James Howard Kunstler: Obama, Dems, Pubs oblivious to the real problem

[KingOrfeo]

James Howard Kunstler is a writer, novelist, social commentator, who has written several books about America's post-WWII suburbanization and the unsustainability of a built environment built on the assumption that we'll always be able to get anywhere by car because we'll always have cheap oil (or else develop renewable alternatives that we can use without changing our lifestyle). His most ominous book is The Long Emergency, fortelling doom within our lifetimes for Western industrial civilization as we know it.

On his website he publishes a weekly "Clusterfuck Nation" commentary. This is the entry for 2/2/09:

February 2, 2009
Road Trip

"We will not apologize for our way of life...."

This unfortunate phrase from President Obama's otherwise sturdy inaugural address, echoed through my mind last week as I cruised the suburban outlands of Montgomery, Alabama. All the usual commercial furnishings of consumerist America hugged the flattish ochre and dusty-green landscape of played-out cotton fields where thirty feet of topsoil has washed away in the two hundred years since the mainly English settlers shoved out the native Alabamu, Coosa, and Tallapoosa. Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle center," book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion.

They say that the banks have stopped calling in their loans on the commercial real estate, even though the owners of the malls and strip malls have arrived firmly in default. Calling in the loans would only pin another horrifying liability on the banks' balance sheets. So all parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life. Something similar goes on at the next level down, where the tenants of the malls and strip malls sink deeper into rent arrears every month, and the eviction process is simply postponed, while the stores themselves put off paying their vendors and suppliers – as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality .

How long will these games go on? This is the primary question that haunts the republic as we wait for new TARPS, and "bad banks," economic stimulus packages, infrastructure renewal roll-outs, and other policy life-lines thrown out in guarded hopefulness to haul America out of a ditch.

The center of Montgomery was instructive, too. Not unlike any other city in the USA (pop. about 200,000), the former main artery of downtown commerce – Dexter Avenue, rolling out like a red carpet below the state capitol hill, where Martin Luther King's early career kicked off in a modest red brick church, and where Rosa Parks famously refused to move to the back of her bus – this "main street" presented a sad sequence of empty shopfronts interrupted here and there by rather creepy amateur murals depicting the cruelties of slavery, as if a remonstrance to the politicos up the hill. Most of the buildings lining the avenue still stood burdened by the clownish facade re-doos and ghastly claddings of the 1950s, which had replaced the ordered classical-vernacular decorum of the original 19th century frontages. Once the malls had landed in the old cotton fields, and MLK moved on to Atlanta, Dexter Avenue was just left to rot in the memory trunk.

Here and there around the rest of the downtown, other weird experiments in American post-war anti-urbanism presented themselves, most notably a "building" designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls – which turned out to belong to Morris Dees' renowned Southern Poverty Law Center -- deployed directly across the street from the modest white clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis after Richmond fell and the Confederate leadership skeedaddled further south. There were a few recently-built government towers that looked like Nascar trophies. But the rest of the downtown – the parts not dedicated to surface parking – was the ubiquitous array of muffler shops, or restaurants and churches that looked like muffler shops.

With the city center thus nearly dead, and the asteroid belt of malls and strips on their knees financially, this emblematic sunbelt metro area finds itself in a pickle. Cotton being well-past decline, and having wrecked the soil, the "new" economy of recent decades dedicated itself to building car-dependent air-conditioned suburban sprawl – the perceived perfect antidote to a previous economic order based on serfdom, hook-worm, and inescapable heat. That now-not-so-new economy of sprawl, in turn, has come to a screeching halt, as a cruel destiny threw sand in the mechanisms of reliably cheap oil and revolving credit, and the gears seized up. A mood of ominous watching and waiting pervaded the city, but many of the movers-and-shakers had pinned their hopes on the chance that Mr. Obama's stimulus bill would allow them to commence building a new freeway to the ocean on the Florida panhandle.

My journey continued on the Jesus-haunted blue highways, to that selfsame place, Walton County, Florida, where some of the most famous experiments in the New Urbanism were conducted beginning in the 1980s with the new town of Seaside. I had been there many times over the years, and I was called down to get a prize in the service of the movement, but it was a little disconcerting to see how the build-out had progressed.

