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May 8, 2005 - Art Bell
02:54:38
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Howard Kunstler - The Coming Energy Crisis
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From the high desert in the great American southwest, I'm your host, Bill McKenzie.
Good morning, good afternoon, as the case may be across this great land of ours and
well beyond.
Every single one of those time zones covered by our program, Coast to Coast AM, I'm Mark Bell, and it's great to be here.
It's a Sunday, Monday morning, and what a night it's going to be.
You may recall not too long ago, I I read an article from The Rolling Stone, which was so damn good about oil, called The Long Emergency, by James Howard Koestler.
And Koestler, I guess it is.
Koestler.
Okay.
Koestler.
Anyway, it was so good about oil, and about where we are with oil in the world, that I read damn near the whole thing on the air.
And he obviously heard about it, and now tonight he's going to be a guest.
The Long Emergency, James Kessler.
So, that'll be in the next hour.
We are in the midst of another, yet another free Streamlink weekend, which means it's free.
Wherever you are in the world, you can listen free of charge.
Now, it runs through 6 a.m.
Pacific Time, Monday morning.
So, right up until then, Then debuting on Monday is our new Streamlink feature, Podcasting.
That is the latest in the world.
Podcasting, which automatically will download the MPEG-3s.
It is now included with the regular subscription price, which we have not raised as we continue to add new features.
So now you can just put it all on a pod.
Pretty cool, actually.
My webcam photo tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is very interesting.
The webcam photo is of an area between Baker, California and here in Pahrump.
And of course we took a ride, I don't know, a week or so ago to California and on the way back.
This is our desert.
What you see in that photograph is water.
And that water is perhaps two or three inches, maybe in places deeper, but it's miles and miles of water out there in the middle of the desert.
What is usually a dry lake bed is not so dry, and when the winds come up, and believe me, they're about to.
In fact, we have 45 mile an hour winds forecast for tomorrow, Monday.
When the winds come up, that water can shift miles.
It's an amazing, amazing thing out here in the middle of the desert.
You've got to remember I'm 20 miles or so from Death Valley, California, and And so this is an unusual, very interesting part of our United States.
And so there it is.
That's two or three inches deep water that literally goes on for miles.
And that's what's in my webcam tonight.
And now, I can't resist doing this.
I'll keep it very, very short, but I am so proud of this I could squeak.
This, again, is going to be a sort of a demo for amateur radio operators out there of this incredible new thing called ESSB.
And being a ham, I've been experimenting and I think those of you with good sharp ears are going to hear the difference big time.
I added a recording of yet a further audio advance within the limitations described last week.
So what you're going to hear is recorded a few hundreds of miles away, almost a thousand in fact.
And it's two different recordings.
The second recording represents the big advance.
I'll just give you a little pieces of it.
Here's the standard.
2.4 type sideband Donald Duck sounding audio that you hear that Ham's have always had.
Here it is.
No, that's the wrong... Get the right CD in there.
That's my break music.
Boom Bop, which I love, by the way.
I'm still complaining about that show dying.
Anyway, here's the first demo, 2.4.
Alright, um, this is W60VB in Trump, Nevada with a brief recording at standard bandwidth of 2.4.
Sounds pretty rough, huh?
Alright, now wait till you hear this.
This is a yet further improved ESSB.
Listen to this.
Hey, W6OVBN from Nevada, near Las Vegas, and we're doing a sound and audio check on some new software.
Hello, test 1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1.
The, uh, new 9000D is sitting here sparkling in front of me and working quite reasonably.
All right, that's the new 9000, Yaesu 9000D radio that I'm, uh, very privileged to be testing.
And that was the audio coming from it, recorded at 3.6.
So there you are.
It's a giant advance, gigantic advance in amateur radio.
Those of you curious about learning more, wanting to know more, go to the site NU9N.com.
Nancy United, NU9, is it NU9?
How did I just get that screwed?
N-U-9-N-dot-com.
That's it.
N-A-N-C-E-U-N-I-T-E-D-N-I-N-A-N-C-E-D-D-O-T-C-O-M.
And you can go to the MPEG-3 pull-down menu and listen and hear some stuff even better than I've done, but I'm getting there!
And that was pretty good.
Alright, let's look around the world a little bit.
Changing the tone from tough talk to friendship, President Bush and Vladimir Putin went out of their way to take a united stand on Middle East peace and terrorism Sunday.
After sharp words in recent days about democratic backsliding and post-war Soviet domination, a smiling Putin even put Bush behind the wheel of his prized 1956 Volga, a pristine white sedan, and let him take it for a spin around the grounds of his private compound 25 miles west of Moscow.
North Korea.
It would seem, is considering exploding a nuclear device as a demonstration.
They're now thought to have perhaps five or even six, as many as five or six nuclear weapons, and they may just let one of them off.
And if they do, of course, that would be at least a partial ding-ding for Major Ed Daines.
Whether it's used in anger or not, I guess, would be subjective.
I don't know when you set off a friendly nuclear device.
An explosion of insurgent violence killed seven U.S.
service members in Iraq over the weekend, even as the Shiite-dominated parliament approved four more Sunni Arabs to serve as government ministers.
One of the four Sunnis rejected the post on the grounds of tokenism, tarnishing the Shiite premier's bid to Include the disaffected minority believed to be driving Iraq's deadly insurgency.
A deadly aircraft accident in Afghanistan, kind of a dumb thing in this case, said to be the result of asking for an exciting flight on an otherwise dull mission demonstrating for visiting dignitaries how troops are sped into battle.
So I guess they said let's Everything's kind of dull out there.
Let's make this flight really exciting, and I guess that's a little too much excitement.
The seven-story freak wave that slammed into the cruise ship Norwegian Dawn last month apparently wasn't so freakish after all.
Rogue waves are much more common than people realize, and scientists are starting to predict when and where they're going to strike.
Government wave forecasts generally are about as accurate as weather predictions.
Wave forecasts made by the U.S.
deal with data grid points that are 15.5 miles apart, which misses the fine points crucial to boaters.
Now, a Texas A&M University scientist, Vijay Prasang, I believe it is, of Galveston, and his associates say they can now actually predict the daily height of any waves Anywhere off the coast of the United States for the next 48 hours across spaces as close as, get this, 500 yards apart.
People who live in coastal Maine are already using his forecasts when he proved his point by comparing his model output with measurements made by buoys.
His predictions frequently show waves as high as 30 feet, even in close-in coastal waters, sometimes as high as 100 feet.
And of course, when this one hit that cruise ship, it broke windows, threw furniture across cabins, that kind of thing.
More in a moment.
Anybody out there want their own personal super computer?
You can get them now.
They've just gone on sale.
A personal computer that packs the processing punch of a miniature supercomputer has gone on sale here in the U.S.
The DC-96 computer was developed by Orion Multisystems in California.
Here in the U.S.
and is aimed at scientists and engineers who routinely carry out computationally intensive calculations.
About the size of a small refrigerator, the DC-96 contains a cluster, get this, of 96 interconnected low-voltage microprocessors, each of which is capable of running at 1.2 GHz, or 1.2 billion cycles per second.
Together, these processors give the machine a peak computing power of 230 gigaflops, or the ability to carry out 230 billion complex mathematical operations per second.
The machine also comes with a massive 192 gigabytes of memory.
Such computer power does not come cheap, however, as you might imagine.
And one DC-96, in case you're about to run out and try and get one, is $100,000.
But Orion Multisystems claims the DC-96 offers an alternative for those who normally have to share supercomputer power within a laboratory or a company.
So there you have it.
You can now get your own, your very own personal supercomputer.
Of course, you spend your $100,000 and then next year The 97 will come out or something, and there you are.
A franchise is a store or a restaurant, you know, kind of like The Gap or Kentucky Fried Chicken, that you can find in every town in the U.S.
and often abroad as well.
Now, space pioneer Bert Rutan says travel agents that can book you on a space travel vacation ...will soon be as common as fast food franchises.
This from unknowncountry.com, Whitley's website.
He plans to build spacecraft with large cabins, where you can walk around just like you can in a conventional airplane.
That is, once the initial takeoff is completed, or blast off, if you will, with large windows through which passengers can get an astronaut-style view of the receding Earth, The moon, and perhaps even some nearby planets.
Passengers will float around the cabin during four or five minutes of complete weightlessness.
Kelly Young writes in New Scientist that Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, has been hired to build five spaceships for Virgin Atlantic.
Galactic.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's quite a change.
Not Virgin Atlantic.
Virgin Galactic!
A division of Virgin Airlines.
Rutan sees the future of space travel As just another version of McDonald's, as you will, with a tourist operator who arranges these trips in every mall.
In the first year, he says, he can book trips for 500 people.
A decade after that, the number could reach 100,000.
Space travel will no longer just be for astronauts or the super-rich, but Rutan thinks Excessive government regulation may end the personal spaceflight industry before it even gets going.
In February of 2005, the FAA issued strict guidelines for space tourism, which do not bode well for the future.
Elon Musk, CEO of Space Exploration Technologies, is planning to build small, reusable spacecraft called Falcon 1 and Falcon 5 to ferry tourists into space.
He also complains about too damn much government regulation.
So, there you have it.
Why do you suppose the government would not want people like Bert Rutan and other companies ferrying the world's population outside of our orbit?
Could there be something they, well, don't want us to see?
What do you think?
The Army is bringing to the battlefield flexible plastic sheeting that, get this, converts light into energy.
Technology that could someday find its way into the casing of laptops or even clothing to power portable devices.
Konarka Technologies Inc.
has signed a $1.6 million contract with the Army Which it hopes is going to lighten the load for troops who must lug around batteries.
You know, batteries are very heavy, and they power everything from night vision goggles to GPS units, you name it, for the modern army.
Troops instead could recharge devices by simply connecting them with energy converting plastic sheets, replacing disposable batteries, and easing logistical requirements in remote settings.
I wonder if this includes Nanotechnology.
As you know, there's quite a bit of nanotechnology on the horizon that would allow people to paint houses with this stuff and draw energy from it.
Well, you probably heard this headline last week, I would imagine.
What a story.
Four-month-old pup survives after its ears, eyes are all glued shut.
Glued shut.
Brittany Garcia heard her four-month-old puppy howling with pain, ran to its aid.
What she discovered astonished Des Moines police, angered the veterinarian who has cared for the dog.
Dog is named Precious.
This occurred last Sunday.
Someone used a strong, fast-drying glue in an attempt to seal shut the puppy's mouth, nose, eyes, and other body parts.
The veterinarian said it just dumbfounds you to hear about it, but it's even more shocking to see it.
Precious is a puppy on poodle mix.
Garcia said she heard the dog yelping outside her home near Grandview Municipal Golf Course on the city's northeast side.
She said, he started to scream when I touched his ears.
And I thought, what is this?
She rubbed a moist towel across the puppy's eyes.
And they slowly began to open.
Moisture, you see, around the mouth and nose prevented the glue from sealing tightly in those areas.
Using medication and general anesthesia to dull the pain, the glue was removed from the ears, eyes, and other parts of Precious's body.
He said when he paused to take a break, Precious would offer an appreciative lick.
Luckily, the puppy's doing great.
We managed to revive most of it.
It's amazing what people will do.
I think there is a... If there is a hell, then there's a very special little place in hell for people who would do that to animals.
Very special place.
I can only imagine what it would be like.
Absolutely unbelievable to me.
All right, we are going to take some calls now and sort of do open lines and anything you would like to talk about between now And the top of the hour.
And once again, at the top of the hour, we're really going to have quite a time of it.
This is a topic that, well, for example, most of you, I think, commute.
You drive a car, certainly.
And you've been buying gas lately.
And you know what the price of gas is like.
It's up and way out of sight.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
I saw today CNN headline news was touting a big 2 cent drop in gas prices nationally.
Isn't that great?
2 cents.
We go up 10 or 20 cents and then they back off 2 cents and we collectively go, whew!
Boy, that's better!
2 cents!
And we forget about the 18 still left that, you know, and then it goes up another 20 cents.
Then it drops 2 or 3 cents.
And I think that is the strategy of the oil companies, frankly.
Ridiculous raise in prices, followed by two or three cents to make us all feel better.
Anyway, we'll talk about oil tonight.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
How are you this evening?
Quite well, sir.
Well, I was just calling about the weather here in El Campo, Sacramento.
This is the KFTE 650 AM.
Yes, sir.
And just the weather we've been getting over the past couple days here, it's just phenomenal.
Yes, and when that storm reaches me, instead of producing a lot of rain, it's going to produce wicked winds.
We've got a wind advisory for the desert that I'm not looking forward to.
Well, they're talking about heavy, heavy snow in the mountains, too.
This falls along with yours and Whitley's changing superstorm, changing weather.
Well, there's no question about the weather changing.
I think that question is already answered.
The question is whether we're going to get up off our high horses, realize it, and do anything about it.
