Bomb The Suburbs

In the third week of June, the price of oil reached $58 a barrel. It could reach $60 before the summer ends. To forestall this possibility and send prices down, Saudi Arabia has promised to increase its production. But the Arab kingdom has made that promise twice recently, and failed to increase its production both times. Two explanations have been offered for the Saudis' behavior. The first is that the nation doesn't want to release more oil because it likes putting the screws to the West. The second is that it can't release more oil because there is no more oil.

The second hypothesis is not crazy. There are some sane and knowledgeable people who subscribe to it. One of them is Matthew Simmons, an energy advisor to George W. Bush. But there are also some silly people who subscribe to it. One of these is James Howard Kunstler. Simmons, in his book Twilight in the Desert, makes a persuasive case that Saudi Arabia has been overstating its oil reserves for years, and he offers policy recommendations for dealing with this reality. Kunstler, in his book The Long Emergency, skips the evidence and the policy and decides that the end times are upon us. The oil age will end, alternative fuels won't save us, and the planet will enter a period of strife and instability called the Long Emergency.

As is often the case, popularity rises as quality declines. Simmons is an expert who has been spent considerable time in Saudi Arabia. He and his book are obscure. Kunstler is a font of vitriol with a BA in theater. His book has been excerpted in Rolling Stone, he has written for the Atlantic, and he has a large following among urban planners and environmentalists.

Kunstler made a name for himself in 1993 with The Geography of Nowhere, a well-written if overwrought jeremiad against suburbia. The book made him a celebrity among New Urbanists, perhaps because his unremitting hatred of big cars and ugly homes read like New Urbanism distilled into some poisonous byproduct of itself. In The Long Emergency his hatred has not subsided. Kunstler despises the way most Americans live, and his arguments are soaked in intolerance. The result is a book that disserves a worthy topic.

That topic is "peak oil"-the idea that sometime soon (as early as 2006), half the world's oil will have been extracted. As the planet crosses the peak, energy will at best become more expensive, and at worst scarce to the point where gains in global prosperity slow or even reverse.

Though it is gaining credence, peak oil is not a mainstream theory. Energy economists are an optimistic bunch, and generally unworried about catastrophic depletion. The Cassandras that periodically crashed the party-to claim that coal or oil or zinc is running out-have historically all been wrong. The burden of proof, therefore, is always on the pessimist, so the responsible pessimist must be ready with a meticulous and patient argument.

But meticulousness and patience have never been Kunstler's strengths, and he doesn't engage, or even identify, anyone who is more sanguine than he about the world's energy future. He simply dismisses them all as "cornucopians" lost in something called the "consensus trance." The economists, the geologists, the energy experts-all are delusional. Kunstler's book, meanwhile, which makes sweeping and magnificently confident claims about geology, technology and geopolitics, has no bibliography and miserably few footnotes. None of its footnotes references scientific journals.

We soon see why. Kunstler isn't interested in the nuances of energy scarcity, nor in the various measures we might take to address it. The real business of The Long Emergency is to describe in lurid detail the forthcoming and well-deserved collapse of suburban America. Kunstler has been nursing a grudge against modernity for some time now, and despite his protestations to the contrary, he takes clear glee in imagining the punishments Americans will endure for their profligate ways.

These punishments include but are not limited to: famine; war; epidemics of deadly disease; governments releasing viruses into their own populations to cull the weak; the demise of the car culture; the bankruptcy of every big box retailer; a return to local, even pre-industrial, economies; and-I'm not making this up-Asian pirates plundering California.

California, of course, will collapse. The Long Emergency wouldn't be a disaster narrative if the Golden State didn't get some unholy comeuppance. On his blog, Kunstler imagines the day when "the reality of our oil predicament falls on the hapless public like a hammer of God and the people of California die for their fucking cars in their fucking cars and over their fucking cars." Spoken like a true humanist.

Kunstler is sometimes described as a radical, and he doubtless sees himself as a lonely intellectual, but the correct adjective for him is "puritan." America to him is sinful, and the anger he feels toward it is released in his fantasies of its demise. He glorifies the past, hates the present and sees only agony in the future. His gloom is almost religiously deterministic; Americans have squandered their opportunities to repent. They have continued to drive and suburbanize. So now it is too late. Now is simply the time to suffer.

Which is nonsense. Kunstler is correct to criticize people who think cheap oil will last forever. But the fallacy of an extreme position is not proof of its equally extreme opposite. The fact that we won't have cheap oil for eternity doesn't mean America as we know it is hurtling toward extinction.

Regardless of whether the oil peak is distant or imminent, and regardless of whether the Saudis are running out of oil or just being truculent, there are good reasons to move away from fossil fuel-dependency. But the disastrous depletion of resources is not a foregone conclusion. It boils down to an empirical question: Can we perfect new sources of energy faster than we deplete the current ones? In the past the answer to this question has always been yes. That doesn't mean it will be yes this time, but we can tilt the odds in our favor by accelerating our rate of innovation and slowing our rate of consumption.

This makes the car an obvious target for public policy. Driving accounts for almost half of American oil consumption, and we drive as much as we do not because we are sinful but because driving is underpriced. Congestion tolls and parking charges, which cities around the world are beginning to adopt, would dramatically reduce our fuel consumption. So would conversion of more of the vehicle fleet to hybrids-a step that could be encouraged through a higher gas tax.

All these measures are effective, inexpensive and lend themselves easily to implementation. Are they panaceas? No. And they will require political work, which Kunstler seems unwilling to do. But they will help, and they will buy time for the alternative fuel projects that Kunstler so airily dismisses. Kunstler likes to think he is telling us hard truths, but in fact he is taking the easy way out. It is easy to be a pessimist, to peddle inevitability and call it analysis. It is far harder to be reflective, and actually devise a solution.

We'll all be better off focusing less on our certain doom and more on solving our problems. Kunstler will be better off as well. The preacher of doom, after all, is often saved by the flock that ignores him.