The Seaside experiment began very modestly as the idea for a bohemian village of architects and artists in what was then an almost empty quarter of piney woods owned by the St Joe timber company. Seaside was designed so beautifully that it attracted the attention of every thoracic surgeon and corporate lawyer between Nashville and New Orleans, and pretty soon Seaside became the Riviera of the sunbelt's economic elite – and came in for gales of criticism for becoming that. The newer houses and commercial structures grew ever grander, as a Boomer generation status competition ramped up into the new millennium. Several more, ever-grander New Urbanist towns sprouted along the adjacent beaches, some of the most recent composed of immense mansions embarrassing in their opulence. The outcome was a little scary, especially now that the fortunes behind many of these mansions may be threatened by the multiplying fiascos of finance and economy overspreading the nation like a vicious plague.

The New Urbanists had not set out to build monuments to Yuppie-Boomer consumerism, but a peculiar destiny shoved them into that role for a while – even while they toiled elsewhere around the nation to reform town planning laws and generally provide an antidote to the fatal cultural cancer of sprawl, that is, of a settlement pattern guaranteed to comprehensively bankrupt our society. Anyway, the collapse of the housing bubble has affected the New Urbanists' business, too, and this may turn out to be a very good thing because they can put aside the distractions of building very grand places to sop up ill-gotten wealth and focus on the issues that Mr. Obama's people should have been paying attention to all along, namely, how are we going to reform the way we live in this country and what will be the physical manifestation of how we live in the decades to come.

The New Urbanists have preached for years that conventional suburbia would fail America in the long run, and that we'd have to prepare for this failure by restoring traditional modes of occupying the landscape. So far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban system as the heart of our economic problem. They can't recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future – and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day.

But then, more than half the population lives the suburban way of life, with its deadly mortgage traps, its mandatory motoring, and its civic disengagements. Nobody in power dares tell the truth: that we can't live this way anymore.

But there are scores of places like Montgomery, Alabama, and thousands of traditional main street small towns that are sitting out there waiting to be re-activated. We need to do this much more than we need to build new freeways to the beach. Suburbia is not going to be abandoned overnight (even if it fails logistically and economically !) but we have got to arrive at a consensus about rehabilitating our forsaken small cities and small towns. The New Urbanists have gathered, organized, and codified all the principle and methodology needed to carry out this campaign. This should be their moment. Mr. Obama and his team should get with the program.

Is he right? And what, if anything, can be done?

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Kunstler's 2001 book The City in Mind, chapter on Atlanta:

A current popular belief in America is that "alternative fuels" could replace gasoline in the vehicles we use and that the system could merrily roll along without petroleum as if nothing had happened. This a dangerous delusion. The truth is that no known "alternative technology," including hydrogen, fuel cell, electricity, nuclear, or alcohol from biomass, can take the place of gasoline in the way we have organized our lives, especially where cars and trucks are concerned. None of the touted alternative fuels is as versatile as gasoline, or can be produced for anything close to the cheap price of gas we've been accustomed to, or can be stored or transported as easily. The electric car is not going to save Atlanta.

* * * * *

I believe the world is entering a long era of chronic instability in oil markets that no amount of wishing or pretending will hold back. By the time this book is published -- a year from now -- I shall be surprised if we are not experiencing the initial effects. The two oil-producing regions that allowed America to postpone this reckoning for twenty-five years, the Alaskan North Slope fields, and the North Sea fields (belonging to Britain and Norway), are scheduled to pass their production peaks this year, and after that, most of the oil in the world will be controlled by people who don't like us, or contained in regions too chaotic to engage in the complex business of oil extraction. The Middle East regions containing the greatest reserves will be the last to peak, but long before they do, the oil markets will destabilize. In the current American mood of narcotized inattention, the point can't be emphasized enough that it is not necessary for oil reserves to run out before world oil markets are severely destabilized. And when that occurs, industrial economies will be painfully compromised.

We Americans cherish a set of delusions to minimize or deflect the seriousness of this. As already touched on, we believe that we can run a drive-in civilization on some fuel other than petroleum. The actual prospects for this are dim, but we base our belief (a wish, really) on the spectacular cavalcade of technological achievements that occurred in the previous century, one astonishing novelty after another: airplanes, movies, radio, TV, antibiotics, Teflon, computers, automobiles themselves. (The lingering "victory disease" from our great triumph in World War Two still stokes our delusions of invincibility.) Alternative energy sources such as natural gas, biomass, coal, nuclear power, solar power, fuel cells, and so forth, will fall far short of compensating for disrupted oil markets. It will be a hard lesson. The world's fleet of eleven thousand jet airplanes will not run on coal or plutonium. Massive disruptions to transportation and business will occur. The "global economy" as touted in recent years -- meaning the long-range transport of enormous quantities of cheap goods virtually everywhere -- will join mercantile imperialism in the history books. Food production, which depends heavily on oil-based fertilizers, will be affected by oil market disturbances. The Caesar salad that travels twenty-five hundred miles from California to somebody's table in Atlanta will become an object of nostalgia. Farming will have to become much more labor-intensive, will have to be practiced on a far smaller scale, and done much closer to market. Half a million other products, from medicine, asphalt, paint and detergent to plastic trash bags, are also derived from oil. As the oil markets destabilize, shortages and fluctuating prices in oil will hinder industry from even addressing the problem of converting societies to other forms of energy.