There's nothing we can do about it.
Well, that may be true.
Actually, that's not true.
You know, there are some things we can do.
If we recognize we're going to get a big shift in global weather patterns, we can begin to shift where we do our agriculture.
Slowly shift it and kind of prepare for it so You know, so a lot of people don't end up starving to death.
That's true, but the actual damage that's been done is irreversible at this point.
It's going to take the Earth itself to heal the damage that we've inflicted upon it.
But I think it's more than just us.
I think it's fallen in line with coming in line with the Galactic Center.
Well, that may or may not be.
Thank you very much for the call.
It could be all kinds of reasons.
For the weather change, including, of course, the cycle of the sun itself, the earth, big cycles, and smaller ones.
The earth itself goes through.
We have plenty of evidence of all of that from coring that's done.
We know these cycles come and go.
And so we could be in the midst of one of those changes, or at the precipice of one of them, beginning to notice it right now.
But there is no question, the weather is doing some pretty odd things.
And so we're battening down the hatches here in the desert as the West Coast takes the brunt of yet another big storm.
When it gets here, the pressure difference that we're going to experience is going to cause incredible winds.
So we're in the midst of tying everything down here in the desert.
But all across America, if you look at the central portion right now, they're getting some pretty vicious storms.
Producing, I might add, plenty of static on the short wave bands.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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Can you hear my heartbeat in this courtroom? Do you know that behind all this caution, lies the city's silent amenity?
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It's 2 a.m.
and we're here to talk.
It's 2 a.m.
I said, we're gonna go.
Because I'm still warm.
I'm gonna make this plan and I'm taking a chance.
Yellow snow on the loose, and sirens in my head.
I'm trapped inside when stars took it to death.
I'm cold, my whole life spins into a frantic.
And I'm stepping into the twilight zone.
This is a madhouse, it feels like deep home.
I think I'm in love with a moving star.
And I'm gonna let it fall to the floor.
And I'm stepping into the twilight zone.
Alright everybody, listen very closely.
Our telephone numbers on the weekend are just a little bit different than during the week.
So if you want to get through, here's the way you do it.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
From west to the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access number, pressing Option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
800-893-0903. From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM
Hope everybody enjoyed the replay last night, by the way, which we had to do because we had promised of the Amityville Horror.
George Lutz, the real story of the Amityville Horror, right back with all of you.
And now, our leap into the gene pool.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, uh, my name's Steven, San Francisco.
Yes.
And I, uh, heard on, uh, Democracy Now, they reported that the oil companies like, I guess, Exxon Mobil, I'm not sure, but they're a 44% profit.
A 44% profit.
I mean, isn't that against the law?
The price gouging on the water during the L.A.
riots was $4 a gallon, and these guys got in trouble for selling the water for $4 a gallon.
Well, let's put it this way, sir.
If that was the interest on your credit card, it would be usury.
Well, that's another good way of looking at it.
I hear you mention HAARP quite a bit.
I think they're using HAARP to make us oblivious to this.
We'll let it go right over our heads.
Well, then it's not working because you're obviously not oblivious, nor am I. Well, I saw the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, and that's got me conscious to the mind over matter control.
Yes, well, as I mentioned toward the bottom of the hour, sir, what they do is they raise the price of gas 15 or 20 cents.
We're all in a horrified mood.
The economy begins to tank.
Then they lower it 2 or 3 cents, and we all go, yay!
That's right.
They're going to level it out.
$2.39 a gallon, I heard.
As I mentioned, I drove down to L.A.
and went through Baker, California.
The price of premium in Baker was $3.19 when I got there.
Oh, man.
Yeah, they really got us.
You know, the patents on these lesser energy, environmentally better sound things should be more mandatory in our society rather than, you know, What's going on here?
In fact, I took a picture of that gas price.
I'll try and get it up there.
Thank you very much.
I will do that.
I'll try and do it during my next break.
I was so astounded at $3.19 that I said, come on, let's stop here for a minute and take a picture of this.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yeah, Art?
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I'm Richard.
I'm calling from Oregon.
Welcome.
Yeah, I have a cat story.
Okay.
We had a Manx cat, and it had two little kittens.
In the corner of our closet, in the next morning, the kittens passed away.
Well, my children were horrified, and the mother cat, for the next 24 hours, was pacing up and down in the basement, underneath the couches, just looking for her kittens.
She would not stop.
Well, our neighbor happened to have a barn, and they had a litter of kittens two weeks earlier.
So I had the bright idea, and I asked them if we could have a couple of their kittens, which also were Manx.
So I took the two kittens, which were two weeks older, so they were twice as big as her newborns, I put them back in the closet and rubbed them around in where her original kittens were born, and I let Portia outside before I did this, and the kittens were upstairs in the closet, And as soon as I opened up the door, she came in and started looking around, and then she just froze.
And then she just jammed upstairs, and she found the two kittens, and it had all the scent of her little kittens in it, and she was purring.
She wouldn't leave them alone.
Oh, what a wonderful thing to have done.
And so now she's nursing them, I take it?
Oh, just like her own, except they're, you know, twice as big as her kittens, and she was just Just meowing and purring.
She wouldn't leave their side.
We had to bring her the food.
Our children were young at the time, so it was a real neat thing for them to go through.
Yeah, it was quite an experience.
It really touched all of our hearts.
Congratulations to you.
Hey, thank you.
That's really a cool thing to have done.
Thank you very much.
And the opposite of that story I had to read the last half hour.
That's incredible.
She was so happy, I guess, just to be involved in motherhood.
She probably knew, but it probably didn't matter.
Yes, Mr. Bell, I'm going to give you an explanation of why the so-called global warming is occurring, instead of just letting you and all your liberal listeners attack our glorious oil companies, our great American oil companies.
Glorious oil companies?
Yes, they have done wonderful things for this country and have built us up into a wonderful powerhouse of economics, but don't try to get me off topic here.
I'm going to tell you what is happening with global warming.
It's because hell is becoming hotter, Mr. Bell, as more filthy souls are cast down into the center of the pit of hell.
Yes.
Stoking the fires of hell, right?
The boiling fires, the boiling pits of sewage of hell are becoming hotter every day, and it's because of the pornography industry.
Yeah.
The pornography industry, with the so-called industry, which is not really an industry because there's not enough people to buy that kind of So hell is heating up.
I mean, it comes down to hell is heating up.
And that is leaking out.
It's leaking out and causing global hellish warming.
That's correct.
That's why you have volcanoes going off and tsunamis going off.
I'm going to tell you why.
I'm going to tell you why God punished those people down there.
The day after Christmas, he gave them a present because they didn't celebrate Christmas.
And then right after Easter, he shook them again with another earthquake and told them, you get off here, you're a heathen.
He didn't, he didn't, I won't say it, but you, you begin to celebrate our holiday or I'm going to punish you worse!
Now listen Mr. Bell.
Yes?
I want to get back.
You're trying to get me off topic for the pornographers.
No.
The pornographers that are destroying this nation, and pornography is simply produced for one thing, and that is to induce self-abuse.
Well, I... Really?
Really.
That's correct.
Actually, I prefer... Wait a minute.
I prefer... I like your first theory, that hell is heating up, and of course the pornographers' souls are going down and stoking the fires of hell.
so they can swipe with their demonic claws to drag down with them, or going down with them.
And I'm gonna tell you what, the hail is becoming hotter, and it's boiling over,
and it's bubbling up in the heat, and the bodies that are burning in there, they're devils.
And how do you know that you're not gonna be down there stoking the fires yourself?
Well, I'm not gonna be down there burning in the fires, but if God asked me to go down and turn up the heat a
little bit, I certainly will help him out and do that.
I'm going to be in heaven, Mr. Bell.
And you have never, never seen a pornographic shot in your whole life, right?
What are you trying to do?
What are you trying to do?
I'm asking a straight-on question.
You know that I have to review pornography.
You know the enemy.
I don't need it at all.
You must know the enemy.
And so, with no enjoyment seen whatsoever, you must review what the enemy produces.
You're trying to get me off-topic.
No, no, no, no, no.
Self-abuse.
Self-abuse, masturbation.
Your whole telephone call demonstrates that, buddy.
thank you uh... where was that
East of the Rockies, you're on here.
Hello.
Hi Art.
I just heard that.
I like his global warming theory, actually.
Well, I've heard that the heat of the earth is getting worse.
Yes, well, that fits right in.
Anyway, what I was going to tell you about is, I just heard on On grudge that the government has just put out these little planes and they've got remote control cameras and now they can spy into everybody's house.
So you mean little spy planes?
Uh-huh, and the police department's in on it too.
Why do you think they would want to look in your house though?
I think they're getting scared.
I think that the people, what I guess you'd call the new world order, they're getting scared because they know that people are fighting them.
And, uh, that may be part of it.
And, um... So if you see a little airplane, um, hovering or buzzing by your window, it's your government at work.
Mm-hmm.
Looking right in.
And the thing is, it goes against our Constitution, and I think that we need to get the people together in this country to start fighting, because they said when you do anything that goes against the country's Constitution, it's treason.
Well, these are, look, these are just drones, right?
Yeah, but they're... Well, then shoot them down.
That's what my husband said.
Probably someone would probably get shot at.
Alright, thank you.
Listen, thanks dear.
I've got to move on.
That's an interesting vision.
Little planes dispatched by our government to spy on you.
Now I understood we had drones, but I thought they were used mainly in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Places like that.
But no, she insists they're there to look right into your house.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hey, Art.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Well, I don't know.
That's changing by the moment.
Yeah, I noticed.
Hey, I had a kind of a question and a comment.
Sure.
A lot of your individuals that get on the show and talk about various religions and philosophies and spirituality and all of these things.
My question has always been, I thought prophecy was prophecy.
and that it is something that might manifest in the future and there's no guarantee that it will.
I just find it interesting that humanity as a whole seems to want to make all of the revelations
of the Bible, the Mark of the Beast, with RFID chips and all this kind of stuff, become manifest
as a reality. Now it's man that is manifesting these things.
Do you think, in other words, you believe that we are causing these things to start
becoming true ourselves and we're trying trying to manifest what the Bible says will happen.
We're causing all this to happen ourselves.
Well, basically, if you look at society as a whole, and you look at how the government's doing things, and how private industry's doing things, it's all in the name of homeland security.
My personal observation is that if you believe that If the terrorists were the only ones who participated in 9-11, then you're uneducated.
That's my own observation.
But as far as my comment, most people don't challenge things that are written in various books, such as the Bible.
When Adam and Eve were in the garden and the Lord God, not God, but the Lord God said, if you eat of the tree of knowledge, you shall become like one of us, no good and evil.
Well, how is there a difference if God was supposed to be the omnipresent being of all goodness?
Why is there a separation?
Why is there a parallel or a paradox?
So, a lot of people that call up and preach all this spiritual stuff, which I believe in the Creator, but not in the sense that man has put the connotations on it.
i think in feel that we've manifest these things as an excuse
to make these realities come true because we can't see the force through
tree so they become self-fulfilling prophecy quickly and if you
really apply that to society as a whole
i mean you know the cut like uh... senators and everything passing the
homeland security act would and none of them read it or the patriarchy
none of them read i understand why you're upset with all of these things and
i don't think any of us except them without being somewhat nervous but
if you were a senator or you were the president and you had to react to what
happened on nine eleven and and and the ongoing terrorism threat
that we face uh...
what will be a bit really wait let me finish let me finish what would you do
uh...
i'd make sure i had all my ducks in a row and all the information was valid
and i had real proof that the things were
Alright, well that's where we differ.
He of course thinks that the 9-11 thing was aided, abetted, if not committed by our own government.
As you know, I don't agree with that position at all.
And I think the terrorism threat that we face is absolutely real.
I don't think it's cooked up.
And I think that if you or I or any of us were in charge, we'd have to do some of the same things that have been done.
And I don't accept them without some nervousness and trepidation about our own constitutional erosion.
The amount of erosion taking place in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, that's occurring without question.
But to not react would not have been acceptable either.
So it's where that line is.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Is that me, Art?
That is you, sir.
Oh, this is wonderful.
This is Mike.
I'm an over-the-road truck driver listening on XM Radio.
A long-time listener, first-time caller.
I can't believe I got through.
Yes, nevertheless, here you are.
This happened to me a few years ago.
I was laying in my sleeper in my truck, and I seen a bright white light in front of the curtain.
You know, in the over-the-road truck, you have the curtain that separates the front from the back of the truck.
Sure.
And I opened the curtain and this was my ex-wife.
We had been divorced for several years and she was in the front of the truck and I said, what are you doing here?
And she said, I'm here for you.
And she came back into the sleeper.
Now this is going to be clean.
But she laid down beside me and kissed me.
And when she leaned over and kissed me, all of a sudden a black envelope just encased my entire body.
And I felt like something was trying to suck the very life out of me and I was fighting and struggling.
