The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #14: Talkin’ Peak Oil. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: talkin’ about Peak Oil, the point at which our demand for oil will probably exceed the global supply. And just a note to our listeners, today’s program contains some sexually suggestive language.

Duncan Crary (in interview): Hey Jim!

James Howard Kunstler: Hey, Duncan!

Duncan Crary: How’s it going?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, aside from a few little arthritic complaints, I think I’m just dandy.

Duncan Crary: Well today’s topic is going to be about talking about Peak Oil. And you’ve been doing a lot of talking about Peak Oil on the media circuit lately.

James Howard Kunstler: Yes, running my mouth as they say.

Duncan Crary: You’re like the Where’s Waldo of American social criticism right now.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, like I pop up in Wisconsin and I pop up in Oregon…they call the police.

Duncan Crary: We have a listener comment, a listener caller asking for advice on how to talk about these issues. Let me play that for us right now.

Listener Caller: Hi Jim! My name is Kris and I have a Web show which is about Peak Oil awareness at KrisCan.com. I’ve read Handmade World (sic) and I’m currently reading The Long Emergency . Well, I’m finding that I’m saying “Yes, of course, absolutely!”

Personally, I believe that the more people that know the facts and have a glimpse what our near future holds there might be less chaos when we all hit the wall.

I can’t seem to persuade many of my friends and family, even with my Peak Oil video show, that this is happening and not invented by a couple of left-wing conspiracy theorists. How do you intelligently speak to people around you who don’t believe that this tidal wave of an oil crisis has anything to do with them, when it all seems so obvious and it’s happening all around us?

Duncan Crary: OK, Kris you read Handmade World but have you read World Made By Hand?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, that’s the real title. I think.

Duncan Crary: Yes. Thanks a lot for your call. So, Kris wants some advice on how to talk to people about Peak Oil who are not quite getting it, maybe a little something like this, Jim:

Stephen Colbert (audio clip from program): My guest tonight wrote a novel about a world without oil. Hear that? A novel, because it can never happen in real life. [audience laughing] Please welcome James Kunstler!

Duncan Crary: That was Stephen Colbert. Jim you were just on The Colbert Report a couple of weeks ago.

James Howard Kunstler: I was. It’s called “Publicity Through Mockery”. ‘Cause that’s how we treat serious ideas these days. They are basically held up to mockery and somebody says, “Next!” and the next person comes in.

Duncan Crary: But probably in speaking about Peak Oil that might be one of the most challenging people to talk to about it, someone acting like Stephen Colbert in real life?

James Howard Kunstler: I should say. The only thing that got me through that was about three cans of Red Bull.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, so Kris wants help about telling people about Peak Oil and she has a Web show which I have already checked out. So I think, before you give her advice, you should probably watch the show and listeners can listen along.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah?

Duncan Crary: So, I’m going to move Jim over to his computer right now. [movement] OK, so Jim we are going to KrisCan.com. That’s K-r-i-s-c-a-n.com.

James Howard Kunstler: Got her.

Duncan Crary: OK, now can you go to public service announcement number three. Do you see that on the screen? And let’s hit play.

[music]

Kris (voice over): Oil is a finite, non renewable resource. Currently, the world uses 85 million barrels of it per day. And that number continues to rise because the world economy is run on oil. And demand for oil globally is increasing.

The supply of oil is not going to match the demand. So production will peak, but demand for that oil will not.

Duncan Crary: So, Jim can you describe for our listeners what you are looking at right now?

Kris (voice over): …users are at, or close to, reaching Peak Oil production. Some say that oil has peaked already. Others say that it will not peak for 10 or more years.

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): Well, I see an attractive young woman with a tattoo writhing behind a couple of oil cans.

Duncan Crary: Naked, of course.

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): With a kind of a solarized video. Um…it’s kind of um…I’d like to see if she’s got a nice rack, but she’s hidden behind the gas cans… A nice face…

Kris (voice over): …petroleum has penetrated all aspects of our lives…

Duncan Crary: Are you being persuaded by this video?

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): What’s going on here is that she’s appealing to two different lobes of the brain. And I think that that in itself creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, which is exactly what we don’t need more of.

Kris (voice over): …what matters is not so much when oil will peak but how we are prepared for this change and that we continue to move away from our dependence on oil.

James Howard Kunstler (watching video): Guys are going to be watching this feeling very preoccupied with that other part of their brain.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim so..

James Howard Kunstler: That was a little complex and I’m sorry if I…did I respond well enough?

