| THE LONG EMERGENCY Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century James Howard Kunstler New York: Grove Press, 2005 (Epilogue 2006) |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8021-4249-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8021-4249-4 | 324pp. | SC | $14.00 | |
| Page 1: | "Even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that collapsed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and sliced through the Pentagon, America is are still sleepwalking into the future." |
| Extra word: S/B "is". |
| Page 51: | "Exploitation of the North sea oil fields was extremely difficult and costly, but became imperative after the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. By then, the U.S. peak was incontrovertibly evident." |
| Contradiction: Compare with "The oil began to flow out of the Prudhoe Bay fields in 1978, and soon came to represent 25 percent of America's total production." (page 50) Am I missing something here? |
| Page 68: | "'The American way of life is not negotiable,' vice president Dick Cheney once famously remarked." |
| Attribution: Was this Cheney or GHWB? |
| Page 89: | "The occupation [of Iraq] may have been a poor performance." |
| "May have been"? I don't know anyone who would equivocate on this point. |
| Page 90: | "Iran's leaders maintain [***] that their nation's oil and natural gas will not last forever and it has to make provision for generating electricity when oil becomes scarce..." |
| Number error: S/B "they have to make provision". |
| Page 98: | "In any case, both [Australia and New Zealand] will be starved for fossil fuels." |
| Australia possesses enormous amounts of coal. |
| Page 100: | "The known alternatives to conventional oil that I will discuss in this chapter include natural gas, coal and tar sands, shale oils, ethanol, nuclear fission, solar, wind, water, tidal power, and methane hydrates." |
| And also geothermal power, which is not mentioned here or in Too Much Magic. |
| Page 102: | "Technology is just the hardware and programming for running that fuel, but not the fuel itself." |
| Too general: much of our current technology depends on fossil fuels, but not all of it. |
| Page 111: | "We'd get less energy out of the hydrogen than we would put in to create the hydrogen, so what would be the point?" |
| The point would be to provide non-hydrocarbon fuel for vital mobile transport devices like airplane mercy flights. It could be produced by electrolysis powered by a nuclear reactor. Would it be NROEI-positive? I don't know; I haven't done the analysis. Neither have you, so you're wrong to dismiss it out of hand. |
| Page 115: | "It suggests that a substantial portion of the public will not be able to participate in motoring." |
| You say that like it's a bad thing. Haven't you been blasting "Happy Motoring" from page 1? |
| Page 126: | "It is not at all clear whether nuclear energy could be employed to manufacture solar components, as nonmilitary nuclear power has been used solely to generate electricity, not large-scale industrial processes." |
| It's not clear what he's talking about here. Does he imagine using the heat of the reactor to directly melt the silicon boules for the photovoltaic wafers? If so, he has no conception of how solar cells are made. Hint: the factories run off electrical mains, albeit perhaps at 480VAC service, and that electricity can be supplied by fission reactors quite handily. |
| Page 129: | "The Romans developed the technology of building in reinforced concrete to an extremely high level of refinement—and an artistry in working with it to match." |
| Totally wrong. They only knew unreinforced concrete, but they did refine its use to level we cannot match. See my review of Concrete Planet. |
| Page 131: | "Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operate highly complex systems at gigantic scales. Renewable energy sources are not compatible with these systems and scales." |
| Not immediately or in one or two decades, but later it becomes feasible. Unless we wait one or two decades to start. Also, no green-energy advocate calls for near-term substitution. |
| Page 139: | "These theoretics are beyond the competence of the author and so I will make only two points about ZPE." |
| At least for this subject he recognizes his lack of competence. He is correct, however: ZPE is a dry hole, to borrow oil-industry parlance. |
| Page 142: | "The critical mass of fissionable material is adjusted by raising and lowering these rods inside the reactor core." |
| That's an unorthodox way to describe it but it is not incorrect in essence. |
| Page 143: | "The Chernobyl reactor was a Russian-designed RMBK model infamous for its built-in lack of safety features." |
| Word order: S/B "its lack of built-in safety features". |
| Page 149: | "The disruptions and hardships of decelerating industrialism will destabilize governments and societies to the degree that concerted international action—such as the Kyoto protocols or anything like it—will never be carried out." |
| Number error: S/B "such as the Kyoto protocols or anything like them". |
| Page 191: | "Simple, ordered flows drain entropy at a faster rate than complexly disordered flows Hence, the creation of ever more efficient ordered flows in American society, the removal of constraints, has accelerated the winding down of American potential..." |
| I don't think this follows. |
| Page 196: | "Obviously incapable of ruling, the tot's official duties were shifted to a regent..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "the tot had his official duties". |
| Page 206: | "During the height of the mania, of course, many more stocks went up then went down." |
| Typo: S/B "than". |
| Page 206: | "During the height of the mania, of course, many more stocks went up then went down." |
| Typo: S/B "than". |
| Page 209: | "In the modern era, entropy has been expressed in conditions as seemingly unrelated as war, industrial pollution, pornography, mass political murder, the shattering of a consensus about the value of money, and incompetent parenting." |
| Pornography? You'll have to explain how that works. I see pornography as a vice that a fairly fixed percentage of the population has always indulged in. The Internet may ease access to it, but I doubt the percentage of users has increased much. |
| Page 211: | "America had participated in the military die-off of World War II to the extent of 295,000 killed in action, but its industrial engines of production and entropy creation remained intact..." |
| Sorry: what does an engine of entropy creation look like? If everything creates entropy (i.e. disorder), then why stigmatize industry in particular? |
| Page 225: | "Computers could calculate large arrays of variables in ways never before possible. Even if they could not really predict the direction of markets—because of markets' essential nonlinear nature—the computer did increase the number of ways to play markets..." |
| Number error: S/B "computers". (and "essentially nonlinear".) |
| Page 273: | "In the Long Emergency, this scale of educational enterprise will no longer be feasible, and the attenuation of childhood no longer affordable." |
| Word choice: S/B "the prolongation of childhood". |
| Page 290: | "Its cultural baggage, via a line of figures as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, H. L. Mencken, and Camille Paglia, includes a lively conversance with the history of ideas free of dogma and cant." |
| That's definitely a diverse assemblage, and certainly they all furthered free discussions. But I gather they all relate somehow to New England, or rather the Old Union. So: Lincoln? Paglia? |
| Page 291: | "The great, brutal, hypertrophic industrial metropoli of America might evolve into much more intimate and human-scaled places." |
| Incorrect plural form: S/B "metropolises". |
| Page 292: | "The Great Lakes have been a deeply underused economic resource for the past half century. This remarkable freshwater inland sea stretching from New York to Minnesota has the potential of unifying an ordered matrix of towns and farms and appropriately scaled cities with a transportation system that is not dependent on nonrenewable energy." |
| Then on what sort of energy, pray tell, would it depend? |
| Page 318: | "Human deaths from H5N1were showing up here and there around Asia by year's end..." |
| Missing space: S/B "H5N1 were". |
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