Yeah, I was pretty much terrified at that point, not knowing what was going on.
And I had no idea what to do, and I'm not a really religious person, but I invoked the name of Jesus.
I said, in Jesus' name, you're gone.
Jesus, make my ex-wife be gone!
I know it sounds crazy, but... Did it work?
She disappeared.
But this thing was real.
I woke up in a cold... No, no, I'm with you.
She did leave, right?
Yes, you did.
All right, well, that's... You know, maybe she had an OBE and she designed to visit you and repay you for whatever her perceived gripes were during your marriage.
But that's a pretty horrible thought, isn't it?
An ex suddenly comes to visit you with obvious evil intent.
Only the name of the Lord could... Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Good evening, Art.
Good evening.
It's Jim in Los Angeles, listening on KFI.
Yes, sir, the mighty KFI.
Yes.
And in light of your guest next hour, I wanted to ask you about a couple of your previous guests that may be relevant to that.
Okay.
That is, one was a device called a Hydristor.
It was an interview you had last fall.
Oh, yes.
And it certainly seemed interesting.
And another seemed, was a little bit more wild, but I think it was a guy that George talked with, little stickers that you put on either your windows or your gas tank and have interesting vibrational effects on them.
I shouldn't laugh, but I don't know about that.
Well, I don't know either.
If I thought putting a sticker on my gas tank would get better mileage, boy, I'd be plastered.
Yeah, and it's actually for just that reason that I wanted to ask about these things, because... Maybe you've got to put smiley faces on there, you know?
Smiley faces for better mileage.
I guess my thought was, is there any follow-up on that, and have these things been Either confirmed or challenged by either people in your world or the Coastal audience or... All right.
I will hereby challenge the stickers without any further investigation.
I hereby challenge the sticker idea.
Much as it might be a nice thing to do, if you're going to try it, I recommend smiley faces for good mileage.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes.
I can't believe I got through.
You have.
I was hoping I'd do it before the hour ended, so I'd know you were going to another guest.
Yes.
Theory about chemtrails.
Okay.
First of all, you may be thinking about this.
Why don't we see them landing, take them off?
There's so many of them.
I'm a Pennsylvania.
Why don't we see them landing and... Oh, you mean in planes?
Well, what I'm saying is there are so many of them.
Yes.
Nobody sees these unmarked planes landing, taking off.
Well, the theory is that some of them are standard jetliners, just using modified fuel, and you can see them landing and taking off every day.
Well, the theory I was getting at was because some of them are unmarked and we don't see unmarked planes taking off.
And landing, and or refueling, and so there's so many people involved.
Maybe sir, it's because they land and take off from unmanned.
Okay, well my thoughts were, they're not really aircraft, what they are, are, whatever they're spraying, is, uh, well of course we don't know what they're spraying, but what possibly it is, they are actually UFOs looking, that look like airplanes, only to throw us off.
So in other words, uh, E.T.s that are doing something to this planet, and so we don't see that there are saucers or cigar shapes or triangles or whatever, and they can get them to do the spraying.
Do you think they're spraying good things or bad things?
I wouldn't have a guess on that.
I would imagine what they're doing clandestinely is probably not very good.
And I don't know, but if they are, what I'm thinking they might be, because there's so many of them, where do all these planes come from?
And they're spraying, and whatever they're doing, in disguise, if they can have a craft that defies gravity, and defies conventional aerodynamics, they certainly have them look like aircraft that nobody would suspect that they are unconventional aircraft.
Alright sir, I appreciate the call.
I don't know.
I've thought a lot about that.
If there are ETs, what are their motives?
Benign or malignant?
And I think the odds are just about an even call for either one.
They may not be the fuzzy little creatures depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In fact, they may be quite malignant.
We don't know that.
From the high desert in the middle of the night where we do our best work, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I can feel it coming.
Be it sight, sound, smell or touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak when it moves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
To have all these things in our memory stored?
And they use them to cover us in blood.
Right, right now she's all, take this place, on this trip, just for me.
Right.
Want to take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll free 800-825-5033.
From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number, pressing
option 5 and dialing toll free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
You may recall a short time ago on this very program, I read an article called The Long Emergency.
It was quite a long article, and I, you know, from Rolling Stone by James Howard Koestler, and I read the whole thing.
Or just very nearly the whole thing.
Well, it's magic.
Tonight, James Howard Koestler is my guest.
James Howard Koestler graduated from the State University of New York Rockport Campus.
He worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers and finally as a staff writer for the Rolling Stone magazine.
He's lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Darton, Cornell, MIT, RPI, University of Virginia, many other colleges, has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA and the APA, the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Mr. Koestler also is the Author of several books and regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he's written on environmental and economic issues.
His latest book, The Long Emergency, describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century.
We're actually starting through those changes right now.
in a moment james howard consular
or forgot to put up a photograph of the uh... actually as i'm speaking with uh...
james howard consular and he is here right now uh...
welcome to the program higher
for those of the uh... as i mentioned i was so impressed with your article i
just read the whole thing just about the whole thing on the air that's
unprecedented i just thought it was so very well well i i i try to write clearly and
uh... people who fit Well, you achieved that all right, but there had to have been quite a bit of research that went into that.
Well, I've been looking into these issues for quite a few years.
All right, let's begin by describing exactly what it is.
The article is entitled in the book, The Long Emergency.
Describe what you mean by that.
Well, you know, I got into this after writing several books about the destiny of suburbia.
Mm-hmm.
And however you look at that, it's very hard to avoid a reflection of what our energy future is.
And if you look into what our energy future is, you very rapidly come to the conclusion that we're having a problem with crude oil and natural gas.
And that can be described as the global A production peak.
Some years ago, an American geologist named Marion King Hubbard, who came out of the oil industry itself and eventually went into academia, Columbia University and Colorado School of Mines, developed a model for predicting how much oil remained in the United States.
And he said, and this is in the 1950s, he predicted that the United States oil production would peak about 1970.
That it would reach a certain point, and that we would never produce more, and after that our production would decline.
And events proved him to be entirely correct.
America did peak in about 1970.
You're saying we've already peaked?
The United States has peaked in production We were producing 10 million barrels a day in 1970, and now we are producing 5 million barrels a day of conventional crude.
And that fact brought on the disruptions of the 70s.
The economic problems and the geopolitical power shift from the United States, which had controlled the oil industry and its pricing mechanisms, Since forever, which shifted then in the 1970s to the OPEC nations, and we all know what happened after that.
I went through all of that.
I remember the fistfights, the anger, the long lines.
A lot of Americans alive today, of course, did not go through that, don't remember that at all.
Well, I was a young newspaper reporter when that happened, and I covered the story, and it was An amazing disruption in normal American life.
It certainly was.
I remember driving down to New York City, at the height of it, to see a girl.
I was, you know, 25 years old.
And being the only person on the New York State Thruway.
And thinking, you know, something has really changed here, Mr. Jones.
But anyway, you asked me to characterize this thing.
The Lung Emergency really deals with the implications of the global oil production peak, which we are now either near or approaching.
And what this means is that at a certain point, the world will produce the maximum amount of oil in a given year that it will ever produce, and thereafter we will begin heading down the arc Of inexorable depletion.
And I believe there are things that exasperate you, make even that worse.
In other words, the second half of the oil after the top of the bell curve is going to be much more difficult and expensive to extract than the first half, true?
Yeah, the first half of the oil, you know, we started drilling for oil in about 1859 here in America.
And we got an industry pretty well cranked up by the 1880s.
And that was all the oil that was easy to get.
It was closer to the surface.
It tended to be the lighter crudes that were easiest to refine.
And after 150 years of sucking that stuff out of the ground and using it and burning it, we're now left with the oil that is harder to find.
The oil that lies in more forbidding places, or the oil that belongs to people who hate us, or the oil that is not as good quality.
A lot of the oil, to make a distinction, there's this substance called light crude, and then there's a substance called heavy crude.
There's sweet crude and there's sour crude.
Sour crude tends to have a lot of sulfur in it, and it's harder and more expensive to refine.
No kidding, I've always wondered, you hear sweet, light, crude a lot, and I always wondered what the difference was, and that's it, huh?
Sulphur?
That's it.
Sulphur.
Yeah, now a few years ago, just a few years ago, there was a lot of excitement around the idea that the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia had a huge supply of oil and it was going to save us from this predicament.
And it turned out that they had a lot less oil than had originally been thought, and that it was mostly high sulfur, sour crude.
And so that sort of dampened a lot of people's enthusiasm.
But as we approach the global oil production peak and then cross over into it, there will be tremendous effects sort of thundering through our economies and our
societies And a lot of systems that we depend on
For our complex modern everyday life are going to start wobbling and destabilizing as a result
All right, we'll get into that let Let's take care of a couple of very strong rumors that are out there right now and see what you have to say about them.
One is, I've been getting emails from certain groups who, for some reason or another, believe that some oil fields, if not most, if we would just check are magically refilling somehow or another magically refilling from beneath or that the theory that the earth is generating continuous amounts of oil and these oil fields are just refilling and we should notice well that's a group of people who believe that the earth has a creamy nougat center of petroleum people like Peter Huber
The author.
Well, I think the fact is, if you actually look at the situation, there is no instance of an American oil field in Texas or Oklahoma or California or anywhere else spontaneously refilling.
Now, I can imagine, for example, a situation where an adjacent oil field suddenly breaks through under certain pressure conditions, or who knows?
Well, let's put it this way.
There are liquids down there in the sedimentary layers, and over time there will be some movement of them.
But the fact is that no significant major American oil field has ever spontaneously refilled, or even shown any partial amount of refilling.
It's really a myth that this is happening, and it kind of interestingly reflects The degree of wishful thinking that exists in the country.
Yes.
So we're back to the Jiminy Cricket Syndrome, as I call it.
All will be well.
All right.
Well, that's one myth down the drain.
Another said frequently is that American oil wells are capped and most of them are capped because of the price of oil.
And when the time comes right, we will uncap them and have all the oil we need.
What say you?
Well, what I say is that a lot of these oils which are in the older producing areas in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, you know, places that have been pumped for, you know, going on 80, 100 years, these wells were capped because they were producing so poorly.
And they probably do have some oil left.
And there is a belief that if you go back in there with new technology, like horizontal drilling and bottle brush drilling, that you will extract enough oil to make it worthwhile.
That said, it doesn't mean that the fields will not then deplete entirely, or that the oil that comes out won't be a tremendous amount.
It'll just be a bit.
And there are all kinds of bottom feeders in the oil industry who can make a living extracting small amounts of oil from played-out wells.
But that's not going to fill the giant coffers and the requirements that we have.
Oh gosh, no.
Is it going to run the interstate highway system?
No.
Forget about it.
So, that one's down the drain.
There's not that much oil there.
What about Alaska?
Now, we've got one field.
I wonder how much oil is left there.
And, of course, we're getting ready to go over to Anwar.
What are the expectations there?
Well, the North Slope, which we began drilling very heavily in the 1970s and 80s, was a great productive field, and it was one of the world's last great Discoveries, and it is now officially past peak and in depletion, and is producing, you know, fractionally a few percentage points less every year, and will continue to until it is finally depleted.
So, you know, it had a good run of about 30 years, which is about, you know, normal, so what the geologists expect.
That would be Prudhoe Bay and the fields associated with it.
It came online around the same time as the North Sea over in England and Scotland and Norway.
The discovery of those two gigantic fields were two of the really last significant oil-producing regions that were ever found in the world, and they pretty much did Um, save our situation back in the early 1980s.
And it, uh, they allowed us to sort of go back into our sleepwalking mode, um, for the next 15, 20 years.
Boy, do we ever do that, too.
I mean, we had the 70s oil problem, big cars sort of went away, we retooled, the Japanese got rich with the small cars, and then as soon as we got cheap oil again, It's like we forgot it ever happened, went right back now with the SUVs and all the rest of it.
Well, Ronald Reagan said it was morning in America, but a lot of people thought he meant that you could sleep another six hours.
And that's exactly what the United States did.
So, you know, the tremendous production coming out of Alaska and the North Sea kind of equalized The pressure that was coming from OPEC and allowed the price of gas to stay relatively stable for about a 15, 17 year period.
Very good for the economy.
Well, for the economy such as the economy was, and of course the economy is the big question mark when you're talking about oil and oil depletion.
Well, I was just on my way back from California about a week ago, stopped in Baker, California, and the price of premium there was $3.19.
I took a picture.
I just put it up on the website, folks, if you want to see it.
And just about $3 for even just regular gas.
So, though that's slightly unusual, you know, we're paying a lot of money now for energy, whether it's gas or propane or whatever kind of energy you use.
It's beginning to cost a lot of money, and I've noticed they raise it 15, 20 cents, go back two or three cents, and we all go, yay!
We're happy, but it's going up and up and up in stages.