Duncan Crary: Well, we’re going to keep talking about it. So those were your live reactions to the program. I know it’s easy to — she’s definitely get people watching.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, they’ll be watching her but they may not hear anything she’s saying. But maybe she’ll reach them on a subliminal level, maybe it’s something that’s actually very cleverly designed to get the message through without us being aware of.

Duncan Crary: Yes, actually a lot of Kris’ — now listeners you can go to K-r-i-s-C-a-n.com to watch some of Kris’ programming. They’re not all — that’s just one public service announcement gag she did with the nudity behind the oil cans.

The rest of her programs have songs and sometimes they have interviews with other people. They begin with her putting on T-shirts.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, sort of the Gillette cavalcade of camisoles.

Duncan Crary: It does make me laugh though, using sex to sell things. Does it really work? I mean using sex to sell something — it gets people to look at…

James Howard Kunstler: Well we use sex to sell everything else, so..

Duncan Crary: Yeah, but does it actually sell stuff or does it just get you looking at the… breasts?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I wish I knew. I do think it sells things like soap and cosmetics and things like that… and cars. I don’t know if it sells lawnmowers and other things. It probably has its limitations.

Duncan Crary: OK, getting to the larger topic here. We’re done critiquing. Kris I think you’re doing a great job with your show. It’s probably only going to get better but the larger question is: how do you talk to people about Peak Oil who just don’t get it?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I go in front of all kinds of groups of people including some who really don’t get it. I remember talking to the International Council of Shopping Center Developers last year.

They really didn’t get it. But they weren’t obnoxious about it. They politely listened to what I had to say. And I was able to actually sit in on their deliberations because my plane was leaving so many hours ahead. So when we finished talking to them, they just went right ahead and started chatting up all of their plans for building more parking structures, after we told them that car storage is probably not going to be the programming of the future — so they didn’t hear a darn thing.

To tell you the truth, I don’t really focus too much on whether people hear or not. And even the well-intentioned, predisposed people often either don’t get it or they have a lot of ideas in their head that are kind of crazy themselves. I talk to environmental groups all the time, and one of the big problems that I’m seeing all over the country is that the environmentally-sensitive, for some reason, are completely preoccupied with how they’re going to run their cars on something other than gasoline — it’s all they want to talk about. You end up with a supposedly well-educated, intelligent audience who are not thinking about these things on a level that’s any better than the NASCAR morons.

Duncan Crary: Jim, what’s your…they call it an “elevator pitch” — what’s a quick run-down of Peak Oil? When you’re asked on these TV shows — where you get 30 seconds to talk and it’s all in sound bytes — what do you give for your pitch?

James Howard Kunstler: Well I tell them that it’s not about running out of oil. It’s about how the various systems that we depend on for everyday life are going to get into trouble just as we go over the peak, and how the problems that they have are going to ramify each other. So that when we have problems with motor fuels and transport, we’re also going to have trouble with feeding ourselves and doing capital finance and doing retail trade, and medicine and all the other things that we have to do — education. That these things are all going to affect each other. So I tell them that.

I tell them that the coming permanent oil crisis is going to change everything about how we live. I tell them that we’re sleepwalking into the future, which they may consider to be a “diss”, and maybe they don’t want to hear that. I do talk a lot about the alternative fuel area because that happens to be the focus right now of so much of the wishful thinking that’s out there. And it’s important to get in there and wrangle with it, and wrangle it away from the center where people are investing all their hopes and wishes and fantasies, because it’s become a very unhealthy set of fantasies.

So I tell the audiences that no amount of alternative fuels will allow us to run the stuff that we’re running now. I guess I’m not overly-concerned with how well they get it or whether they get it. I’m just pretty much doing my thing and if they get it, fine, and if they don’t get it, then I just go onto the next bunch.

Duncan Crary: I heard something on WNYC’s Radio Lab. It’s a radio show and you can listen to it as a podcast. It’s a very interesting science/cultural show. And they were talking to a scientist about messing with the DNA of microbes to be able to basically excrete diesel fuel. So…they can do it in a Petri dish already. They can change the genetic coding of these microbes to… when they digest their food, they excrete basically diesel fuel.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s cool. You know what question it raises?

Duncan Crary: It raises a lot of questions.

James Howard Kunstler: What’s their food going to be?

Duncan Crary: I don’t know.

James Howard Kunstler: Soylent Green?

Duncan Crary: (laughs) I don’t know. But they’re talking about how we can release this into a lake, and we can have machines that skim off the diesel as it floats up. It’s horrifying man, but people are taking this stuff seriously.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah. You could also probably genetically-engineer a human baby to look like a baluchitherium, but why would you want to do it?

