James Howard Kunstler - Quotations

Quotations

Energy

"...we are in danger not just of oil prices going way back up again, but of losing access to our supplies from the exporting countries. In other words, we're just as likely to face shortages as high prices, and soon. Oil shortages are certain to produce a political freak-out here unless we get our heads screwed on right..."

"the truth is that no combination of solar, wind, nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power ... the interstate highway system – or even a fraction of these things – in the future...our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost."

"... we'll have to figure out how to make things in this country again. We will not be manufacturing things at the scale, or in the manner, we were used to in, say, 1962. We'll have to do it far more modestly, using much more meager amounts of energy than we did in the past."

"The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd."

"The second law of thermodynamics never rests."

Society

"...the American public is deathly afraid of the kind of changes we actually face – such as, the end of consumer culture, the gross loss of value in suburban real estate (which forms the bulk of the middle class's private wealth), the prospect of food and fuel scarcities, the need to re-localize our lives, the need to physically shape up to stop the costly and unnecessary drain on our medical resources, to grow more of our own food, to work harder at things that actually matter, and to save whatever we can for a difficult future."

"... we're not going back to a "consumer" economy. We're heading into a hard work economy in which people derive their pleasures and gratification more traditionally – mainly through the company of their fellow human beings..."

"Please stop referring to yourselves as consumers. "Consumers" are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities, and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you are using that word “consumer,” you will be degrading the quality of the public discussion as we go into the very difficult future that we face."

Food

"... we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life."

Commerce

"... we're going to have to make things again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities."

"We'll have to restore local economic networks – the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed – made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers."

Transportation

"...we have to move away from the private automobile and commercial trucking, and the airline industry is certain to contract dramatically. When are we going to start the discussion about rebuilding a US public transit system that was once the envy of the world? It no longer matters how much Americans love their cars, or even how much investment we've made in car infrastructure."

"Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption."

"California (and every other region of America) would benefit much more from normal-speed trains running every hour on the hour on tracks that already exist than from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that might not get built for ten years. The dregs of the Big Three automakers can and should be reorganized to produce the rolling stock for a revived railroad system."

"The motoring era is coming to an end. Heroic investments in highway infrastructure to create jobs will be a tragic waste of our dwindling capital."

" Stimulus aimed at perpetuating mass motoring will be a tragic waste of our dwindling resources. We'd be better off aiming it at fixing the railroads (especially electrifying them), refitting our harbors with piers and warehouses in preparation to move more stuff by boats, and in repairing the electric grid."

"The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now."

"One other implication of this is the necessity to use our waterways for moving things and people again. Has anybody noticed, for instance, that the once-bustling New York Harbor, possibly the biggest and best sheltered deepwater harbor in the world, has next-to-zero operating docks left along its massive perimeter?" (In 2008, New York Harbor was the third busiest in the US out of 149, as measured by tons of cargo handled, with over 150,000,000.)