 

[The_Trouvere]

It is risky business to predict the future. The easy tendency is to look at a few obvious trends, and assume that they will continue into the future.

"The Population Bomb (1968) is a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich. A best-selling work, it predicted disaster for humanity due to overpopulation and the "population explosion". The book predicted that 'in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

In How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, published in 1979, Howard J. Ruff predicted an inflationary recession.

Mark Twain famously said, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."


Nevertheless, reports of Twain's death were eventually accurate. The predictions of Kunstler, Ehrlich, and Ruff may eventually be realized, too.

The notion that suburban sprawl is unsustainable does not bother me at all. I dislike suburbs. I like cities. In his book American Theocracy Kevin Phillips pointed out that there is a correlation between gasoline consumption and support for the Republican Party. I like the thought of Republicans being punished at the pump.

I want to raise the tax on gasoline by two dollars a gallon, and spend the money exclusively on non automotive means of transportation.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I want to raise the tax on gasoline by two dollars a gallon, and spend the money exclusively on non automotive means of transportation.

Like these?

 

[ivantheterrible]

it's hard to run a locomotive pulling thousands of tons of stuff on solar. or a tank to fight a war running on a solar cell.
modern society screwed itself.
it forgot about local, and community. thus food, energy, and politics becomes a thing that is done elsewhere. and that requires a corporate mindset.

 

[off2bed]

Blame Frank Lloyd Wright, he advocated the suburbs way before WWII.

I agree the American suburb is wasteful and destructive in many ways, and have always believed so. But what are we going to do? spend trillions on bulldozers and level them, so we can re-do it?

 

[The_Trouvere]

Like these?

That sure would help. The civilized world is leaving the United States behind.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Blame Frank Lloyd Wright, he advocated the suburbs way before WWII.

I agree the American suburb is wasteful and destructive in many ways, and have always believed so. But what are we going to do? spend trillions on bulldozers and level them, so we can re-do it?

We can stop building new suburbs. We can revitalize downtown areas of our cities.

 

[KingOrfeo]

We can stop building new suburbs. We can revitalize downtown areas of our cities.

And we can build streetcar and light-rail and regional-rail and long-distance high-speed rail networks to make everybody less auto-dependent, therefore less petroleum-dependent (trains can be run on electricity, which can be generated in nuclear power plants, which we need a lot more of; the technology is much safer now than it was in the 1970s).

The idea is a multi-tiered system -- see here.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Blame Frank Lloyd Wright, he advocated the suburbs way before WWII.

I agree the American suburb is wasteful and destructive in many ways, and have always believed so. But what are we going to do? spend trillions on bulldozers and level them, so we can re-do it?

What's probably going to happen (within, say, the next 10 or 20 years) is that the rich and poor will change places -- physically/geographically, I mean. The decrepit inner-city neighborhoods will be gentrified and the affluent will move in, displacing their current residents. The suburbs will become the new slums, the place you live when you can afford nothing better. Which will leave the underclass even worse off than they are now, because in addition to all their other problems, they'll need automobile transportation to everything, which they will not be able to properly afford. But at least they'll have lots of space, light, and air -- everything the suburbs were made for (except isolation from the scary Other).

 

[KingOrfeo]

This week's Clusterfuck Nation entry:

February 9, 2009
Poverty of Imagination

Venturing out each day into this land of strip malls, freeways, office parks, and McHousing pods, one can't help but be impressed at how America looks the same as it did a few years ago, while seemingly overnight we have become another country. All the old mechanisms that enabled our way of life are broken, especially endless revolving credit, at every level, from household to business to the banks to the US Treasury.

Peak energy has combined with the diminishing returns of over-investments in complexity to pull the "kill switch" on our vaunted "way of life" -- the set of arrangements that we won't apologize for or negotiate. So, the big question before the nation is: do we try to re-start the whole smoking, creaking hopeless, futureless machine? Or do we start behaving differently?

