the success of a fascist tendency within one of the two major parties. Even defeating the Christian Right may not be enough, given their seemingly infinite capacity for resentment (and their probable willingness to translate resentment into violence): but if they continue much longer as a dominant political force, if their GOP minions steal another one in 2008, then God—their God—help us, because it's damn sure at that point we won't be getting help from any other quarter.

posted by michael  10:53:22 AM  
tell me about it []