This is what I call a ratcheting effect.
Yes.
You know, it will go up three clicks, then it will retreat two clicks, and it will go up four clicks, and it will come back three clicks.
Right.
And this is pretty much what we're going to be seeing in the months and years ahead.
Although the ratcheting itself could actually become even more extreme than it is now.
And I think the important thing for Americans to understand is it's not just the price of energy, it's how the price of energy affects the entire economy, since everything we get is delivered through the use of energy, right?
Or made.
Or made, yes.
Or even created.
In other words, all the way around.
All these things we have around us, the way they get here, all of it, energy, is equal to energy.
That means our economy is equal to energy.
Or equal?
Every tick up, you were calling it in ticks, every tick up means a tick down for the economy, right?
Well, these things thunder through our economy.
And that was the great lesson of the 1970s was, you know, the oil price doesn't just exist in a vacuum.
Once that goes up, all of a sudden you get tremendous price inflation and In all your household goods and all the necessaries of everyday life.
And, you know, back then the economists kicked back and scratched their heads and wondered what they were seeing.
And they pronounced the phenomenon stagflation.
In other words, stagnant economy with inflation.
And they were baffled by it.
It didn't fit any of the models they had created.
Which says something about the limitations of highly conventionalized economics, because it was really quite clear what was going on.
It was, you know, an eight-year-old child could have figured it out.
All right, so that we're all clear, this halfway point on oil, that is half the oil that we're going to be able to get, we've already gotten.
Are we at peak oil, or have we now passed peak oil, or is that hard to call?
It's always hard to call, and the conventional wisdom is You see it in the rearview mirror a few years down the road.
Right.
Because that's when the production figures actually come in and you know how much was produced, how much was actually produced.
That was certainly the case in the 1970s when the U.S.
peaked in 1970.
And that event was signaled by the Texas Railroad Commission, an obscure little agency which had the task of Regulating the pumping quotas for Texas Oil.
And in 1970, they basically sent a message out to the oil producers and to the world, which was, you guys can now pump 100%.
They told them you could open the valve to 100% from now on, and that's all fine.
What that meant was that they could produce as much as they could possibly suck out of the ground.
What that also meant was, That they had reached their production limits, their final capacity.
In fact, if you looked at the production data a few years later, you saw that the United States never produced as much oil again as it had in 1970.
that in nineteen seventy that began
going incrementally down after that felt
uh... with the world is now in a situation where we have reason to believe we may be at or
near the peak All right, so we see something in the rearview mirror.
We're not exactly sure what it is yet, but there is an image in the rearview mirror, and it may be peak oil.
James, hold on a sec.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Now, what does this mean?
Well, it means everything for us.
I mean, everything.
Our whole economy.
Everything you know, everything you do.
...is powered one way or the other.
And maybe the power is almost gone.
We'll be back.
I'm going to be back.
Which could be anyone and anytime.
Remember what we said?
Not me.
Be sure to check back for future reports later.
Episode 2 Takeoff
Pump the meter She got lost
She let her mind go somewhere else Pump the meter
She got lost No, no, no, no, no
Do it I'll tell you what's wrong
Before I get off the floor Don't bring me down
You're always talking about your crazy nights What I've been thinking, don't you get it right
Don't bring me down Don't drive me down, my mind
You're always talking about your crazy nights I'll tell you what's wrong
Before I get off the floor Don't bring me down
Don't bring me down Don't bring me down
Don't bring me down Don't bring me down, my mind
Don't bring me down You're looking good, just like a snake in the grass
What a lovely day, she's gonna break and blast Don't bring me down
To talk with Art Bell, call the Wild Card Line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
The long emergency in the title of James Kunstler's book has begun.
We're actually in the middle of a long emergency.
Right now.
After all, these are emergency measures we're involved in right now.
Aren't they?
We'll be right back.
The picture I promised is indeed there.
I cropped it while I was talking with James and actually sent it up.
And if you look carefully, you'll see regular 299.
About two-thirds, maybe even closer to three-quarters.
what unleaded at three oh nine uh... streamer premium at three nineteen well
unusual to the desert of course also the higher but those were the prices about a week ago and i was a big
prices really big prices of what percentage of oil james do uh... we import
right now about two-thirds
maybe even closer to three quarters well uh...
we use about twenty million barrels a day And that means every five days we use a hundred million barrels a day.
Every five days.
And two-thirds are better imported.
Yeah.
We use about every 50 days we use a thousand million barrels.
That's a billion barrels.
billion barrels and every uh... three hundred and fifty days we use
seven billion barrels of oil
uh... the united state has remaining about twenty eight billion barrels of
crude uh... of conventional crude oil
and I'm...
So if you do the math, you'll see that we don't have a whole lot, based on the fact that we use about 7 billion barrels a year, there's about 28 billion in the ground.
Worldwide, I wonder what percentage come from people that hate us.
You know, I think about 20% comes from Saudi Arabia.
We get a lot of our oil in the United States from Venezuela, despite the fact that we've tried to kill Hugo Chavez a couple of times and he hates us.
The old saying is that oil is fungible.
Meaning that, you know, oil produced in Nigeria finds its way into markets all over the place.
And I think that that's true to a certain extent.
It's a world oil market, right?
Yeah, it is a world market.
What we're seeing, really, you said we were in the long emergency.
I would say we are about to enter the long emergency.
And one of the first signs is that we're seeing the energy market wobble.
We're also seeing the automakers wobble a little in the U.S.
I mean, this most recent price hike in the price of oil has...
I saw this story the other day, I don't know if it's true or false,
indicating that the bonds of some of the automakers were derated by at least one agency
that derates these kinds of things.
Is that really going on?
I mean, the fact they're producing all these SUVs, are they that hurt just by this little price hike?
Well, they are hurt, although General Motors and Ford have been on the ropes for a lot of other reasons.
General Motors, for one, has not been making Any profit off of automobile manufacturing for a long time.
They make their profit, whatever profit they make off of activities like money lending.
GMAC, the financial entity that lends money to buyers.
They don't make money on cars?
Not really, not on production.
They have tended not to.
But it certainly isn't going to help them that they are all tooled up to produce nothing but large SUVs There are going to be fewer and fewer people asking for them.
And of course, as we know from our last go-round in the 1970s, you know, when you tool up these enormous factories and these systems to produce a certain kind of product, it takes quite a bit of change in time.
To retool the factories to bring out a different kind of product.
Don't you wonder, James, why they apparently did not learn anything from the 70s?
I mean, they had to be able to see what you can clearly see is ahead.
Well, you know, it was a slow process.
And, you know, we're talking about a 30-year process.
And I think it's pretty clear what happened, is that after the mid-1980s, When the price of oil started heading way down again, when the North Sea and the North Slope of Alaska came into full production, Americans sort of lost interest in economical cars.
And General Motors, you know, slowly but surely, and Ford started producing large SUV-type cars based on their truck chassis, their pickup truck chassis.
They were popular.
They were a big hit.
And what really fueled it for them was the fact that they made a much, you know, whatever profits they were making at the time, they were making much higher profits off of these large vehicles than they were off the little vehicles per unit.
To be fair to them, I guess they've got to produce what we want.
Well, that's true.
And so, back then, they decided that it was in their interest to do this.
They've just been sort of sleepwalking through the car industry the same way that the public's been sleepwalking through the last ten years of American life.
What was the Iraq War about?
The Iraq War was an attempt to set up a police station, an American police station, in a very unstable and very strategically important part of the world that we were desperate to stabilize.
And we're desperate to stabilize it because?
Well, because the Middle East is where two-thirds of the remaining oil in the world is.
Bingo.
I believe every American president of recent vintage historically has said we would, if necessary, go to war, meaning even nuclear conflict, to protect the access to and from the Persian Gulf, right?
Well, it was pretty much the Carter Doctrine.
Jimmy Carter defined This doctrine which declared that the Middle East was an important strategic area to the United States, and that we would do what was necessary to secure its stability.
And that's pretty much exactly what we did.
Secondarily, the Iraq War was prosecuted to moderate and influence The behavior of the states adjoining Iraq, namely Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Syria.
And Syria to the Emirates, all the states down there, but principally Iran and Saudi Arabia, because they're two of the most important oil producers in the world.
Is it working?
I'd say that it has worked to the degree that the whole region hasn't exploded over the last four years.
Is it a project that we can feel confident about in the long run?
I don't think so.
You have to ask yourself, how many years can we remain occupying an unfriendly country?
Or more than one of them?
Well, it began as a very popular effort.
The latest survey that was on CNN the other day indicated 52% of the American people now feel negative toward what we're doing there.
Well, that figure's liable to go up.
I hasten to add, whatever the polls say, it does not alter the strategic reasons for our being there.
And, you know, one of the things that the American public, I think, struggles with is the notion that whether they approve of things or not, whether those things are necessary.
In a way, this was necessary, right?
Well, it was necessary if we wanted that part of the world to remain stable.
Well, we do.
It was spinning out of control.
It was a desperate attempt also to keep life in the United States stable, because we had this enormous kind of economic system cranked up.
That depends utterly on reliable oil production from that part of the world.
And for how much longer do you think that's going to remain reliable?
Either way you look at it from a political point of view or even just how much oil is really left and at what price, more importantly?
There are a couple of things you have to look at.
One is, of course, what we were just talking about.
How long, how many years can How many of the United States occupy unfriendly nations, and how many can we occupy at a time?
And how successful can that venture be?
Obviously, we're not having an easy time of it in Iraq, and sooner or later, we're going to have to get out of there one way or the other, whether we establish this successful democratic regime or not.
All bets are off, really, for Saudi Arabia.
Anything could happen there at any time.
You know, somebody could walk into Prince Bandar's office with a cell phone loaded with plastic explosives, and that would be the end of a large percentage of our oil imports right there.
There's also no telling what will happen with the infrastructure of oil, namely the wells, the terminals, the refineries, the pipelines, all of this rather delicate, soft These delicate soft targets that are all over the area that so far have not been destroyed, but could be fairly easily.
Alright, I had a caller in the first hour who was complaining about the oil company profits.
You know, as you're looking at the economic side of things, how big a factor is the percentage of profit they're making during all of this?
Well, I tend to be allergic to conspiracy theories.
So, despite the fact that the oil companies are profiting from the current high prices, I don't see that as particularly significant.
I don't see that giving us really a lot of information about what's going on.
We are at peak, meaning there's still a lot of oil in the world and there's still a lot of it flowing and moving around.
For now, it is still flowing and moving around through fairly stable markets.
Nothing has really fallen apart yet.
Nothing has really kind of wobbled too badly yet.
So, this is precisely that part of the process when the oil companies are going to do best.
There are some things we can observe about the oil industry, though, that are somewhat telling.
They are taking their enormous profits And they're not putting it back into exploration and drilling.
Oh, that's interesting, isn't it?
Right.
They are, you know, buying back their own stock and using their profits to buy other companies and merge with them, which, by the way, has the result of eventually getting rid of a lot of employees.
Which you would imagine indicates they clearly see the writing on the wall that we don't.
Well, what they're seeing is that this is a contracting industry.
Yes.
On the whole.
In the macro sense.
That oil production and oil drilling is an industry in decline.
That's a very good point.
They're not making any new investments in trying to find new oil.
And the reason that they're not trying to do it is that we have good reason to believe that most of the great Discoveries have been made and that very little remains to be discovered in places where it is economically recoverable.
We know that the United States has been searched, you know, up and down.
It may be counterintuitive, but the fact is that the former Soviet Union, now Russia, and even China, have been relentlessly and remorselessly searched by their respective State oil companies, because they didn't have to justify it economically.
They could drill wherever they wanted.
They didn't have to report back to stockholders and tell them whether it was worthwhile or not.
So they drilled relentlessly in all these remote parts of Asia, including Siberia, and they found what they found.
But it isn't likely that they're going to find any major new strikes.
And that's really where we're at now in the oil industry.
All right, so here we are, just about at peak.
A few years ago, I was lucky to visit China, James, and I got up into Shenzhen, the economic area in China, and even those years ago, and that was quite a number of years ago now, I was stopped dead I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
I passed miles and miles and miles of factories.
It was kind of like the old industrial US.
The roads were absolutely choked.
The air was foul.
Trucks were everywhere.
The economic activity was unbelievable.
And now, years have passed, and it's grown by leaps and bounds.
So the energy demands from China are bound to be astronomical.
Well, they did pass Japan last year as the world's second largest consumer of oil.
They don't have that much of their own.
They have, I think, slightly less than we do, and they are cranking up this enormous oil-based economy.
I tend to refer to it as the last great industrial economy.
They started relatively late.
You know, a lot of people regard China as the coming great giant dragon of the 21st century, and I have reservations about that.
They are a nation, for all their current power and the great leaps that they've made in the last 20, 30 years in cranking up their economy, they are a society which is afflicted by tremendous ecological problems, By orders of magnitude greater than anything we have here or can imagine.
