If Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" has a single message, it's that global warming is bad--very, very bad. Floods, droughts, famine, disease . . . a miasma of End Times calamity caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Even at that, Gore is--at the risk of paraphrasing--a candy-assed optimist, according to James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century."
Whereas Gore and other prophets of climate change believe we still have the time and means to avert the worst consequences of anthropogenic global warming--hybrid cars, solar panels!--Kunstler argues with hellish persuasion that we are basically toast. Why? The entire edifice of American civilization--from our mega-scale methods of food production to our great repositories of national wealth, that is, the equity invested in our sprawling suburbs--is propped up, trembling as if balanced on matchsticks, on cheap oil. And there is no substitute for cheap oil.
But wait, I say, when I get him on the phone at his house in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. What about plug-in electric vehicles and pure electric vehicles, not a few of which are, here in California, being charged by DIYers' solar panels? What about wind power, biomass or wave power? Kunstler emits a well-practiced harrumph.
"When confronted with these ideas, people generally go through . . . what was her name? . . . Kubler-Ross' stages of grief," Kunstler tells me. "You're still in the bargaining phase." Nothing, no deliverance of technology, he says, could possibly replace the cheap energy we get from oil, and even if it could we would have to surmount the "incredible passivity" of the American people narcotized by decades of abundant petroleum. Kunstler derides the belief that alternative energy will save us as Jiminy Cricket-like wishing upon a star.
When I ask him about the TerraPass program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (drivers pay a fee proportional to the size of their cars to offset their cars' carbon impact), he goes bananas. "What do I think? I think it's [colorful intensifier here] stupid!" he fairly shouts. "There's not going to be a [ditto] Wharton School!"
So, that would be a nay, then?