Duncan Crary: But if that’s our solution to the impending oil crisis?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, we’re nuts. We don’t get it. But I’m actually kind of amused with the degree of ‘not getting it’ that people show. And watching this whole spectacle unfold is like an amazing clown show. There are elements of it, to me, which are just purely entertaining, and elements which are scary, and elements which are tragic.

So it’s a multi-dimensional show out there — it’s not all tragic and it’s not all doom. As I’ve said more than once, Samuel Beckett once observed that nothing is funnier than unhappiness. So the unhappiness of this whole problem actually has a lot of comedy in it.

Duncan Crary: So I guess your advice to Kris – I mean it depends on how much she… does she want to just convince people of this, or does she want to produce an entertaining, witty program online?

James Howard Kunstler: Well she seems to be a bit of an exhibitionist, which is OK because she’s got a good thing to exhibit: her body. In fact, I’d do her, you know …if somebody gave me the opportunity…

Duncan Crary: Uh the first time I saw this –

James Howard Kunstler: …like Kris.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Thanks a lot.

James Howard Kunstler: OK, bye.

Duncan Crary (as host): Well folks, our caller Kris today pointed out that some people just don’t get it. And to illustrate that point, here are hosts Daniel and Jana of That Podcast Show reviewing The KunstlerCast:

Jana: I felt like he was extremely educated, really knowledgeable about just a wide variety of things that come into society and how it’s made up. It was, to me, very thought-provoking.

Daniel: Yeah, but I go back to what is billed as: “the tragic comedy of suburbian (sic) sprawl.” I still do not know or have that really answered for me, and maybe it’s because the show’s really young. It only has, what, 11 episodes? So I think they’re trying to get it, but that’s just a lot to throw out there and it’s very confusing. They did not clarify enough for me what in the world that means.

Jana: Again, I hate to disagree with you, but I just feel like it was so obvious that, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that makes it a tragedy. I’m looking forward to more episodes because I think it is such a broad topic. Maybe in each episode, he’s giving you a piece of the puzzle and he’s going to have to do 100 or 200 of these before you get the whole picture.

Daniel: Now that very well may be true. And if that’s the case, which I suspect you may be correct on that, it still has some more growing to do. But as of this time, I’m going to go with a two out of five for the show, for The KunstlerCast.

Jana: Wow. I am way on the other side. I’m giving it a solid 4. Solid 4.

Duncan Crary (as host): To hear that entire review, search for “That Podcast Show” on the Internet.

You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to

You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_14.mp3

Comment & Discuss at KunstlerCast Forum

The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #13: Personal Transit & Green Buildings. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunsterCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: personal transportation and sustainable green building.

Today’s program is in special partnership with Planetizen. Visit them online at Planetizen.com.

Duncan Crary (in interview): Hey, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Hey, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: The Planetizen folks are back again for another special cross-promotional podcast.

James Howard Kunstler: Do they get here in some kind of UFO from their planet? Is that a planet they’re on?

Duncan Crary: They arrive in MP3 format.

James Howard Kunstler: Is that Planet Zen? Are they all Zen Masters?

Duncan Crary: It took me awhile to figure out how to pronounce Planetizen.

James Howard Kunstler: Man, I didn’t know until, you know I–I’ve been writing for them for like four years. I still don’t know how to pronounce it. So, I’m glad you told me.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, Planetizen. OK, anyway…

James Howard Kunstler: I thought it was like Planet Citizen, or something like that. I was having some kind of a, you know, learning disability thing.

Nate Berg (recording): Hi, I’m Nate Berg, assistant editor at Planetizen, the leading news and information website for the urban planning, design and development community. You can keep track of the latest news, views and issues in urban planning and contribute to the conversation at Planetizen.com.

Here are some questions for James Howard Kunstler from the Planetizen editorial staff and also a few from Planetizen readers:

How do you feel about personal rapid transit, a pod-like automated transit systems that are being experimented with at London’s International Airport? Is this just another crazy idea or has its time come?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’ve gotten a lot of letters from the PRT guys and I’ve run into them at conferences. They seem to be a particular kind of crank. And, you know, I just don’t get it because it requires so much infrastructure and so–you know, you have to build these sort of trestle systems and…

It’s basically a monorail with your own personal monorail car pod in it. And… are they going to build trestles everywhere? I don’t really get the whole idea.

If we’re going to replace the car, why do it with something that’s not only like the car but not really as good as a car.

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: It just seems crazy. You know, the whole point ought to be that we need walkable cities, walkable towns, walkable neighborhoods. And to just invent another machine system for schlepping people around is nuts. And this one just requires so much built infrastructure, I just don’t see how it has a chance.