Right.
You know, tremendous problems with fresh water.
Their water tables in the grain-growing regions of North China are retreating by about 10 feet a year, and their grain crops, their crop yields are heading south at a substantial rate.
They're going to be net importers of food very soon, if not already.
And energy.
They have tremendous energy needs and problems.
And you have to ask yourself, of course, when does China start reaching out for energy resources?
And I think the answer is they have been very quietly and carefully reaching out over the last couple of years.
They've been making contracts with nations like Venezuela and Canada.
And they are doing civil engineering projects all over Africa and the Middle East, trying to curry favor with the various nations there.
And, you know, to a certain extent, it's just sort of a practical business thing.
A point may come when a nation like Saudi Arabia will say, well, you know, we've had all this trouble with the Americans, and they try to control us.
We have these cultural problems with them, and these religious differences, and here come the Chinese, and they want to buy as much oil as we can sell them.
Why don't we just sell them our oil and not have these cultural problems we're having with America, and political problems?
I hadn't thought of that.
I think that you could say it another way, too, is that, you know, China is very close geophysically, geographically, to many of the oil-producing parts of the world.
They can literally walk into places like Kazakhstan.
And you have to ask yourself, will they do it?
Or will they even just extend their influence there?
Or how far will they seek to extend their influence?
Might they invite some of the Arab states Under their, the protection of their nuclear umbrella and say, look, you know, you guys were protected by the Americans for 50 years.
Why don't you try being protected by us now?
Yes, we have the we have weapons that are very potent and will be good customers for you.
So come under our tent for a while.
And I think that that's sort of the expectation for the next 10 years.
I hadn't thought of any of this, but I'm sure to the Saudis, the Chinese would be considerably, I don't know, a more comfortable sell.
If they're going to get the same money and virtually the same protection, then you're right.
Why not make the switch?
Yeah, well, it also brings us back to this question of the United States and realistically, how long can we afford To continue to occupy, physically, these countries where they're trying to blow up our soldiers every day and succeeding, and it's costing us $80-100 billion a year to do it.
How long can we do that?
And, you know, if you think about it for a while, it's hard not to come to the conclusion, sooner or later, that America may have to withdraw back into the Western Hemisphere.
Sooner or later.
James, hold it right there.
We're at the top of the hour.
James Howard Kunstler is our guest.
We're talking about the book, his article in Rolling Stone, The Long Emergency from the High Desert in the midst of the night.
I'm Art Bell.
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It's all for all of us, the sleepwalkers. We really do sleepwalk through an awful lot of things, don't we?
Right now we're sleeping, sleepwalking right through this whole energy crisis and we're about to hit a wall.
wall. To talk with.
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
Thank you.
We've had that already.
instead the long emergency of book by james howard consular who is
my guest right That Long Emergency being just about to begin.
James, China, before we leave the subject of China, how likely is it, as you pointed out, they have a massive number of nuclear weapons, fully capable of really putting us in a mess, if it got down to that.
How likely is it That as the pinch gets really severe, we could end up in a conflict with China.
Well, that's a good question, and in fact, Robert Kaplan has a very interesting piece on that in the current Atlantic Monthly Magazine, although I don't happen to agree with his view.
Kaplan's view is that we're going to see a kind of renewed Cold War with the new Cold War partners, so to speak.
And that all the action will be in the Pacific region.
And I don't really see it that way at all.
I actually see the world becoming a somewhat larger place.
As we were talking before the break about whether the United States could indefinitely occupy these Middle Eastern nations to keep the Middle East To stabilize, to sort of police the region.
And my conclusion is that sooner or later, the U.S.
is going to bankrupt itself or exhaust itself militarily just in that policing duty.
And that sooner or later, we will have to withdraw into our hemisphere.
Well, the signs of that are there now.
Well, the signs of exhaustion are there.
Yes.
You know, you raised earlier the fact that the American public Polling seems to be wearying of the great adventure in Iraq.
No question.
And so sooner or later we may find ourselves not doing that.
Now when that happens, we are going to lose a lot of our ability to control events in that part of the world where we get so much oil.
And sooner or later we may actually lose our access to that oil.
I really doubt that we are going to contest militarily in Asia or the Middle East with China, with the Chinese army on land.
That would seem to be a project that we could feel very little confidence about.
Well, as something happens, old Taiwan would probably be just a perfect place for some sort of something to happen.
We would be, but you know, and there's every reason to believe that there's going to be mischief over Taiwan.
And we have treaties with Taiwan that oblige us to protect them, but when you really get down to it... Would we?
Well, when you really get down to it, I wonder whether we would do a very quick re-evaluation on what our true interests were.
And I'm not sure that we have an enormous interest in keeping Taiwan As an independent entity from the greater Chinese nation itself.
I can't see the U.S.
getting into a nuclear exchange over that.
So that remains to be seen.
I differ from Kaplan.
I don't particularly see us being able to engage with China in the way he states.
He believes that the Chinese navy is being built up to Former rivalry with the United States Navy.
But it raises the question, for control of what?
Well, I think the answer is for control of the sea lanes, where the oil is transported.
And the Chinese want to make sure that they can defend those transportation routes.
But you know, oddly enough, we now have these very important economic relations with China, which involve this pipeline of manufactured goods, you know, of all the
stuff that fills up the Walmart and the Kmart, which has been, you know, coming over to us endlessly for
the last 20 years.
And so you wonder, under any scenario that has us coming into serious conflict with China,
what happens to the U.S. retail economy?
What do people think is going to happen with that?
Well, of course, that's a two-way street, too, though, James.
And since they're producing all of these things and making a great deal of money from it, they might be loathe to get into a conflict with their biggest market.
You're quite right.
That's an excellent point.
I think what we'll see happen, in fact, will We'll be a bit different.
As the oil markets wobble, and this brings us back to the United States, as the oil markets wobble, I think that all large entities in the United States, corporations, governments, even large agricultural systems, are going to find themselves in trouble.
Really, anything large is going to be in trouble, anything that is done on a giant scale.
And, you know, one of the easier ones to talk about is Wal-Mart.
And the businesses like it.
You know, the national chain retail system that we have devised for ourselves for carrying on trade in America, for retail trade.
So we depend on these enormous systems, the Wal-Mart warehouse on wheels where they're sending 18-wheel tractor trailers continually all over America with all these plastic wading pools and mixmasters and trucks full of women's clothing and plastic flip-flops and garden tools and all this stuff coming from China, being made in China, and it's circulating continually around the United States until it lands in the Walmart in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
This is a system that is not going to prove to be very resilient, especially in the face of wobbling oil prices, fluctuating oil prices.
All right, this guy says you wrote a lot about suburbia, didn't you?
Yeah, I did.
All right, so what is it about suburbia?
Explain that.
Well, how do we think about suburbia?
You know, first of all, it's a living arrangement, and it's also an economy.
It can also be viewed in sort of macroeconomic historic terms as, and this is how I would put it, the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
Pretty severe.
The greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
We poured all of our post-war wealth into building this infrastructure for daily life that has one outstanding characteristic, which is that it has no future.
And the future is now here.
And so you have to ask yourself, what is the destiny of this living arrangement we've created for ourselves?
Why does suburbia have no future?
Well, because it depends utterly on cheap and reliable supply, on reliable supplies of utterly cheap oil.
And if you subtract that, then it becomes completely dysfunctional.
The people who have commuted from suburbia into the city eventually will no longer be able to afford to do so.
Is that it?
Well, that is going to be part of the picture.
You know, we also have the problem that the dirty secret of the American economy for the last 20-30 years is that it has come to be based mainly on the creation of ever more suburbia and the furnishing of it and the accessorizing of it And the servicing of it.
And if you subtract all of that, you know, the home building, and the tanning huts, and the burger barns, and the strip mall building, and the automobiles, you know, motoring around continually, and you subtract all that activity and motion from the American economy, there isn't a whole lot left besides open-heart surgery and hair cutting.
You know, people ask me, why does the American leadership seem so clueless about this issue?
Why aren't they preparing the American public for this post-cheap oil future?
How would they do that?
Well, here's the problem.
First, let me answer my own question, my own rhetorical question.
The reason that we're being so poorly prepared is that nobody wants to touch this issue about what the American economy really is.
And the fact that it's utterly dependent on this chain of suburban activities.
The building of ever more tract houses.
The building of ever more strip malls and big box stores.
And sooner or later, we're going to bump up against some very uncomfortable limits.
We already are.
One of them is that the middle class in America has been struggling for a while to keep their incomes up, keep their wages up.
In fact, it's been a losing battle.
And a great deal of the retail action for the last 10 years has simply been people giving their credit cards a workout, and we know where that leads.
Yes.
And we know that that has to stop sooner or later.
So, uh, the reason we don't hear about this from our leaders is that, um, they're terrified that if this game of musical chairs stops with the suburban economy and the economy based on building suburban houses, that there won't be a whole lot left.
And that means, you know, a lot of unemployed people and a lot of angry unemployed people who are going to be bewildered about the loss of their entitlement to the American dream.
So the destiny of suburbia?
The destiny of suburbia is to become dysfunctional, to lose value.
A lot of the presumed wealth in America exists in the form of suburban real estate.
That presumed wealth is going to evaporate.
It will prove to have been a temporary hallucination.
And so the necessity, driven by energy shortages, will be to get people close together again in the city life.
That's one way of looking at it, but I wouldn't put it quite that way.
There are other options.
And you have to sort of look at other activities to see where this is going.
Other options like what?
Well, for one thing, we may not, you know, big cities are going to be in as much trouble as suburbia.
Especially the biggest ones, places like Chicago, New York, L.A.
New York and Chicago especially being overburdened with exactly the kinds of skyscrapers and large buildings that we're going to have trouble with in a post-cheap energy economy.
But getting back to my point, you have to look, for example, to the problems that we will encounter in agriculture.
When the cheap oil economy starts to falter.
Okay.
You know, we produce all the food for our nation, in essence, by pouring oil on the soils of the Midwest.
And pouring fertilizers made out of natural gas on the soils of the Midwest.
So we have this agriculture, you know, based on large corporate entities producing cheese doodles and Pepsi-Cola for the American diet.
And that is not something that is going to continue for very long.
And we are going to get in severe trouble with food production.
The upshot of it all is that probably within the next 20 years, we're going to have to be producing a lot more of our food locally, and in a different way, in a smaller scale, probably using a lot more human labor.
And I think there will be a lot of turbulent movement of people away from suburbia and even away from our largest cities.
And all of this, you think, is driven by the coming energy shortage?
Yes, I think that the basic equation of the basic household economy of the American household writ large is going to be changing severely.
And it's going to require us to live very, very differently.
So, you know, you said, will people move from this dysfunctional suburbia into the cities?
Yes.
I think we will see more likely that they will be moving into smaller towns and smaller cities.
And the most successful places will be those places that have a viable agricultural hinterland near them.
You know, an opportunity to grow food locally.
And this, of course, has implications for certain parts of the country, including the one that you're in.
The implication of what you're saying is that no longer will it be viable to be delivering the groceries to suburbia, basically, right?
Yeah, basically.
The age of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad is coming to an end.
We're going to have to make other arrangements.
But, you know, we're also going to have tremendous problems with employment as Vocational niches disappear and whole industries begin to wither.
And a lot of those people, I think, are going to find themselves one way or another, sooner or later, redirected into agriculture, which I believe will come much more to the center, return back to the center of American life.
It's a picture that I think is very hard for the average citizen to comprehend.
And yet, I think that's exactly where we're heading.
How quickly, James, can you give the American people some idea of how soon it will start to become that severe?
Well, in my opinion, we will be seeing a lot of pressure on our way of life within the next 36 months.
And I think we will be seeing a lot of turbulence within The end of the decade that we're in now.
Very soon.
Yeah, we'll see a lot of economic turbulence, a lot of population movement, a lot of jobs and industries changing and withering.
I think national chain retail, Walmart and Target, etc.
will be on the ropes within the next 10 years.
And we're going to see American society being compelled to reorganize itself.
And it's going to be very painful.
And we're going to see a certain amount of hardship.
There will be a lot of economic losers created by this process.
Does it become not reasonable any longer at some point in this emergency to be importing things from China and from other parts of the world?
Well, circumstances will really dictate what happens with that.
It certainly depends how long we can maintain the kind of friendly trade relations that we have.
People assume that globalism is a permanent institution, when in fact it's really just the product of a kind of transitory period of There was a wonderful article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, about a month or two ago, by Neil Ferguson, the young historian at Harvard.
He was describing the first period of globalism that began in the 19th century, just after the Franco-Prussian War, around 1870, and continued until 1914.
Uh, era of the late 19th century, turn of the century, sometimes known as the Belle Epoque, the beautiful era.
Uh, it was, it was part of the progressive era in the United States.
