{"id":1568,"date":"2005-07-17T08:59:07","date_gmt":"2005-07-17T08:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=1568"},"modified":"2005-07-17T08:59:07","modified_gmt":"2005-07-17T08:59:07","slug":"the_long_emerge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=1568","title":{"rendered":"The Long Emergency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/news\/story\/_\/id\/7203633?rnd=1121607086589&#038;has-player=true\">James Howard Kunstler<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>It has been very hard for Americans &#8212; lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring &#8212; to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9\/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.<\/p>\n<p>Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life &#8212; not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense &#8212; you name it.<\/p>\n<p>The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don&#8217;t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder if we will see oil prices crater, like it has after previous spikes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>James Howard Kunstler: It has been very hard for Americans &#8212; lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring &#8212; to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9\/11, America is still sleepwalking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}