The attempted re-start of revolving debt consumerism is an exercise in futility. We've reached the limit of being able to create additional debt at any level without causing further damage, additional distortions, and new perversities of economy (and of society, too). We can't raise credit card ceilings for people with no ability make monthly payments. We can't promote more mortgages for people with no income. We can't crank up a home-building industry with our massive inventory of unsold, and over-priced houses built in the wrong places. We can't ramp back up the blue light special shopping fiesta. We can't return to the heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and over-sprawled metroplexes. Mostly, we can't return to the now-complete "growth" cycle of "economic expansion." We're done with all that. History is done with our doing that, for now.

So far -- after two weeks in office -- the Obama team seems bent on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all the impossible things listed above. Mr. Obama is not the only one, of course, who is invoking the quest for renewed "growth." This is a tragic error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities, and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a level of decreased complexity.

For instance, the myth that we can become "energy independent and yet remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use and there is absolutely no chance that drill-drill-drilling (or any other scheme) will change that. The public and our leaders can not face the reality of this. The great wish for "alternative" liquid fuels (bio fuels, algae excreta) will never be anything more than a wish at the scales required, and the parallel wish to keep all our cars running by other means -- hydrogen fuel cells, electric motors -- is equally idle and foolish. We cannot face the mandate of reality, which is to do everything possible to make our living places walkable, and connect them with public transit. The stimulus bills in congress clearly illustrate our failure to understand the situation.

The attempt to restart "consumerism" will be equally disappointing. It was a manifestation of the short peak energy decades of history, and now that we're past peak energy, it's over. That seventy percent of the economy is over, especially the part that allowed people to buy stuff with no money. From now on people will have to buy stuff with money they earn and save, and they will be buying a lot less stuff. For a while, a lot of stuff will circulate through the yard sales and Craigslist, and some resourceful people will get busy fixing broken stuff that still has value. But the other infrastructure of shopping is toast, especially the malls, the strip malls, the real estate investment trusts that own it all, many of the banks that lent money to the REITs, the chain-stores and chain eateries, of course, and, alas, the non-chain mom-and-pop boutiques in these highway-oriented venues.

Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don't know anyone who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for has reached the end of the line. We seem to be learning a new and interesting lesson: that even a team that promises change is actually petrified of too much change, especially change that they can't really control.

The argument about "change" during the election was sufficiently vague that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn't, materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought they would only administer it differently than the Bush team -- but basically life in the USA would continue being about all those trips to the mall, and the cubicle jobs to support that, and the family safaris to visit Grandma in Lansing, and the vacations at Sea World, and Skipper's $20,000 college loan, and Dad's yearly junket to Las Vegas, and refinancing the house, and rolling over this loan and that loan... and that has all led to a very dead end in a dark place.

If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there's a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don't focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don't get started on this right away, we're screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the scale represented by General Motors.

The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses. It's a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again. We'll see a striking illustration of "phase change" as the public mood goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage. Not only will they discover the impossibility of getting back to where they were, but they will see the panicked actions of Washington drive what remains of our capital resources down a rat hole.

A consensus is firming up on each side of the "stimulus" question, largely along party lines -- simply those who are for it and those who are against it, mostly by degrees. Nobody in either party -- including supposed independents such as Bernie Sanders or John McCain, not to mention President Obama -- has a position for directing public resources and effort at any of the things I mentioned above: future food security, future travel-and-transport security, or the future security of livable, walkable dwelling places based on local networks of economic interdependency. This striking poverty of imagination may lead to change that will tear the nation to pieces.

 

[off2bed]

"Endless revolving credit" is the Democrats' "fix."

 

[IrezumiKiss]

"Endless revolving credit" is the Democrats' "fix."

"Trickle Down Theory N' Tax Cuts" is the Republicans' "fix."

 

[off2bed]

"Trickle Down Theory N' Tax Cuts" is the Republicans' "fix."

Our "fix" has a proven success record. Yours?

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Our "fix" has a proven success record. Yours?

Proven success record? Seriously? That's why we're in such great shape now? Where is this portal to Bizarro World you just entered and how much does it cost to enter?

 

[mark_j]

"Endless revolving credit" is the Democrats' "fix."

"Trickle Down Theory N' Tax Cuts" is the Republicans' "fix."

Our "fix" has a proven success record. Yours?

Proven success record? Seriously? That's why we're in such great shape now? Where is this portal to Bizarro World you just entered and how much does it cost to enter?

And neither side has ANY FUCKING CLUE how to fix anything

 

[off2bed]

Proven success record? Seriously? That's why we're in such great shape now? Where is this portal to Bizarro World you just entered and how much does it cost to enter?

You actually think the current problems are caused by reductions in income tax rates? You can't be that fucking dumb.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

You actually think the current problems are caused by reductions in income tax rates? You can't be that fucking dumb.