This era of tremendous prosperity and technological innovation, you know, all these wonderful things being invented, the car, the railroad, the telephone, motion pictures, phonograph, airplanes, you know, you name it.
Tremendous global trade going on in this 45-year period, and then it all comes to an end with World War I and this tremendous calamity.
And it isn't really resumed again until the 1960s or 70s, when, you know, after a second World War, those nations involved begin to recover and globalism resumes.
So we're in kind of the second phase of globalism.
And you're suggesting that globalism will begin to go the other way, it'll begin to shrink as the ability for easy global movement grounds to a halt.
That's really what you're saying, right?
Yeah, I think that that's basically it.
That a lot of the procedures that are associated with globalism will wither.
And we're already seeing some of them, you know.
You could call the aviation industry the canary in the coal mine, so to speak.
Well, it's on its little skinny knees right now.
The aviation industry is on its knees, and things really haven't even gotten that bad yet.
You know, they still have a lot of customers.
We haven't even gotten to the point in America where the middle class is being really severely stressed.
That's a good point.
Hold it right there.
No question about what the airlines are going through.
Ask anybody who works for the airlines.
They really are in trouble.
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Always follow the money, right? That's a hard and fast rule.
So when you look at the oil companies, James made an awfully good point that they're
not looking for new oil particularly, they're investing money in that area but instead of buying
back their own stock and divesting and looking at other things.
There's a very, very serious reason for that.
that think about it uh... james howard kessler writes in a very blunt in your
face fashion telling you what's about to happen what is happening
with regard to energy and our economy and And it seems to me, James, that in every, even biggest disasters, there are winners and losers.
So there are going to be areas that we'll do and people that will do better than others during this long emergency.
Can you pick out any of the winners or good places to be?
Well, this is a kind of fascinating aspect in reflecting on where we're going and what's going to happen with us.
Of course, I don't pretend to have a crystal ball, but I think that there are some predictions that you can make that are already pretty clear.
This period I call the Long Emergency will be one of economic hardship, political turbulence, and some parts of the United States are going to do better than others.
I'm rather pessimistic about the Southwest.
Yes, I read that.
Phoenix, Las Vegas, which you apparently live near.
Yes, that's right.
The excitement will be over in Las Vegas.
These places are going to have really severe problems on top of the energy problems they face.
Because of?
Well, first of all, you're going to have severe problems with water.
You're already bumping up against those problems, especially in the Las Vegas area.
That's quite right.
And they're only going to be exacerbated by the problems that you have with petroleum and natural gas.
People think about cheap air conditioning in Phoenix.
Phoenix is virtually unlivable without Some kind of air conditioning relief.
You get a hundred days a year with three digit temperatures.
Correct.
And it's really hard to take.
And air conditioning has made it possible.
Not just air conditioning, but cheap air conditioning that most people can afford at some level.
You're absolutely right.
And you know, so on top of that and water problems and friction with Mexico, Which I think is going to continue and become worse, because as the American economy suffers and stumbles, the Mexican economy will suffer by another order of magnitude, and that will tend to increase the volume of people seeking to leave Mexico and come north, even if America is struggling.
And I think that friction is going to increase and become a much more severe problem.
All right, let me interject one possibility here.
We are, after all, working on a number of other energy sources.
Now, there's no magic bullet yet.
But wind energy and solar energy and some of these, hydrothermal, some of these other things we're working on, biodiesel, there's no single solution, but it looks like there may be an array of possible alternative solutions out there that could, at the very least, slow what you're talking about.
Well, this is the hope of many people.
And indeed, there's plenty of reason to believe that we will be using virtually all of these things in the years to come.
But, you know, I would direct you to really a basic formula, which is that no amount of alternative fuels or renewables or systems for using them is going to allow us to run the United States the way we're used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it.
All right, then let's talk... And so it leads to a consideration of what actually might happen, and I think what you'll see is that Some of these systems of solar, wind power, hydropower, there are more esoteric ones even.
I think that some of them will be used on a very local basis.
Perhaps even on a household basis.
But we're not going to just plug and play the equipment that we're now using.
We're not going to run the interstate highway system on biodiesel.
I've been having a correspondence with biodiesel enthusiasts By email for the last 10 days.
Yes.
And, you know, I'm rather amazed at the things that they don't think about.
Like what?
Well, for example, if you reflect on the idea that industrial agriculture in America, based on fossil fuel inputs, is going to be in trouble.
And that we're going to have to change the way we do farming and food production.
Right.
One of the basic conclusions you come to is that We are probably going to need more acreage to make up for the crop losses that we will have as a result of not being able to pour fertilizers and pesticides on the soil.
It will take more acres to grow an equivalent amount of food.
Okay, but that aspect of the long emergency is still quite a ways down the road.
I'm talking about the time that we become short of fertilizers.
Well, wait a minute.
I'm talking about biodiesel fuel as one of the alternatives that people are proposing.
Right.
A lot of people think we're just going to take, you know, X amount of acreage and devote it to growing soybeans or hemp or algae or something that will produce Oil, and that we'll run the interstate highway system on these crops.
Well, not in totality, certainly, but it can help, right?
I wonder if we're going to be able to do it at all.
This is the point I'm making, is that I think we're vastly underestimating the amount of cropland we're going to have to dedicate, not only to growing food for human beings, but in addition, growing feed for working animals, which requires Tremendous amount of dedicated cropland and acreage.
And, you know, the biodiesel people have this kind of weird suburban view of things.
It's a kind of a gee whiz.
You know, here I am sitting in front of my computer, having fun making algorithms and looking at the screen, but I'm not really thinking of the real world out there.
And the real world is we're going to need a lot more acreage for growing food for humans and for animals.
I'm not convinced at all that there's going to be much land that we can devote to growing biomass for these biofuels.
I think it's a chimerical kind of pursuit, a quixotic.
Excuse me, a quixotic pursuit.
Let's talk very quickly about our leadership.
What you describe must be obvious to more than just you.
I mean, it's virtually a national security issue all the way around, no matter how you crack it up.
It's a national security issue, so what is our leadership doing?
I mean, most Americans would expect, as we look at something of this magnitude, we have something along the lines of a Manhattan Project to come up with something to stop what otherwise is ahead for us.
We are completely unserious, Art.
We are lost in raptures of infotainment from top to bottom.
Let me give you an example of something that we could do that we're just not doing anything about.
If we could restore the passenger railroad system in the United States, We could take a very significant amount of pressure off of our oil imports because so much of our oil is dedicated to running cars.
If we could restore the passenger rail system, we could take a lot of the pressure off of the airports that are now suffering from tremendous congestion and flight delays because they're running all these flights between cities that are 400 miles apart that would be much better served by rail.
We would give people a choice.
It would just do wonderful things for us.
James, would people make that choice?
Let me continue for a minute.
There are additional implications.
One is, this is a project that is doable.
We know how to run railroads.
We know how to build them.
We know how to fix them.
All the technology is proven and established.
If we could restore the national railroad system, that would do a lot for the morale of the American public and give them a sense that they had some power to help themselves and affect their own lives in the face of these energy problems that are coming down at us.
But this is the one thing that nobody wants to do.
Well, let's look at it for a second.
If we had an in-place, efficient rail system, would people use it?
Of course they would.
Of course they would.
Certainly, if it was run at the level above the kind of Bulgarian National Railroad service that we run at now, people will not take trains that arrive three hours late.
People will not take trains that do not show up on time.
But they will take trains that leave on time, that follow timetables, that are reliable.
And we just haven't had that in this country for years.
And it would give people at least a significant new choice.
And we wouldn't have to be running our cars all the time for everything that we do.
Especially for the... You know, it's one thing to talk about, you know, making those seven trips a day to the school, the Walmart, the soccer field, the pharmacy, etc., etc.
It's another thing when you're talking about, you know, people who have to go from Columbus, Ohio, to Cleveland.
And there are plenty of them every day.
All these people out there piloting their own vehicles, making these 325-mile trips, these tedious and often dangerous trips, you know, for people who are 70 years old behind the wheel.
You know, that's not a good thing for everybody to be the pilot of their own vehicle.
Anyway, you know, there are models for this in other parts of the world where it happens to work pretty well, and we just don't want to do this.
We're too intellectually and economically lazy to begin this process.
Well, one of those areas, to some degree at least, is a lot of Europe.
A lot of Europe has pretty good rail systems and transportation within cities.
Paris is great.
You can bop around Paris very efficiently underground on the rails.
And you can get to a train station and hop on a train to Amsterdam and get to Amsterdam and take a tram into the heart of Amsterdam.
Without ever having to get into a car and without suffering because of it.
People in Europe don't feel like losers because they're getting on trains.
It's obviously a different social experience.
You have to feel that it's okay to be with other human beings acting in a civilized manner.
It's true.
We're just out of the habit.
It's not that it's such a terrible thing.
It's just that we're not used to it.
The fact of the matter is we're not going to be able to continue living the way we're living anyway, so we're going to have to do this whether we like it or not.
I think the nut of the problem we're talking about is why haven't we started talking about it?
I happen to not be a Bush voter.
I happen to have been a registered Democrat, although not a happy one.
John Kerry didn't say a word about restoring passenger railroad service.
No, he did not.
And it was one of the few things that he could have said that would have encouraged Americans to feel some confidence about our ability to do things and get things done.
So, if you were in a position of power, you would renew the rail system?
Anything else?
I would start with that because it's such an easily doable thing and it would do so much for our national morale.
What else would you do if you had the power?
I mean, what should we be doing?
We should be doing everything possible to get rid of the incentives to continue to build more suburban sprawl.
Because everything that we put in the ground now is going to have a tragic outcome.
Every housing development that is getting started now, every new strip mall that goes in, is going to be just one more dysfunctional entity in, you know, three or five or ten years, and it's going to be a tremendous liability for American civilization.
Well, your picture's kind of a downer both ways.
I mean, suburbia's going to deteriorate, and cities are going to contract, so there's going to be pain everywhere, virtually.
Yeah, there is.
It's going to be hard to Nobody is going to get off easy in this tremendous period of hardship and contraction.
But, you know, as we started saying earlier, some places will do better than other places.
I happen to think that the Northeast and the Upper Midwest will do somewhat better than the Sun Belt.
Why?
Well, I think what you'll see in the Sun Belt is that it will suffer in proportion exactly to the degree that it benefited from the last 30 years of the final cheap oil fiesta that we've been enjoying.
But the Northeast doesn't get off the hook.
I mean, why?
No, it doesn't get off the hook.
We've got to run the air conditioners, but during those long, cold winters, you've got to have the oil.
Well, we're going to have problems with that, for sure.
But, you know, one of the other problems in the Sun Belt is that up until, really, just after World War II, the eastern Sun Belt, or the wet Sun Belt, you know, the states of the old Confederacy, Were generally agricultural states.
There were a few cities of consequence.
There were a lot of towns, but few great cities of consequence right after World War II.
And most of what happened in the South after World War II was really the result of this cheap oil fiesta and the suburban building program that went with it.
And so most of the construction in the South, most of the stuff that exists, is new.
And most of it is not going to work very well.
It's going to be much more of a liability for people in the Sun Belt and for the kind of economy they're going to have to transform themselves into.
And I think that, you know, there are all sorts of hidden consequences that haven't really begun to show yet.
And one of them is this, that You know, as this suburban infrastructure for daily living becomes worthless and dysfunctional in the South, I think you're going to see a great deal of conflict arise out of it.
And some of it may even become violent, as this society attempts to kind of reallocate our resources and reallocate our land for different purposes.
How do you see conflict developing?
Well, for one thing, I think that you'll see You know, in the NASCAR belt, as I call it, I think that there is a kind of an attitude of hyper-individualism that is pretty common.
The notion that the individual rights are supremely important.
There is.
And this combines with a romance for firearms and violence.
And the idea that firearms should be used liberally in defense of hyper-individualism.
And I think that a lot of these things will combine to produce some very unfortunate politics in the South.
A politics of grievance and resentment that is liable to boil over into violence.
Especially with the suburbs tanking and people losing their homes and all of their investments and their livelihoods.
I think we'll see... A new division between the North and South?
Well, I think we'll just see, for starters, a lot of conflict in the South between the people who are hanging on and the people who are doing very poorly.
A lot of this conflict may arise around the issue of the reallocation of land, because We're not going to be using it for suburbia anymore.
We're probably going to have to return to local agriculture.
The hallmark of the period of the long emergency is that we're going to have to live profoundly and intensely local.
So we're going to have to rip up the concrete and plant crops?
Well, I don't know that we're going to be able to rip up a whole lot of asphalt.
We're going to have to work around what we got.
The subdivision practices of the last 50 years have been very destructive, ruinously destructive of the integrity of the landscape, so that, you know, in many places you've actually destroyed the ability of the land to be used in a coherent, integral way for farm production.
How can it be this serious, this close?
