Julian Darley: More news came in today, that I believe, all the anhydrous ammonia production plants in Minnesota I read today have been shut down for lack of natural gas and natural gas is 80% of the price of fertilizer, which we know is very closely related to ammonia. And that leads me to mention, do you think the natural gas problems, or the natural gas crunch, do you think that will wake Americans up to a greater hydrocarbon problem?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, you know, something is capable of waking Americans up. We may be sleepwalking into the future, we may have gone into a kind of a coma, but we’re not dead. I think it will take what I call a bitch slap upside our nappy heads to wake us up. And I think we’re going to get it, and it’s going to come in one form or another. We could have an oil crisis tomorrow if some chap walks into Prince Abdullah’s bedchamber with a bomb strapped to his belt. That could be the end of our Saudi Arabian imports, indeed that could be the end of the Sauds and their family and their regime and the beginning of something else in Arabia. And that would change everything.
As I said earlier, I lived through the 1973 oil embargo and that made quite an impression on me because, you know, you saw people’s behavior change overnight. You saw people being severely impressed with the power of extrinsic events to change your life. And I remember driving down to New York City to see a girl when I was 25 years old from 150 miles away in Albany, N.Y. And I was a newspaper reporter at the time; I had planned this trip to see this girl very, very carefully so that I knew where I might be able to get some gas, you know, on the way back from there. And I was the only person on the New York State Thruway between Albany and the Tappan Zee Bridge. And it was like that science fiction movie The Day The Earth Stood Still. There were like five cars on, going down Second Avenue in Manhattan that night. It was very, very spooky.
And I’ve never seen anything like it since. Certainly nothing that we’ve experienced since, except the World Trade Center disaster matched that for sheer shock value. But the difference was that the World Trade Center disaster, although it was seen by everybody, it only happened, really, in one small place.
The oil embargo actually happened all over and people from California to Boston sat on those lines and experienced the trauma and thought very hard about how they were going to make some maybe different decisions about commuting. I, for one, when the oil embargo happened, I had been living in a kind of rural village about 20 miles away from my job. Two weeks later I went in and rented an apartment in downtown Albany, NY, I was working for the newspaper there. So I obviously made a very concrete decision to move, and was basically glad I did.
But, yeah, I think that it’s conceivable that that could wake up Americans and so could a natural gas crisis, many things could. But, the trouble now is of course is that our investments in suburbia are orders of magnitude greater than they were even 25 years ago in 1973. And it’s going to be much, much harder for Americans to find the pathway out of this. You know, I think the real key to all this is that Americans kind of, in the strange complacency that overtook us in the last 20 years, ever since the North Sea and the Alaskan Slope kind of came on line and made it possible for us to postpone this reckoning.
This strange complacency that overtook us kind of gave us the idea that there’s a guaranteed happy ending to every terrible predicament that you find yourself in. That life is sort of like a TV show or a Bruce Willis movie – that there is a happy ending. But in my opinion, the great shock to Americans is going to be to find out that there is no smooth transition between the end of the cheap oil era and whatever follows.
In fact it’s going to be very disorderly, and very turbulent, and it’s going to involve a lot of stress, and woe, and ruin, and whatever emerges from it is going to emerge from really a great kind of fire of the soul that may even match what we went through in the Civil War. And I hope we’re able to come out the other end. I’m just young enough, or put another way, just not old enough, so that it’s conceivable that I could see coming out the other end. And I’m as curious as anybody to see how it turns out.
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