The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes...

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the ... | prophetic -- read this excerpt

books:

The Long Emergency...

	The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the ... Grove Press, 2006 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 213 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency was an underground hit, going into nine printings of the hardcover edition. His shocking vision for our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders and was the subject of much debate, stimulating discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels. Now in paperback, with a new afterword, The Long Emergency is set to reach an even larger audience.

The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind, much of it based on the exploitation of cheap, nonrenewable fossil-fuel energy. But the oil age is at an end. Life as we know it is about to change radically, and much sooner than we think. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after we pass the point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore.

for more information click here

The Long Emergency

An excellent argument that we are at or approaching the peak oil production plateau, and speculates on the drastic future we may expect. Well done. Provokes a lot of thought about how one should adapt to eventually intolerable circumstances!

prophetic -- read this excerpt

I'm posting this mid-October 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis. Here's a phophetic excerpt from The Long Emergency that was written in mid-2004:

"By the time you read this, it is very likely that the housing bubble will have begun to come to grief... The economic wreckage is liable to be impressive. If house owners cannot make their mortgage payments, Fannie May and Freddie Mac, and by extension the federal government, would be the big losers. The failure of [Fannie and Freddie] would make the Savings and Loans fiasco of the 1980s look like a bad night at poker... It could easily bring on cascading failures that might jeopardize global finance. This time, the American public will feel the pain... Our desperate problems with oil and gas will effectively shut down the growth of our industrial economies, and with that our expectations for economic progress, as we have known it... The transient and ephemeral condition of industrial hypergrowth that the world has known for just over 200 years will be over. Energy will be at an extreme premium, and human survival skill will be the new capital. What it may be like to live later on in the 21st century ("The Long Emergency") is the subject of the next chapter."

I haven't read the next chapter yet, though unfortunately I have a feeling we're all about to "live" The Long Emergency instead of "read" it.

~mark~

for more information click here