I mean, you talked about three years, this serious and this close, and our leaders Uh, not yet.
Jumping all over it.
Hold that answer, James.
We're at the top of the hour.
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency.
If you don't believe what you're hearing, then you might want to read the book, because it's carefully annotated.
You know, all these things are like numbers you can add up, and the conclusions appear inescapable.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, some zero-point wondrous invention that'll save us, but I haven't seen it yet.
Have you?
marco the
the the
the Bye!
Time will understand Be here for the clouds that come
Romeo and Juliet Are together in eternity
40,000 men and women every day 40,000 men and women every day
40,000 coming every day Oh, come on baby, don't feel the need
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code...
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The book is The Long Emergency Kunzler and...
In a moment I'm going to ask him, I wonder how it goes, saying things, you know, telling the American, the world, things that it doesn't want to hear.
Usually in such situations the messenger is not treated well at all.
I'd like to remind my audience that a very great deal of the information I use,
and incidentally that relates to the long emergency the article sent to me
that I ended up reading, A lot of these things, most of them I use on the show, are
sent to me.
So if you have something of great interest in an article or Anything at all, really.
I'm available on the Internet, of course.
Artbell at mindspring.com or artbell at aol.com.
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at mindspring.com or aol.com.
Now, James, generally, when somebody like yourself writes something like you've written, You know, you're telling people things they really, really don't want to hear.
As you point out, we're sleepwalking through this, and they don't want to hear the kinds of things you've said tonight.
So, how's it gone down?
I mean, the messenger is usually shocked in situations like this?
Well, it's a little early to tell with my book, The Long Emergency.
I can tell how my friends and associates around here where I live have reacted to these ideas.
How's it going?
Well, generally, my friends around here are, you know, yuppie professionals.
They tend to be politically progressive.
Living in the suburbs, mostly.
Well, I live in small-town America.
I live in upstate New York, in a classic American Main Street town that does have its suburban components.
But, you know, my friends tend to scoff at these ideas.
They find the idea of a long emergency or the idea that we're really heading into big problems with energy to be rather abstract and not real.
And I don't try to persuade them to see things from my point of view.
It seems rather futile.
I just try to present the facts and draw some conclusions about it and let people decide for themselves.
So far I haven't been persecuted a whole lot.
It's a little bit early in the publication cycle.
The actual official pub date is not until May 15th.
So there haven't been major reviews yet.
I believe there was one in the New Republic about a week ago.
And the title of it was Wise Fool.
Wise Fool, really?
It was an equivocal review, and what he said in a nutshell was, these ideas that Kunstler is retailing seem pretty far out, and I'm not sure whether we can believe them or not, but they also seem maybe kind of plausible, and maybe we ought to take them seriously.
So, he really didn't know which way to go, finally, and I imagine there'll be a lot more of that.
But as I said earlier, you know, I'm allergic to conspiracy theories.
I just, I think people generally overplay them.
And I don't think that there will be any, you know, conspiracy to keep this information away from the public.
Unless it's by the public themselves, in just not wanting to hear it.
I hold the public very much accountable for their own predicament.
The public wanted to build this suburban drive-in utopia for themselves, and they've gotten exactly what they wanted.
You know, I see this a lot in the struggles that have occurred over Walmart over the last 20 years, because I've been, you know, often brought into various communities to help some battle against the Walmart here and there.
And the fact of the matter is that there's always some sizable faction of the local population that wants the Walmart very badly.
Now, in my opinion, they're often making a choice that goes very much against the self-interest of their community, because the Walmart will come in and, in effect, destroy their local economy.
And it's happened time and time and time again, and we've all seen it.
And yet, Americans have not been able to make the connection that, you know, there's a reason why it's important to have a local class of People engaged in retail and wholesale and these fine networks of economic interdependency and why they matter to a locality.
Americans have basically sold themselves down the river to save $9 on a hairdryer, and they've done it time and time and time again.
Our own behavior, collectively, has been somewhat foolish over the last, you know, through the post-war period.
And accelerating, especially in the last 20 years or so.
I live in a small community, indeed, and recently a super Walmart opened here, James, and there was, for the most part, a town-wide celebration.
Sure.
But of course, you know, you're living in one of those towns out west that really sprung up about 20 minutes ago.
That did not have really a deep and long, you know, infrastructure of, you know, commercial stuff and families running business going back for generations.
Quite right.
But here, you know, back in the older parts of the United States where that's the case, you see tremendous devastation.
Most of the towns in the eastern United States now look like a former Soviet backwater.
They are so dead.
You know, and the desolation is so visible, the boarded up storefronts, the shut down factories, The empty streets, the houses that are not taken care of.
I remember going through parts of Kansas that were the most depressing sight I ever saw.
As you pointed out, stores boarded up, towns virtually dead.
Startling.
Depressing.
Yes, I found it depressing.
Many of these towns 30 years ago were vibrant towns with local economies.
They manufactured things and the local retail economies Mostly functioned on a local and regional basis.
We had local bakeries and local creameries and wholesalers of goods that were manufactured in the United States.
We had a comprehensive economy.
We're moving into something quite different now, after a long period of sort of shock.
Alright, I want to go to the phones, allow the audience to ask some questions.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with James Kunstler, hello.
Mr. Koontzer, my name is Jim.
I am calling from Rochester, New York.
I assume you're a neighbor.
Well, I'm east of you somewhat by about 200 miles.
I'm over sort of near the Vermont border.
Okay.
The reason I'm calling is because I realize how daunting all this information could be to most people to hear this for the first time, and I think there's some optimism that can be taken away in an example that's been set nearby where I'm from, which is, I mentioned Rochester, New York.
Ithaca, which is a town that's created its own currency, And what that's done is essentially reverse the trends of export-based economies into essentially a localized economy where everything in the local is favored.
So, I wonder if you could comment on that.
I'd like to know, Caller.
Explain what you mean, their own currency.
Well, what they've done is essentially create their own currency.
It's been in trench since 1991.
It's legal.
There's been videos about it.
It's actually been on national news.
And what it's done ...is essentially reverse all the trends that are negative towards pushing us to this state of being we don't want to be in.
James?
Yes?
Well, I know about the Ithaca experiment.
You know, they still use the U.S.
dollar in Ithaca, New York, mainly.
The Ithaca experiment has been kind of an idealistic, cooperative experiment to construct a network of favors and barter and the ability to obtain local services.
And to promote that idea.
And it's been a good-hearted experiment.
I'm not sure that it really is the way we're going to be doing stuff in the future in America.
I imagine we're still going to be using the dollar.
The dollar may have quite a bit less value.
We may see quite a bit of barter.
Sometimes I think that we're going to be living in garage sale nation.
That's similar to what that community is like.
Pardon me?
That's very similar to what that community is like.
They have a lot of co-op farming.
Everything is very locally controlled, locally oriented.
I think it's something that's They've gone very far in helping insulate their community towards the effects of what we're going to see to come.
So this so-called currency was an effort to sort of localize the economy.
Exactly.
It's called the Ithaca Hour.
Alright, I've got it.
Thank you.
So you don't think of that, James, as a possible successful model?
Well, I see it as a noble, small-scale, local experiment, but not necessarily something that has widespread implications for what's really going to happen in the States.
And, you know, it's also among a fractional population of the people who live there.
Right now, we consider the United States the last great surviving superpower.
Is that a fair assessment?
Is that what we are right now?
well uh...
the soviet union or the former soviet union russia has in fact actually more
nuclear armaments and we do so they're speaking at the moment that
it will pretty super you know
I don't know.
I happen to believe that our economy is largely a sort of hallucinated economy right now.
We're kind of levitating, kind of running on fumes.
And it wouldn't take much to kind of knock the hallucinated props out from under it.
And all of this implies that we may have less of an ability to project our power Internationally than we believe that we do.
I mean, we certainly have airplanes and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and bombs and rockets and things.
But, you know, we're already proving that just to occupy one unfriendly nation is a very difficult enterprise and not something that we could necessarily sustain for a long period of time.
So, I think that we probably will withdraw back into the Western Hemisphere.
And the world will be a larger place.
And that will be a, well, again, you're projecting the beginning of the really tough times in about three years.
So when do we begin withdrawing?
Is there a way to foresee that?
Oh, you know, I think that any reasonable person could look at the situation and say, well, we're probably not going to be, you know, do we stay in Iraq for two years, two more years, four more years?
Six years.
What seems really reasonable?
And at what point do we start exhausting our military and bankrupting our treasury in doing it?
I think that you could come up with a range of time that most people could agree on, you know, probably something between, you know, the next 12 and 48 months.
We're going to have to decide whether we stick around there.
A lot of people talk about the The possibility, the prospect of occupying Saudi Arabia, for one reason or another, you know.
Mainly to protect our access to their oil.
That's right.
And in the event of some kind of a thing like a coup d'etat, or a threat to the Saudi family, or some kind of terrorism against the infrastructure of Saudi Arabia.
We could not allow that to occur, could we?
Well, we say that, but I don't think that we could really prevent it.
Could we occupy Saudi Arabia and even control the terrain there?
I doubt it, after our experience in Iraq.
Could we protect the oil infrastructure?
Well, the conventional wisdom is that all you need is five pounds of Semtex plastic explosive and a camel, and you can blow up the most important pipeline that runs across Saudi Arabia from Riyadh to Jeddah.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with James Howard Kunstler.
Good morning.
Good morning.
This is Michael from Indio-California, which is not a very well-to-do but rapidly growing community, which is like a mixture of middle America and the Southwest, as he was describing.
Right.
I do predict, and I'm only 25 years old, that I predict in 25 years the United States will become like the former Soviet Union.
That's what I predict, and I'm only 25, and I have a very good knowledge that I paid attention to our Well, I think the prospects are pretty grim.
I happened to be in a high school last week.
Now, I don't have any kids.
I've been married a couple of times.
through all of this could it go that quickly james really in the next five
years could we be like the former soviet union well i i i think the prospector pretty grim i happen to
the in a high school last week and i don't have any kids i've been married a couple times i don't have any kids
but i i did give a look a lecture on the birthday at a large make a large
suburban high school here in the new york capital district
on Earth Day.
And I was astounded at how out of control, how rude, how stupid the kids were who were there.
They didn't want to pay attention.
Their teachers had no control over them.
And I had to throw two kids out of the auditorium myself.
Because the teachers wouldn't do it, wouldn't control the kids.
I asked them later, you know, why don't you control their behavior?
And they said, well, we can't.
You know, there are these elaborate bureaucratic procedures we have to go through to control that.
And so it was shocking to go to this school.
Anyway, it happened to be my belief that what we are going to see is that our large centralized school districts will not work Not very well for us anymore.
You know, for very similar reasons to the other things in suburbia failing us.
These schools that depend on these fleets of yellow school buses to drive hundreds or even thousands of miles every day.
They're very hard to heat because they're all one-story buildings.
Moreover, I think education itself is going to change.
American high school amounts to very little besides an elaborate babysitting service.
You know, some kids do succeed at it on its own terms, but even they suffer from the futility of it.
And I have a feeling what we will see is schooling becoming much smaller, taking place on a much more distributed basis around the places we live, in smaller physical places.
And that schooling for many people may not go past the eighth grade ten, twenty years from now.
I think the college is going to cease to be a mass consumer activity in the sense that it is today, and it will return, if at all, to being an activity for the elite.
Now, how much resentment and grievance that generates among the people who are disentitled from it remains to be seen.
I think a lot of large universities are going to dry up and blow away.
We're simply going to be a much less affluent society, and we're probably not going to be able to run many of these great universities, including the great land-grant diploma mills of the Midwest.
My God, James, I consider myself to be pretty cynical, and I don't know, I look at the negative side of things, but you make me look like a piker.
I mean, you really have a...
Kind of a bleak outlook for everything and in the very near term at that, huh?
Well, I don't consider myself bleak or cynical at all.
In fact, I'm a relatively cheerful person and I lead a relatively happy life.
What I'm doing is looking at the circumstances of our society and making, I think, some reasonable projections about where we're going with this.
And one thing you have to remember, you know, a major discontinuity in the patterns of life is not necessarily the end of the world.
A lot of people accuse me of being apocalyptic, and I rather resent that label because I'm not describing the end of the world.
I'm describing major changes that we're going to go through in American civilization that are going to change the way we do things.
It may be a convulsion.
It may be full of hardship, but it's not the end of the world.
A realignment of the world, though, certainly.
Well, yes.
Our world.
Have you done any personal planning based on what you know?
Well, I made some of the decisions that I did make quite a few years ago.
I grew up in New York City and I lived in many major cities when I was a young newspaper reporter.
And I decided to move to a main street town Thirty years ago, and I've been here ever since, writing books.
You're, uh, indeed, uh, the exact kind of place that he suggests will make out best in the long emergency.
What do you say, folks?
You buying into this?
