Last night on C-Span II there was a book reviewed about the coming oil

[patricia92243]

crisis or actually the lack of oil that will cause a crisis. For the life of me, I can't remember the name of it. It was something the "long crisis" The neverending Emergnecy or something like that.

Does any body know the name of the book - and the guy who wrote it. He was also on AAR.

Thanks for your help.

[chicagojoe]

1. The Long Emergency by James Howard Kuntsler

[patricia92243]

4. Thanks! I want to see if Audible books is going to have it. When I starte

started to do a search, my mind just went blank.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. He was on "Ring of Fire" today on AAR.

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

<snip>

The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.

<snip>

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.

It will change everything about how we live.

<snip>

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633?rnd=1118015270621&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.872

[pstans]

3. Nice

I love Kunstler. I started reading his books a few years ago in my college Urban Planning classes. He is a great writer and able to put wit and humor into a reather dim topic. Check out his website www.kunstler.com.

I just started reading The Long Emergency and highly recommend it. I am on page 80 something, so just getting started, but it gives a good history to the Oil situation we are in and events that could cause harm to the current situation.

[patricia92243]

5. He said the oil emergency could start in as short a time as 36 months.

It's the type of thing that the more I think about it, the more upset I get.

When people don't travl, tourism will dry up everywhere. Destroying whole economies for lots of places.

Thanks for the website. Will look at it later. Am off to Audible books right now. :)