Peak Oil Optimism In The Face Of 'Cultural Inertia'
AlterNet reports on a peak oil event in New York City, featuring James Howard Kunstler and Julian Darley, and calls into question Kunstler's use of language to frame the peak oil debate.
"I think Kunstler was dead right -- many of the ideas and practices about how we can make other arrangements are already in existence, but there isn't a wide demand for them. There must be a language that competes with the standing fantasies in our consumer society that makes people want to ditch their cars, stop their consumptive impulses, and make our standing commercialized social narratives as appealing as the idea of taking a bath with a corpse.
But I wonder if the winning rhetoric involves direct insults, like calling middle Americans who live in suburbia 'craven f**kups' to their face. I wouldn't write it off instantly, given the popularity of serial insult artists like Dr. Phil. Kunstler also emphasized that talking about peak oil and automobile dependency just once to someone isn't going to make any converts. 'You're going to have to employ repetition...to an uncomfortable degree.'"
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We Need Cassandras Like Kunstler AND Al Gore
Americans are a funny people. Take our approach to sex, for example.
On the one hand, sex literally saturates the media and advertising, media selling itself and to sell stuff in general, respectively. On the other hand, this culture is still very prudish and puritanical. In Europe, public nudity is no big deal, particularly for sunbathing, at the spa, at the beach, and so forth. Europeans are also tolerant of pornography, not obsessing over it the way too many Americans do.
But in America, any form of public nudity, and most of us are SHOCKED, just SHOCKED! Similarly, most Americans SEEM unconcerned about the overall harm to society from excessive fuel consumption such as by Hummers and other large SUVs; but DON'T YOU DARE SMOKE or engage in other POLITICALLY INCORRECT behaviors or unpopular speech, WATCH OUT! This is rather SKITZO for a nation that prides itself on its individualism, and still grossly underprices individual activity that DOES harm society as whole, e.g., excessive fuel usage, so-called free parking (kudos to Don Shoup), and so forth.
Solving these problems require something in short supply lately, somethin' called "LEADERSHIP".
James Howard Kunstler serves the same function that all other Cassandras have in U.S. history: he's the Fire and Brimstone Preacher (tm) warning us of the peril. I think the parallel with the critical Dr. Phil is accurate: we always need someone to point out what's wrong. However, given human nature, nothing will change until the benefits of solving the problem for each individual person are clear--and how some individual short-term sacrifices are beneficial to society as a whole is also shown to be in individuals' best interests. Certainly Mr. Kunstler is NOT the person to make this transition, even though he is useful as a Cassandra.
Ironically, one possibility for a person pointing out the benefits of solving the energy/global warming problem is Al Gore, of all people (www.climatecrisis.net). Gore seems to have gotten a lot more street smarts since 2000 and isn't shy about pointing out what's wrong. I think he is rather alarmed at the global warming problem, particularly the prospect that sea levels could rise by 20 feet within a century, destroying most of our major cities and probably 90% of our cultural artifacts (bye, bye, Venice, New York, London, etc., etc.) Gore certainly is as alarmist as Kunstler regarding the problem, BUT unlike Kunstler, he also has the guile to point out the many positive possibilities from solving global warming and the energy problem: the new, often dramatic and extensive economic possibilities made possible by advancing technology and increased sophistication in human use of technology (for example, see the program advocated at www.apolloalliance.org).
I think it's a fair bet that Gore might run again for President in 2008. If Gore does, look forward to "Clash of the Titans": Al Gore vs. BOTH Bill Clinton AND Hillary Clinton! (If Gore won, he could offer Bill some sort of "World Ambassador" status, I suppose). What a spectacle that might be! But a discussion and debate vital to the future of the planet, too.