James Howard Kunstler Quotes

I think the business community knows that half the world's oil reserves are gone. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there's the scramble for what remains.

The North Sea was supposed to run out in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s. And now production is still on-line.

Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before.

The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.

We're teaming up with a major Hollywood studio, and we're making a movie called 'Copper.' It's set on Mars in the 24th century. By then we've got 27 billion people in the world, copper is the world's most valuable metal because everything runs on electricity, and there's no more burning of hydrocarbons.

It's self-evident that we are going to have permanent problems with oil and gasoline and the prime resources that are needed to run the American suburbs. And we're just not going to be able to run them. You know, it's just unfortunate, it's tragic, but it's the truth.

There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation.

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.

America has remained highly engaged in global affairs throughout decades of growing energy dependency, so it's hard to imagine it would disengage if its quest for energy self-sufficiency failed - especially amidst a world of heightened resource competition.

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

The country remains dependent on oil. But as we are now learning, oil is becoming increasingly scarce.

War is usually fought over diminishing resources, particulary those that we perceive to be extremely valuable.

It's not an if - we're going to have to change. Oil is simply going to be gone.

Human use of one resource runs squarely against human use of another resource.

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.

There'll be years of teething problems searching for alternatives to oil, but they have to be embraced with passion because our oil is finite, and we're running out. Fact.

The danger facing us comes not from lack of resources, but from people who insist that we have run out of resources. If you embrace their idea of a world where there is only so much to go around, then you are endorsing a program of genocide and a war of all against all.

Even if we can solve the carbon problem for coal, it is still a non-renewable resource. At some point, coal supplies will drop.

The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a "time out" from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this "time out."

There are many disturbing news. We believe that the production of conventional petroleum reached peak oil already in 2006. The oil fields in the North Sea and the US are collapsing ... time is running out.

Everything adds up to a major crisis. Humanity is faced with a global energy crisis ... The core of the crisis lies in the increasing shortage of oil.

Peak oil is already upon us. It is destroying our banking system, that is, our system for marshalling capital, and that is about to put us out of business-as-usual. So, we have to carry on with business-not-so-usual. This could mean anything from your children finding careers in farming (rather than show biz or plastic surgery) to reorganizing households differently to traveling from New York to Boston by boat.

It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.