Weekly Dig #11 After Oil (May 2007)
by Baratunde Thurston, originally printed in The Weekly Dig (Boston)


Warning: if you saw "An Inconvenient Truth" and thought, "Oh my God, we're all gonna die," hold on to your sun hats.

While our leaders launch plans to reduce carbon emissions (kudos to Boston and the state for their recent announcements), there's an even more immediate and systemic problem. It's lurking, like Governor Patrick in a parking garage, and threatens to derail much of our society.

What am I talking about? Six weeks ago, I sat down in my apartment, and I didn’t leave for three days as I read and re-read a book by James Kunstler called, "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century."

I was transformed and traumatized by this book. I did not go out. I did not talk to friends. I did not even check my MySpace, OK? I just kept reading.

The book is based largely on the concept of "peak oil," which is the simple idea that oil resources are finite, and we're at or near peak supply. As availability declines, energy prices will skyrocket, impacting the very foundation of our society.

Kunstler predicts food shortages, transportation breakdowns, battles over water, and even a race war. Any mention of race war is going to get my attention, because I’ll have to decide which of my white friends is most worth smuggling north to Canada. (Applications for the Underground Light Rail are due June 1).

To me, oil dependency was a tiny, coffee-drinking, cell phone-yapping, angry American driving a USS destroyer class H10 Hummer that runs on a combination of premium fuel, Iraqi baby blood and the mental health of a generation of young American soldiers.

No. Oil is in everything we do.

Plastics, roads, industrial farming, manufacturing, suburban living, food distribution, and the power grid are all heavily dependent on oil or other fossil fuels like natural gas which are peaking as well.

We’d all like to believe in renewables and "smart technology people" who will figure it out. Yes, they are working on it, but so far nothing comes even close to meeting our energy needs in the way oil has. Ethanol, for example, depends on large scale corn crops that are only possible in a cheap oil economy. Sorry, Iowa.

Fortunately, Boston has a great start on adapting to a new energy future, though success is not guaranteed, and that race war is so going to start here. Ignore for a moment that $15 billion driving subsidy called the Big Dig. Our city is mostly walkable, has active farmer’s markets, better public transit than most with plans to extend it regionally.

We also have sustainable business entrepreneurs like Robin Chase, who started the car-sharing program, Zipcar and has launched a ride-sharing program called GoLoco.

There’s not enough space here for me to do this topic full justice, but it’s a start. Look it up, or hit me up. I’ll be happy to tell you about the nightmare I had in which slavery made a comeback because America was short on farmers.