[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Wishes, Hopes, Fantasies

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (2005)

www.kunstler.com (May 25 2009)


Note: Later this week, Clusterfuck Nation will be migrating back into my
main site, kunstler.com, in a new format (Moveable Type imbedded in my
site) with new overall site design.  This site here on TypePad.com will
be kept up for a few months through the summer directing readers to the
new one, and giving you time to change your bookmarks.


Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunch
meat on industrial-capital's All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is
that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a "lean, mean
machine" for producing "cars that Americans want to buy", and that, by
extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring economy may be
extended a while longer.

This fantasy rests on some assumptions that just don't "pencil out". One
is that the broad American car-owning public can continue to buy their
cars the usual way, on credit. The biggest emerging new class in America
is the "former middle class". Credit kept the remnants of the middle
class going for decades after their incomes stopped growing in the
1970s. Now, their incomes have stopped coming in altogether and they are
sinking into swamp of entropy already occupied by the
tattoo-for-lunch-bunch. Of course, this has plenty of dire
sociopolitical implications.

Unfortunately, the big American banks did their biggest volume business
in their biggest loans at the very time that that the middle class was
on its way to becoming former. Now that the former middle class is
arriving at its destination, the banks are so damaged by bad paper that
they won't make loans to even the remnant of the remnant of the middle
class. In other words, the entire model for financing Happy Motoring is
now out-of-order, probably permanently.

Even assuming some Americans can continue buying cars one way or
another, I'm not convinced that we can make the kinds we fantasize
about. Notice, nobody talks about hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars
anymore. Why not? Because the technicalities and logistics could not be
overcome at the scale required - that is, at the current scale of mass
highway motoring and commuting. Sure, you could build a demonstration
vehicle and run it around a test track a few times, but could you build
a mass production car by the tens of millions that would run for 150,000
miles without a hugely expensive fuel cell change-out? No, at least not
within the time-window that the liquid hydrocarbon fuel problem
presented. Or could you construct a hydrogen fuel station (and product
delivery) network replacing the old gasoline stations? Fuggeddabowdit.
Hydrogen, as an element, was just too hard to move and contain. It's
teeny-weeny atoms leaked out of valves and gaskets remorselessly and you
couldn't pack enough into a tanker truck to make the trip to its
destination worthwhile. Schemes to generate hydrogen on-board all ended
up in the "perpetual motion" sink.

The current wish is that the dregs of GM and Chrysler will hire low-paid
elves with no pension or health benefits and pump out hybrid and/or
electric cars. It's conceivable that we could "reverse-engineer" a Prius
or an Insight, but considering what a lousy job American car companies
did on reverse-engineering everything that Japan or Germany pumped out
over the past thirty-five years, the odds are pretty high that these new
products will be just lame enough to fail against the established
competition. What's more, they also present logistical and technical
problems. For the hybrid, gasoline is still an issue (and Jevon's
Paradox comes into play: the more efficient you make a means for using a
resource, the more of that resource you will use). For both the hybrid
and the electric car, the issue of how to get enough lithium for the
batteries obtains, at least for now, given the current state-of-the-art
battery technology. Most of this rare metal now comes from one place,
Bolivia, and everybody wants "a piece" of it. Electric vehicles in large
numbers depend on either coal or nuclear powered electric generation,
each presenting special hazards. Both hybrids and electric cars would
depend on the old installment loan purchase system - at least to work in
the current mode of suburban living, long-range commuting, and
interstate highway travel.

Boone Pickens's plan of last year for converting the US car fleet to
natural gas was another fantasy with wide appeal. But it depended on the
companion fantasy of building massive wind-farm infrastructure on the
great plains to shift natural gas use from power plants to vehicles, and
the financial crisis has destroyed the capital necessary to even begin
planning that project - it even destroyed a large part of Mr Pickens own
capital reserves. Anyway, I would not be so sanguine about the long-term
future of the shale gas plays that this scheme was based on. The
depletion rates of these wells is horrendous and the amount of steel
needed to keep production up is not consistent with the realities of the
available infrastructure.

All the technologies under consideration are not likely to extend the
Happy Motoring era. A prayerful reflection on them can only reinforce
the specialness of oil and its byproducts - cheap oil double-specially -
as well as reinforcing the reality that the cheap energy era itself is
over. And, of course, in the play of events over the past several years
we can see the relationship between cheap energy and easy credit, and
how our entire economy has run aground, one way or another, on resource
limits.

The implications of all this in the sociopolitical and geopolitical
realms are pretty daunting. As long as we maintain Happy Motoring as the
normal mode of existence in this country, we are going to see an
ever-growing class of very resentful citizens pissed off at being
foreclosed from it. In my oft-repeated scheme-of-things, this leads very
quickly to the trap of political extremism, perhaps even corn-pone
Naziism, as the system becomes increasingly difficult to prop up except
by force. In geopolitical terms it leads to ever more dangerous
international contests over the world's remaining oil reserves.

All this leads to two conclusions.

One is to accept the fact that the Happy Motoring era is over and to
devote our remaining resources to re-localization, walkable communities,
and public transit. It obviously requires a very drastic revision of our
current collective self-image, of what we aspire to and who we are. If
the car companies have any future at all, it should be based on making
the rolling stock for public transit - and for now the most intelligent
choice for us is to fix the existing passenger railroad lines instead of
venturing into grandiose new transit systems requiring stupendous
capital outlays. Let the car era wind down gracefully. Triage and
prioritize the highway maintenance agenda - we won't be affluent enough
to keep repaving the whole existing system - and let other nations meet
the diminishing demand for cars in the USA. This would be a "best case"
scenario. (Other nations may decide to go further up the Happy Motoring
road at their own eventual peril.)

My second conclusion is not so appetizing, namely that the bankruptcy of
General Motors may set in motion a chain of events that will accelerate
the destructive unwind of the bad credit economy, the damage to our bond
values, the loss of faith in our currency, and the authority and
legitimacy of our leaders. This last dire outcome might be allayed if,
say, President Obama directed his policy efforts to the items in the
paragraph above, that is, a reality-based agenda for true change in how
we live - but who can feel confident about that happening these days?
Maybe it will take a horrifying chain of events to get Mr Obama there.
And then, tragically, he may be overwhelmed by the chain of events
itself. I hope not.

_____

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

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