[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Status Quo-oh

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)

www.kunstler.com (June 16 2008)

My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at
all booksellers.
____________________________________


A catastrophe for Iowa farmers will not be just a catastrophe for
Midwestern Americans. In the Iowa floods, we'll see more evidence of how
the problems of weird weather (climate change) combine and ramify the
problems associated with peak oil. In this particular case they lead to
an inflection point sometime around the 2008 harvest season, which will
also be our time of political harvest.

These are not your daddy's or granddaddy's floods. These are 500-year
floods, events not seen before non-Indian people starting living out on
that stretch of the North American prairie. The vast majority of
home-owners in Eastern Iowa did not have flood insurance because the
likelihood of being affected above the 500-year-line was so miniscule -
their insurance agents actually advised them against getting it. The
personal ruin out there will be comprehensive and profound, a wet
version of the 1930s Dust Bowl, with families facing total loss and
perhaps migrating elsewhere in the nation because they have no home to
go back to.

Iowa in 2008 will be an even slower-motion disaster than Hurricane
Katrina in 2005. Beyond the troubles of 25,000 people who have lost all
their material possessions is a world whose grain reserves stand at
record lows. The crop losses in Iowa will aggravate what is already a
pretty dire situation. So far, the US Public has experienced the world
grain situation mainly in higher supermarket prices. Cheap corn is
behind the magic of the American processed food industry - all those
pizza pockets and juicy-juice boxes that frantic Americans resort to
because they have no time between two jobs and family-chauffeur duties
to actually cook (note: reheating is not cooking).

Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the
steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertilizer. Both of
these "inputs" have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap. Oil-
and gas-based farming had already reached a crisis stage before the
flood of Iowa. Diesel fuel is a dollar-a-gallon higher than gasoline.
Natural gas prices have doubled over the past year, sending fertilizer
prices way up. American farmers are poorly positioned to reform their
practices. All that cheap fossil fuel masks a tremendous decay of skill
in husbandry. The farming of the decades ahead will be a lot more
complicated than just buying x-amount of "inputs" (on credit) to be
dumped on a sterile soil growth medium and spread around with giant
diesel-powered machines.

Like a lot of other activities in American life these days, agribusiness
is unreformable along its current lines. It will take a convulsion to
change it, and in that convulsion it will be dragged kicking and
screaming into a new reality. As that occurs, the US public will have to
contend with more than just higher taco chip prices. We're heading into
the Vale of Malthus - Thomas Robert Malthus, the British
economist-philosopher who introduced the notion that eventually world
population would overtake world food production capacity. Malthus has
been scorned and ridiculed in recent decades, as fossil fuel-cranked
farming allowed the global population to go vertical.
Techno-triumphalist observers who should have known better attributed
this to the "green revolution" of bio-engineering. Malthus is back now,
along with his outriders: famine, pestilence, and war.

We're headed, it seems, toward a fall "crunch time," and that crunching
sound will not be of cheez doodles and taco chips consumed on the sofas
of America. I think we're heading into a season of hoarding. As the
presidential campaign moves into its final round, Americans may be
hard-up for both food and gasoline. On the oil scene, the next event on
the horizon is not just higher prices but shortages. Chances are, they
will occur first in the Southeast states because oil exports from Mexico
and Venezuela feeding the Gulf of Mexico refineries are down more than
thirty percent over 2007.

Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers
are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while
getting paid $2000 for loads that cost them $3000 to deliver. In Europe
last week, enraged truckers paralyzed the food distribution networks of
Spain and Portugal. The passivity of US truckers so far has been a
striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They
might continue to just crawl off one by one and die. But it's also
possible that, at some point, they'll mount a Night of the Living Dead
offensive and take their vengeance out on "the system" that has brought
them to ruin. America has only about a three-day supply of food in any
of its supermarkets.

The yet-more-ominous thing here is that shortages of food and oil are
two fiascos that are pretty clearly predictable for the second half of
the year. That's bad enough without figuring in the "unknowns" that
could kick up American hardship a few more notches.The hurricane season
just got underway - obscured for the moment by the bigger weather story
in Iowa. The fate of the banks is a train wreck still waiting to happen.
As it occurs - also heading into the high political and hurricane
seasons - we could find ourselves not only a nation wet, hungry, and out
of gas, but also completely broke. I'm sorry that Tim Russert will not
be here to talk us through it all.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/06/status-quo-oh.html


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