The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
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Product Description
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.
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
prophetic -- read this excerpt
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Comment:
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~
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Summary:
Don't bother......
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Comment:
This book is long on illustrating a make-believe world that the author desires, and short on facts.
Very short on facts.......
The author manages to insults virtually every racial and geographic group - except for his own, of course.
Honestly, save your money, this book is a waste of time!
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Summary:
If Only He Could Have Been Bothered to Fact-Check
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Comment:
I had read the Rolling Stone article, and I was positively stoked to begin this book. During the first half, I was fascinated, but then, I am neither a geologist nor an engineer.
I was even willing to overlook Kunstler, in the early pages, defending fellow prophets of doom Thomas Malthus and Paul Erlich, and claiming that they were right after all, despite the fact that the predictions of either man never came to pass.
Then, during the second half of the book, Kunstler started discussing things I actually know quite a bit about, to wit, human disease and history. Oh, Holy Cats, how incorrect his facts were. In the words of another reviewer, he gets it Just Plain Wrong.
For example, he says that historians don't really know what the cause of WWI was. Huh. I guess the Army War College and every 20th Century History department need to talk to Kunstler, so they can be properly informed of their ignorance. Yeah, WWI's causes are complex, but just because Kunstler doesn't know what they are doesn't mean that nobody else does either.
He also claims that global warming will accelerate the spread of diseases that were previously confined to a specific geopgraphic area, which is probably true. However, we have already seen diseases migrate a good deal because of the volume and speed with which humans jet around the globe on a daily basis. Kunstler ignores the profound upside to this, being that, for the vast majority of us who are not immunocompromised, this challenges and boosts our immune systems.
Or how 'bout when he says that the 1918 flu jumped directly from birds to humans, without the usual influenza pit stop in pigs. If that's the case, why was the 1918 flu first noticed on a Kansas pig farm? Or when he claims that we still don't know why the 1918 flu proved fatal to so many young adults- uh, yeah we do. Because of cytokine storms, which turn your own immune sysstem against you- the stronger the immune system, the worse you're affected.
The worst offender, however, is when he claims that HIV (which he incorrectly calls AIDS) is on it's way toward mutating from a blood born pathogen into one that's carried on air. Give me a break. I have had five years of schooling training me to be an HIV educator, and I have never heard or read anything remotely like this from an even somewhat reputable source. Why did he make this claim of HIV, and not, say, hepititis B (another sexually transmitted blood born pathogen), which infects 1.7 billion more people than HIV does? Because "AIDS" sounds scarier, that's why.
All this JPW stuff in the second half of the book makes me doubt the veracity of the first half, and that was only reinforced when I made it to the very end and read Kunstler's racist rant against Mexicans and African Americans. He had already skewered every subset of white people that were remotely different from him, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
I've checked "The End of Oil" out of the library, so we'll see how the first half of "The Long Emergency" holds up, fact wise. But if you're really interested in reading an Apocalypse Story, I'd suggest picking up Stephen King's "The Stand".
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Summary:
A long, rambling discourse focusing on the worst possible outcome....
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Comment:
I bought this book so that I could relate to a friend who is using it like his bible and guide for his future. I found it to be poorly organized and a long and rambling discourse on the evils and eventual failure of fossil fuels, nuclear energy, the food supply, and an eventual return to living in the stone age in our lifetimes. He passes opinion off as fact to build his case.
Mine's for sale used!
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Summary:
The Long Emergency
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Comment:
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!
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