These guys have come up to me time and time again with their schemes and their booklets and their diagrams. And you know, I just think they’re crazy. It seems basically like a railroad that only carries one person per carriage. So where’s that at?

I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something.

Duncan Crary: I don’t know. It’s probably going to end up with the Segway, go the way of the Segway, right?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, the Segway was a very interesting kind of analog to that. You know, another personal transportation device that costs a huge amount of money, like $3,000 or something or more maybe. And was it better than a bicycle? It just seemed…

And also, the Segway was a good idea for people who are disabled, let’s say, for one reason or another; you know, too old. But the idea that normal people need a prosthetic extension for walking around, that was also kind of nuts.

Duncan Crary: I think Crocodile Dundee got it right when he was sort of looking at the escalator, like: people have this machine so you don’t have to walk upstairs and then they have to go work out on the Stairmaster? [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, pretty nice.

Duncan Crary: Let’s take that next question.

Nate Berg (recording): With the increasing popularity of green thinking and development and the rising notoriety of environmental rating systems like LED and LED for Neighborhood Development, how do you think cities and consumers are going to react to the cost of creating “sustainable” places?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, boy. Well, that’s a mouthful. Let’s start out with an English lesson. Notoriety means to be notorious, as to be known for doing bad things. It’s not a reference to things that are just, you know, well known. So, OK, English lesson over.

There’s so much yammer about greening this and being green and you know, I just came back from a green kind of conference in Colorado. And everybody wants to be green. And I think that we are blowing a lot of green smoke up our ass. I think there’s an awful lot of misunderstanding and confusion about what we’re actually doing.

I have a friend here in this town who–a very dear friend—who was a hippy carpenter who morphed into a developer. And he did a green development, so-called, full of buildings that were impeccably built without any kind of artificial off-gassing insulation. He did a great job with the model. It was very pristine. The trouble is that it’s built in a cul-de-sac subdivision which is going to require mandatory driving and is not connected to any other kind of civic activity or infrastructure.

To me, it seems a very self-defeating thing. And I think that there’s a lot of that going on.

There’s an idea that if you can build a quote “green” house–you know, a house that is made of good quality, pristine, safe, healthy materials that you really have solved the problem. But the problem is a problem of urbanism, not individual houses. It’s a problem of how the buildings relate to each other and their context and how the whole thing works together as an ensemble.

So, I’m not very impressed with the so-called green thinking that I see. A lot of it, by the way, is being applied to skyscrapers. And I don’t see anything green about the whole concept of a skyscraper. I think that everything about them implies enormous externalities of cost and the likelihood that they’re not going to work very well under any circumstances given our power situations.

Duncan Crary: The second part of the question was, “How do you think cities and consumers are going to react to the cost of creating quote ’sustainable’ places?”

James Howard Kunstler: Well, let me begin by revisiting my campaign to abolish the word “consumer” from our discussions about these things. It’s a very unuseful, demeaning, degrading term to call ourselves consumers, because consumers have no obligations or duties or responsibilities to anything other than their desire to eat Cheez Doodles and drink Pepsi Cola.

We need to call ourselves something else. You know, maybe– I don’t know–citizens or something other than consumers; very bad word. Because it also suggests that remaining a consumer society is a desirable end. And I think that that has caused a huge amount of mischief.

So, now what was the rest of that question?

Duncan Crary: Well, it’s just asking: how are citizens–using your term–going to react to the cost of creating “sustainable” places?

James Howard Kunstler: I’m not sure that we’re even going to have a lot of money to spend on new forms of public transit or retooling or retro-fitting things that currently exist. It’s mostly going to be a question of how do you get people out of their cars and walking? And how do you create an environment that is rewarding for walking in that isn’t absolutely horrible and invoking fear and making people uncomfortable.

You know I was having a talk with one of my best friends today about–there’s a shopping center that was retooled in the asteroid belt of Albany, New York. It was actually the first big shopping center of the ’60s. And then it went into decline and it had a really bad decade, and then they’ve gone and poured a whole lot of money into it again, and they’ve pedestrianized it a little bit–they’ve built some sidewalks around the perimeter and down the road that it’s on, et cetera et cetera.

But it’s still not really a very nice rewarding journey to go down that sidewalk. They built the sidewalk, but to be on that sidewalk next to an eight-laner–or whatever the hell it is–is really a frightful experience. So we’re trying to get there by fits and starts and we’ve got a long way to go to make this stuff work.