No, wait. You said your "fix" has a proven success record. Why aren't we succeeding, then, if that's the way we were living under a Pub Government for the past eight years? If it's supposed to work, then why isn't it a continuous annual cycle of good news for everyone under the sun here?

 

[Angeline]

Our "fix" has a proven success record. Yours?

Your fix has a proven success record for people who already have a lot of money and access to the kind of networks of people who support each other in sustaining their lot of money. That's great for the very few who benefit from it, for the rest of the country (ie, the majority, the vast majority), not so much. And that vast majority, sometimes referred to as a silent majority, is having a hard enough time making their upwardly-mobile lifestyle work these days that they are starting to finally catch a clue where the real problem lies.

 

[Ham Murabi]

I want to raise the tax on gasoline by two dollars a gallon, and spend the money exclusively on non automotive means of transportation.

I see. And how do people in the hinterlands benefit from this tax.
Perhaps you should drive across Nevada some day, where it is not uncommon to have to drive 100 miles between communities. No mystery to that, since roughly 90 percent of Nevada is federally owned.
People in Tonopah, for example, already pay about 50 to 60 cents more per gallon because of their isolation. You would charge them an extra $2 per gallon, yet there is no plausible transit system that would get them to Las Vegas, Reno, Elko or Sacramento that would be anywhere near cost efficient.
You would raise the price of fuel $2 a gallon for farmers who, by the way, don't live in urban areas. Talk about the tax that keeps on giving - that extra $2 would hammer consumers at grocery stores because it dramatically increases the costs of reaping the harvest and getting it from Point A to Point B to Point C.
You are a fountain a half-baked ideas, Trouvere.

 

[mark_j]

I see. And how do people in the hinterlands benefit from this tax.
Perhaps you should drive across Nevada some day, where it is not uncommon to have to drive 100 miles between communities. No mystery to that, since roughly 90 percent of Nevada is federally owned.
People in Tonopah, for example, already pay about 50 to 60 cents more per gallon because of their isolation. You would charge them an extra $2 per gallon, yet there is no plausible transit system that would get them to Las Vegas, Reno, Elko or Sacramento that would be anywhere near cost efficient.
You would raise the price of fuel $2 a gallon for farmers who, by the way, don't live in urban areas. Talk about the tax that keeps on giving - that extra $2 would hammer consumers at grocery stores because it dramatically increases the costs of reaping the harvest and getting it from Point A to Point B to Point C.
You are a fountain a half-baked ideas, Trouvere.

Diesel fuel for Ag purposes in my state is tax exempt as long as it is only used to power Ag equipment (it also dyed red) but once you go on-road it is subject to federal/state taxes. If you get caught with dyed fuel in your vehicle tanks at a weigh station or checkpoint it is a pretty hefty fine.

Gasoline you pay the taxes on it either way.. they don't differentiate Ag or on-road with that stuff..

Course none of this matters once you get the product off the farm since you still have to truck it out..

 

[KingOrfeo]

Of course, neither "endless revolving credit" nor "trickle down theory 'n' tax cuts" has anything to do with the irreducibly material problems Kunstler is talking about and both parties are persistently and inexplicably ignoring.

 

[off2bed]

We can stop building new suburbs. We can revitalize downtown areas of our cities.

We've been revitalizing downtowns for decades, sometimes it sells, sometimes people still won't live there. You really can't force people to live in certain places. We have this freedom thing.

...streetcar and light-rail and regional-rail and long-distance high-speed rail networks...

Another good idea that you can't force people to use. In existing suburban sprawl areas, light rail would be so inefficient it would end up costing more than cars and streets. Economics kills them.

What's probably going to happen (within, say, the next 10 or 20 years) is that the rich and poor will change places -- physically/geographically, I mean. The decrepit inner-city neighborhoods will be gentrified...

History has shown that pattern to be the norm.

 

[off2bed]

Reducing tax rates increases revenues. But that seldom happens in a vacuum. Congress can't curb its insatiable lust for spending, so any revenue increases keep getting dwarfed by spending increases. That's not the fault of the tax rate reductions.

If reducing prices didn't increase revenues, then retail stores would never have sales.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Reducing tax rates increases revenues. But that seldom happens in a vacuum. Congress can't curb its insatiable lust for spending, so any revenue increases keep getting dwarfed by spending increases. That's not the fault of the tax rate reductions.

If reducing prices didn't increase revenues, then retail stores would never have sales.

The economic dynamic behind a BIG! BLOWOUT! SALE!!!!! in the retail sector has nothing whatsoever to do with the thinking behind the Laffer Curve.

And neither has anything to do with the problems we'll be facing because of peak oil.