Shoulder Season

[Crewleader]

by Jim Kunstler


America is on vacation from its financial, fiscal, and economic problems, having left the centers of power in Wall Street and Washington for a Nantucket-of-the-mind, where, in a haze of artisanal vodka and bong smoke, it's out in the cool dune grass watching imaginary whalefishes blow, leaving only the TV Bubbleheads behind back home. Larry Kudlow of CNBC was practically drooling into his cufflinks on screen last week when the dollar popped against the Euro, and crude oil slumped, and the equity markets climbed up a flagpole.

This sort of euphoria is actually an alarming pre-crash symptom, in this case of a patient (the US) entering the terminal phase of sclerosis. Our society and all its playerz -- especially the appointed communicators -- just can't fathom the reality of the threats we face, which are 1.) the loss of primary energy resources, 2.) the loss of technological potency, and 3.) the loss of a comfortable standard of living.

As the boys over at the Financial Sense News Hour podcast have been saying for months, we're caught in a paradigm shift and we're trying desperately to prove (to ourselves) that we can get back to the way things used to be. This is a broad cultural phenomenon and helps to explain why even the greenest captains of environmentalism strive to find groovy new ways to run all our cars, while their counterparts on Wall Street strive desperately to salvage a set of "innovative" financial rackets based on getting something for nothing. It also explains the foolishness of the "drill drill drill" crowd, which believes we could be back to 99-cent gasoline if only Exxon-Mobil were allowed to prospect offshore where the codfish used to swim. (By the way, I'm in in full favor of granting them permission to do so, if only to put an end to this foolish debate.)

Reality, meanwhile, strives to take us in another direction. Our destination is a far less complex society in a larger, rounder, and less economically-integrated world. We will be leaving a lot of our technological comforts behind, staying closer to home, living in smaller cities and reactivated small towns, working the land more intensively to produce the food we need, and possibly organizing our governance at something less than the continental scale our dwindling riches used to afford. That is, if we're lucky enough to avoid the real possibility of social disorder and violence that would attend a fullblown economic collapse scenario.

August is historically a quiet time for oil, the so-called "shoulder season" when vacationing climaxes, but before deliveries of heating oil get underway in earnest. We have no real prospects of overcoming any of the structural problems now built-in to our oil supply, starting with the grim central fact that we import at least 70 percent of the oil we use. Add to this the fact that world production of conventional crude has not exceeded the 2005 rates; that export rates from our Number 3 and 4 sources of oil, Mexico and Venezuela, are down a combined 30 percent this year; that discoveries of new oil are meager to the degree that they fail by a long shot to offset current world-wide depletion; that the oil available on global markets is proportionately more sour and heavy crude than the light and sweet our refineries are designed for. And so on....

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/08/shoulder-season.html