Kunstler: Calgary

By James Kunstler,
October 3 2005
I was way out in Calgary, Alberta, last week, the tar sands capital of western Canada. I was there to yak on camera for a CBC-sponsored documentary about suburbia, and the city itself proved to be a strange and interesting case of immersive delusional behavior.

Calgary started out, of course, as the railhead for western ranching and a jump-off for various gold rushes in the late 19th century. Now it has become an archetypal city of immense glass boxes in a sterilized center surrounded by an asteroid belt of beige residential subdivisions -- sort of what Rochester, New York, would be like if it had an economy. The vast suburbs ooze out onto the prairie to the east, along with their complements of strip malls, power centers, car dealerships, and fry-pits, and on the west they bump up against the foothills of the Rockies.

The real estate scene in Calgary is rip-roaring because newcomers are flooding in to work the tar sand angles. No doubt the tar sands will generate a lot of wealth in the years ahead. But those who think they will save western civilization from a Peak Oil clusterfuck are going to be very disappointed. We are not going to run the interstate highway system, Walt Disney World, and WalMart on the Canadian tar sands.

These days, a lot of people (including news reporters) are saying that the tar sands contain the equivalent of a trillion barrels of oil, which is just plain nonsense. It's more like the equivalent of 180 billion barrels -- with world consumption at 30 billion annually (do the math). But the word equivalent is tricky, too, because it's only the equivalent in volume, not in the cost of recovery, since the stuff does not flow out of the ground at room temperature like Texas sweet light crude. The process requires a huge up-front mining operation on top of everything else, conducted in a climate so cold that the 13-foot-diameter tires of giant dump trucks crack regularly. The Achilles heel of the operation is that it requires hundreds of millions of dollars a year worth of natural gas to melt the stiff goop out of the sand, and that Canada's natural gas supply is verging on depletion just as ours is. They'll have a gnarly choice in a few years: either heat their homes or power the tar sands operation.

Another catch is that even in the short term, the petroleum that is recovered is not going exclusively to the United States or even Canada. The Chinese have been very busily inking contracts for substantial gobs of it. Is George Bush going to send the 82nd airborne into Alberta to secure access to the tar sands?

But this blog entry is not really about the tar sands, it's about the expectations of the people working off of them, which is that they assume the easy motoring utopia will continue indefinitely and are madly busy building a suburban infrastructure for it to dwell in, even while Canadians themselves are now paying the equivalent of $4 US a gallon for the privilege to commute forty miles a day.

What's going on in Calgary, with new subdivisions of half-million dollar houses opening every month, is the North American tragedy in microcosm. Because every new suburban house built, every new Target store opened, every new parking lot paved, every highway widened will be a project in the service of a living arrangement with no future. It is a true madness that beats a path to historic tragedy.


And this is what you have to think about, wherever you live in the US or Canada: what kind of projects and proposals are moving right now in the permitting pipeline of your own municipal planning boards? Things waiting to be built in the next year or two. Chances are they're the same suburban furnishings we've been getting for half a century, in the latest state-of-the-art releases. Each one is a tragedy. Each one will carry us further into darkness.

How do you stop such suicidal behavior? Probably not by persuasion or exhortation. People change what they are doing when circumstances compel them to and not before. The American public barely even thinks about these things. The Sunday New York Times news section contained not one story this week about the current state of oil-and-gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The fact is that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed more than 90 production platforms as well as pipelines and drilling rigs. The implications are so obvious and we are not getting them.

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