Duncan Crary: OK, and here’s one more:

Nate Berg (recording): Rising oil prices have seemed to serve as a good impetus for getting people out of their cars. Public transit has seen higher ridership in recent years and some areas are reporting record lows in gas consumption. Do you think this trend will continue as fuel efficiency increases and alternative energies allow driving without the guilt related to pollution? Or do you think people will revert to their car-happy habits when the costs fall back down and the emissions concerns fade away? And how do you see this transition affecting land use and development?

James Howard Kunstler: I’ve been to places where there are some impressive changes going on. For example: Dallas, Texas. They’ve built a light-rail line there about five or six years ago and they had very low expectations for it. But the ridership has really been quite high.

And to go along with it, there’s a long urban corridor in Dallas called the McKinney Avenue Corridor–I think it’s called–which has gotten a lot of apartments and condominiums along it along with retail on the ground floor and all of the ingredients necessary to create a walkable neighborhood.

They even have a pretty marvelous pedestrian and bike trail that runs on an old railroad right-of-way, that, if I remember correctly, there may even be an existing rail line on it, I’m not sure. But it runs quite a distance, kind of a parallel way of getting around on your bike or on foot or running. And the whole combination was pretty favorable. I got a pretty good impression of it. That was about two years ago.

Portland, Oregon is another place that made some really large investments in light-rail and I think those have proved to work out really wonderfully well.

Everywhere that we’ve seen it, really, the light-rail, I think, is paying off. Unfortunately there are still a lot of people who are stuck where they are in houses that they bought in the ’80s and ’90s and they’re not served by the rail and they don’t have a whole lot of choice.

We’re trying to kind of fix a development pattern that is a very unfavorable development pattern to begin with. I think some places are making a heroic effort, and in some places it’s working out better than others.

The Dallas thing is interesting. On the other hand, Dallas is in a very punishing climate. You can understand why people stay in their cars all the time, because it’s so hot there. Three of four months of the year it’s 90 degrees, 100 degrees every day. So it’s punishing to walk from point A to point B in a place like that. Unless it’s really compact-and I’m not sure they’re really getting there with as much compactness as they need–even though they’re building downtown buildings, multi-story buildings and condos, the blocks are probably too big and too long to traverse. The whole scale thing has really not been addressed.

Duncan Crary: OK, and the second part of this question is: Do you think people will revert to their car-happy habits when the costs fall back down?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that is a question of whether the costs will fall back down and how far they’ll go and what the picture is with gasoline and oil. And I think it’s probably deceptive. The price of oil probably is going to ratchet around. It’ll go up a few steps, it’ll fall back a step, maybe fall back a few steps, and then notch up a few more steps. I do think that the overall trend line is going to continue to be upward. But, of course, price is not the only factor here.

Other people have made the case-and I think that it’s correct-that before too long, sooner rather than later, we’re going to have problems with spot shortages and regional shortages of refined product and diesel and gasoline. And that’s really going to be the thing that is going to get the attention of people. It’s not necessarily just going to be price.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, but there also is something about (the) psychology of Americans and driving. I showed you once an historical memoir of someone who was visiting Saratoga Springs in 1814 and was like, “American’s drive everywhere!” This was in the day of horse and carriages. But there’s something about hyper-individualism and just the American Way.

So, I think what they’re asking is: If we came up with some fuel that had lower emissions or some magic fuel, would American’s return to our happy motoring ways, even if, in the meantime, we’ve built better public transportation?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that’s kind of a trick question, because I don’t really believe that there’s going to be a rescue remedy for happy motoring. I just don’t believe it. If there were, well, I have to say, I don’t think there’s any question that American’s would revert to their happy motoring habits. Why wouldn’t they? The system’s all set up for it.

I just consider it an idle wish. You can understand the wish. Once you’ve invested all of your nation’s wealth in a certain way of using your environment, there’s certainly going to be a huge desire to keep running it. And that’s exactly where we’re at.

But realistically I don’t think that any hypothetical “they” are going to quote “come up with,” a miracle rescue remedy for this thing.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, that was an ultra-fast Q & A round with you but I think you held your own, so thanks for doing it.

James Howard Kunstler: My head is still spinning.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Those were some great questions…

James Howard Kunstler: It’s spinning like a planet of its own. Maybe I have my own Plan-Planetizanzin–how do you say that?

Duncan Crary: Planetizen.

James Howard Kunstler: Planetizen.

Duncan Crary: So, all you KunstlerCast listeners, if you haven’t been there, check out Planetizen.com. Thanks a lot, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: See you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast, featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to

You can download episodes of this program, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_13.mp3

Comment & Discuss at KunstlerCast Forum