Or do you think there'll be a miracle?
That's something we need to ask more about, that possibility of a miracle.
Something new, radical.
Energy producing.
Free energy!
Otherwise, the road we're on is the one described in The Long Emergency.
Good morning, I'm Art Bell.
I'm going to show you how to make a Christmas tree.
You'll never know, I said tonight To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Perhaps nothing is as it seems.
Good morning, James Howard Koestler is my guest and what a dire message he carries.
The book is called The Long Emergency.
If you imagine the economic social changes that have been outlined tonight by my guest,
then you have to imagine a drastic change in politics because that reflects, of course,
And so how will American politics change through this period of time?
Any projections?
From me, Osh?
Yes.
Ah, well, we were talking a while ago about this new phenomenon that I think we'll be seeing in the years ahead.
The formation of what I call a formerly middle class.
A large, former middle class.
Yes.
And they will be full of grievances and resentment, and they will be bewildered by the loss of their entitlements to life in a drive-in utopia.
And I think that they may even be so angry that they will vote for corn-pone Nazis.
Or people like that.
People who will make George Bush look very mild, indeed, in comparison.
Really?
Now, having said that, I have to qualify that by adding that I think that the federal government will become progressively less powerful rather than more powerful.
In the years ahead.
And remember, I said anything big, anything on the large scale, whether it's... Including government.
Yeah.
Whether it's government or Walmart or large industrial Cargill-type farming operations, anything big is going to wither during the long emergency.
And a lot of my friends are very disturbed about the prospect of a big brother government controlling their lives, you know?
I think that We'll be lucky if the federal government can answer the phone 20 years from now and let alone regulate our laws.
But I do think on a local basis we're liable to see a lot of extremism and some of it may be quite dangerous because it will involve things like scapegoating And, you know, blaming our problems on various groups of people.
I think, you know, justice is liable to be a lot swifter and cruder.
We're going to not tolerate misbehavior, and we're going to deal with it probably fairly swiftly.
You make the world government almost sound good.
But first time caller on the line, you're on the air with James Howard Kunstler.
Good morning.
Right, that was almost a perfect segue you gave me.
I'll give you three quick examples.
You talk about big things withering.
You, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, and all those listening, just finished as an example paying where you view your tax dollars for something big that's withering in Boston.
We had a great idea to try and move traffic along by creating the well-known Big Dig.
Now, we find we're residing to driving wooden pegs into the sidewalls of a big, big tunnel going through Boston Harbor to keep the water out.
It simply is failing miserably, and this is a perfect example of big government withering by trying to move traffic, which you simply can't do.
When traffic gets to a certain level, There's nothing you can do.
Another example.
Ever tried driving through the 405 known as the Jug Handle in Southern California?
What's the government want to do there?
Well, let's put up toll booths.
The drivers are already paying 50 cents a gallon in taxes.
Now they're going to try and sustain or foist tolls on top of that?
It simply will fail miserably.
You live up in the Great Lakes region in New York.
Isn't it sad to see that some of the lakes down there now are unfishable?
There's hydrazine in the water, which turns male animals into female.
The hydrazine converts testosterone into progesterone and changes the males into females.
These are telltale signs of things that are happening now.
We don't have to prognosticate and say, oh, this is what's going to happen.
These fines are happening around us all over the place, and the sooner people wake up and realize what you're saying is really on target, the better we'll be.
The government we elect is the government we get, and unless we're willing to make a drastic change in how things are run, I'm afraid we're going to I don't think the American people are at all prepared to make the kinds of choices that are being discussed this morning.
I just don't think they are.
There are two points the gentleman made that I think are kind of interesting.
One is he's generally describing what I would call The diminishing returns of technology.
Meaning that, you know, we think that technology is only a benefit in our lives, but in fact, it bites back a lot.
And so we had this big project in Boston where we tried to put the expressway underneath the city, and it turned out to be very problematical.
You know, this leads to a consideration of another big problem, though.
A lot of Americans are confused about the difference between technology and energy.
Often in this public discussion, you'll hear people say, new technology will help solve these problems for us.
Right.
But the problem isn't the technology.
The problem is the energy that the technology runs on.
you know you can't be confined new technology all day long for all sorts of
things you know everything from you know running rock and roll music uh... through your eat
your drums to um...
uh... you know running out of volkswagen on the residue of a french fried fry machine
you know if you don't have the basic energy uh... to run the things that it is sort of doesn't matter
what kind of technology you come up on
Are you truly convinced, James, that there will not be some technological breakthrough in the area of energy?
I mean, that is a possibility.
Well, I would put it differently, although I've said that more or less.
What I am saying is that even if some miracle occurs and we discover some source of energy
that we hadn't known about before or some way of using the things that we've got that
we didn't know about before, there will still be this period of hardship and turbulence
that we're going to go through that I call the long emergency.
I see the period itself as being really quite unavoidable, but I wouldn't completely foreclose
the idea that the human race will discover some other way of running things.
Right.
Maybe.
But even if they do, the transitional period is still going to be that same long emergency.
Yeah, and there's also, you know, quite frankly, the prospect that the carrying capacity of the Earth for the numbers of human beings that are now living on it really has been exceeded.
And whatever else happens, We're probably going to have to die back to a more sustainable population.
Now, whether that happens over several generations or a millennium or just a couple of decades is a question that's up in the air, and it's not necessarily something that I advocate one way or the other.
Something will happen, but I wouldn't want to advocate for it one way or the other.
Good morning.
This is Esther from New York on WABC.
Yes, Esther.
I also think that individualism, the hyper-individualism, we should realize that if you give up the... Where'd she go?
Let's try it again.
Are you still there?
Hello, Mark.
Okay, we've got some cross lines here.
Is this you, young lady?
Yeah, I'm here.
Good.
Okay, please continue.
Yeah.
You mentioned about the synthetic fuels, so I'll go on to another subject.
I think that the individualism to drive, you know, 30, 50 miles should be given up because it would be a patriotic thing to do and to keep the American way of life, to be able to go to the drugstore, you know, make these little trips And also, I think that if they design railroads, that they should make the subway cars or other cars, you know, more human-friendly.
You do feel like you're giving up, that you're a failure if you go into one of these things.
So if they make them prettier and make them, you know, more user-friendly, make you feel more important going into them.
One example, in the old subway cars, they used to have them Like, uh, 16 people, uh, together, you know, like a little, uh, rectangle.
And now you have these, just these long lines and you really feel like, uh, a real failure in them.
So if they make these things, you know, more, uh, they make people feel more important.
All right.
Well, it's a very good point.
And, you know, but it goes to our leadership.
And again, there's a gigantic apparent failure of leadership, uh, going on, right?
Well, I don't know if I would attribute that to the design of subway cars.
No, but a move toward a mass transit system.
I mean, these are things that only, really, government can do.
Well, yes, you do need some agreement at all levels of government that these things are necessary.
Right now, we're having a debate in Congress about allocating You know, something like $1.8 billion to saving Amtrak.
We're spending $80 billion in Iraq, and a lot of it to fix the sewers and electrical systems of Iraq, and we're not even willing to spend a small fraction of that maintaining our existing rail system.
You know, it's true.
We have a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of at this point.
And we have to do better.
I don't happen to agree with the caller that Americans are going to voluntarily step out of their cars without driving individually.
I don't think so.
Just out of patriotism.
They will stop doing that when they're compelled to do it by circumstances, and not before.
All right.
East of the Rockies.
Your turn with James Howard.
Good morning.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes?
It's Michael.
Yes, Michael.
Oh, okay.
You are a hard person to get a hold of.
Yes.
Time for a week, man.
Alright, you're through now, Michael, so let her rip.
This is Michael from Walton Beach.
Uh, yeah, I can tell that you're on some kind of internet connection.
Not a very good one, either.
Skype, is it not bad?
Uh, it's not great.
Look, go ahead and ask your question.
No, no question.
No question.
I have all the answers.
Okay, well then give us one.
Okay, give us one.
Okay, one answer?
No need to worry about oil, because in 20 years, I think the center of the world is going to be covered in water anyway.
See, you're not Skyping very well.
Okay, there you are.
So, James, there is one answer.
Well, global warming is happening.
Climate change is happening.
There's very little disagreement in the scientific community about that.
And we're going to be facing some additional problems, you know.
In my opinion, this has most significance for our food production issues, because not only are we going to be facing the loss of oil and gas inputs, but we're going to be facing some very strange and perhaps devastating Climate issues, you know, years of drought.
The inability to grow certain crops that we have been accustomed to growing in certain parts of the year.
Desertification of places that only receive marginal amounts of rainfall.
These things are all going to be part of the bigger picture of the emergency that we're facing.
James, how much of a possibility is there that your timetable is askew?
I'm not disputing what you're saying is coming, but that it may be a little farther away than you're suggesting.
I think that, if anything, the problems that we're going to encounter with oil are closer.
And I think that because of this reason, that you don't have to run out of oil or even go very far down the arc of depletion Before the major systems that we depend on start to destabilize and wobble and mutually amplify each other's distress.
So that when the price of oil goes up even moderately, that's when the big box retail stores start to have trouble with their business equation.
That's when the agricultural producers start to have trouble with justifying their production.
That's when people start losing jobs.
That's when the air starts coming out of the economy.
That's when people discover that the investments they've made may not be worth what they thought they were.
And all sorts of things start affecting each other and wobbling, and pretty soon you find yourself, you know, in the beginning, in a very, very difficult economic situation.
You know, and then you're confronted with the realities of really how you're going to Use these infrastructures of daily life that are really seriously failing you.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with James Howard Kunstler.
Hello.
Well, good morning Art and James.
This is Kerry in California and what I want to say is there is a way of making extra fuel by just breaking the molecules down of water into hydrogen and oxygen.
I've already been working towards that.
I've completely making my own power now in my own motorhome and living in it and Hey, as soon as I can get the other parts I need to convert and start making my own hydrogen, I'm going to!
Alright, well he's not the only one talking about hydrogen.
James, the President had a lot to say about hydrogen.
How much of the equation is it?
Well, we're unlikely to have a hydrogen economy, at least the way the President described it.
We can make hydrogen and we can use hydrogen, but It's almost, you know, you don't, you get less energy from the hydrogen that you, than you, you have to put more energy into the process of getting the hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen itself, and that's a, you know, a general truth of the system.
In other words, it's a net loss.
It's a net loss.
Hydrogen's not really a fuel source, it's just a sort of a carrier for the energy that's produced by something else.
Generally, electricity.
It takes electricity to separate hydrogen from the oxygen in water, and you get less energy from the hydrogen than you put in the electricity.
Well, then the president has to know that.
If he knows that, then what's he doing?
Just trying to calm everybody down, or what?
Yeah, and I think there was also this idea that we would construct an enormous number of nuclear electric generating plants to get the hydrogen, and that we would You running the easy motoring system of America, the interstate highway and all of its furnishings on hydrogen.
But I think what you find really with hydrogen is that it doesn't scale.
That's sort of an engineering term.
It doesn't scale.
And it's true of a lot of the alternative fuel things.
You can do them on a small basis.
You may be able to do them on a household basis or even on a neighborhood basis.
But we're not going to be able to run the systems of American society as presently constituted on these things.
I would take it right now, your book, The Long Emergency, is available on Amazon.com, all the bookstores.
Yeah, Borders, Barnes & Noble, the independent booksellers.
Let's not forget them.
The people organized under BookSense.com.
How's it doing so far?
Well, I don't know.
I think it's coming out of the box pretty well.
You know, there are a lot of people out there who recognize there's a problem, who would like to hear it articulated in a rational way, and are interested in where we're going and what we're going to do.
And especially the young people out there who are going to be living most of their lives in an America that's quite different from the one that we've been used to.
And do you think, based on this information, people are beginning to make personal choices, actual decisions?
Oh yes, I get emails every day from people who are making real plans to move to different places.
People who are going to leave Los Angeles, for example, and recognize that that may be one of the more difficult places to be.
People who are thinking of new trades and vocations.
People who are in college, learning things that they know that they will never be able to make a career of, like public relations.
Marketing, you know, marketing.
Things that are not going to be vocations 30 years from now when they're, you know, when they're my age.
All right.
Well, we're going to have to hold it right there.
We're out of time, but boy, you sure laid it on the line, brother.
Well, it was a pleasure to be here and to talk to your audience, and I hope that you all got something out of it.
Thank you, my friend.
I wish you good luck in the long emergence.
Thank you.
I'll need it, based on where I am.
Take care.
Okay, bye-bye.
All right.
James Howard Kunstler, everybody.
That's it.
That's the weekend.
See you next weekend.
It's been a great one from the high deserts.
The doomed high deserts.
I'm Art Bell.
Good night.
Good night in the desert.
Shooting stars across the sky This magical journey Will take us on a ride Filled with the longing Searching for the truth Will we make it till tomorrow?
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