[Texgreen] Kunstler does Houston

[Roger Baker]

Peak Universe
By James Howard Kunstler
The Energy Bulletin

Monday 22 October 2007

The big Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston
last week - but before we get to the substance of that, a few words
about where we were. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban
construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the
Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and
depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter
wasteland around Houston's convention center.

Luckily, we didn't have to enter the convention center itself
across the street - a baleful megastructure the size of three
aircraft carriers, adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to
counter Houston's gym-sock-like climate. And when I say "street" you
understand we are talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside
parking, which is the norm for this town. The effect is that every
street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the expense of
pedestrians - but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway because in
ninety percent of Houston's so-called downtown of glass towers there
are no shops or restaurants at the ground-floor level, only blank
walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps, and landscaping
fantasias. We were informed that in parts of downtown there existed a
network of air-conditioned underground corridors with shopping, but
that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office workers
straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the convention
center. The rest of district was devoted to surface parking.

It has often been stated that Houston's ghastly development
pattern comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really
proves is that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical
American boneheaded zoning with no zoning - as long as your don't
give a shit how people feel in their daily environments.

The convention center itself, though, demonstrated something
beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness
was a metaphor for the fatal grandiosity at the heart of contemporary
life in American today, the utter disregard for a scale of human
activity consistent with what the planet has to offer within its
ecological limits - and of course the oil issue was at the center of
that story.

Oh, one final thing about Houston life per se. Judging by the
local items in the daily newspaper, the so-called city enjoys a level
of mayhem that makes Baghdad look like a Sussex garden party. Sample
headlines: "10 Charged in Burglary Spree," "Pit Bull Shot Dead After
Pony Attack," "Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death," "Two Killed
in Home Invasion." One particularly insane story told of a man who
shot and stabbed a visiting friend who "dissed" his dog. We didn't
see any of that action around the convention center's Hilton
Americas, where the ASPO conference actually took place, but the news
didn't exactly make you want to venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway,
you couldn't buy a stick of gum within a mile walk of the place, and
the thought of traipsing past all those surface parking lots in 90-
degree heat was like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.

It was a sublime coincidence of fate and history that throughout
the ASPO conference, the price of a barrel of oil surged up through
the high eighty-dollars range and briefly touched $90-a-barrel on
Friday (just as the stock market was tanking by 360-odd points). It
was also interesting that as all this action was unfolding, MSNBC was
running an interview with Senator Larry Craig (R. Idaho), lately
accused of soliciting sex from a policeman in an airport toilet.
Apparently what the nation really wants to know about is the
Senator's self-described "wide stance" in bathroom technique. Perhaps
when Craig is finally forced from his senate seat, he can get a job
as a "personal toilet coach," and become the pioneer in a whole new
realm of self-improvement science, teaching others how to assume the
manly "wide stance" and become more effective leaders.

So, while the price of oil ratcheted up hour by hour, the ASPO
conference members heard from an impressive range of experts who have
been leading the public conversation on the Peak Oil story - with no
help from the mainstream media or the political sector. Among them
were Robert Hirsch, co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report,
commissioned by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the
consternation of its sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain
terms that it was heading for a catastrophic set of disruptions
in "normal" American life if we heedlessly continued energy business-
as-usual. Hirsch went a little further now, two years on, than he had
in his famous report, predicting a future of "oil export
withholding," panicked markets, and allocation disturbances that
would make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age.

Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry,
who has worked tirelessly to lift public awareness of Peak Oil, also
raised the specter of shortages, telling the audience that market
allocation problems in the near future would almost certainly
induce "hoarding behavior" among the public that would cripple the
economy, lead to enforced rationing, and shock the nation. Simmons
compared the current public mood over energy issues to a "fog of
war." He also repeated his oft-stated opinion that the drilling rigs
and other equipment used around the world to pump oil out of the
ground are so uniformly old and decrepit that they pose a problem
every bit as dire as peak oil itself. In the meantime, he said, to
offset climbing prices, the developed nations have lately dipped so
deeply into their accumulated stocks of crude and "refined product"
that some countries may breach what is called their "minimum
operating levels." Offstage, he told me, "We're too preoccupied
trying to figure out the exact date of the peak. Meanwhile, we'll
drain the gasoline pool and it will be gone forever."

The other most significant contribution came from Texas geologist
Jeffrey Brown who presented a full-blown version of his theory that
world export rates from the countries with oil to sell are liable to
decline so much more sharply than their actual production decline
rates that the world would be thrust into an oil export crisis within
the next five years - and that this export crisis would turn out to
be the defining condition of the Peak Oil story.

There were plenty of other fruitful contributions on subjects
ranging from the future of the airline industry to reviving passenger
rail service, to the question of nuclear power. And there was one
real clunker presentation by a shill from the Toyota corporation,
designed to blow green smoke up the audience's ass about the future
of happy motoring (Toyota's products will save it from Peak Oil).

For coverage of the particulars, visit TheOilDrum.com, the
nation's best energy discussion website.

If there were reporters from the mainstream media present at this
event, I didn't run into of them. They are apparently uninterested in
the fate of industrial economies, at least as long as Senator Larry
Craig is out there on the frontiers of toilet coaching science, and
Britney Spears is still sparring with K-Fed, and Diddy is beating
people up in nightclubs, and people are murdering their friends for
dissing their dogs.