Benjamin Kunkel’s funny and scary piece in the new GQ — “World Without Oil, Amen” — is must reading.
The article follows Kunkel’s attempt to figure out what might happen after we reach the point known as “peak oil” — “(when) diminishing global oil production will cause gas prices — steep enough already, you might think — to go up and up as supplies go down, with far-reaching consequences for the only world we know.”
Kunkel wrote the wonderful 2005 novel “Indecision” and is one of the founding editors of the journal n + 1.
He’s a writer who loves to explore the contradictions in modern American life — our well-founded anxious thoughts about the future while we luxuriate in the consumer comforts all around us (for the moment).
“Start thinking about oil and it’s in everything you see, taste and hear,” Kunkel writes of a trip to cover an oil futurist’s conference. “It was oil in the form of a passenger jet that had brought me to Atlanta and oil in the form of chips and guacamole that I’d eaten in the hotel bar before wandering outside to take in a view of oil and more oil: sluggish streams of SUVs and dark sedans slipping past the theater marquee, the dialysis-center storefront, and the emptying parking lot…The sight was the same wherever I looked — 87 million gallons a day keeping the global economy afloat.”
Kunkel explores the debate over what happens when we reach the point of diminishing returns as far as the earth’s supply of oil goes. He travels from Atlanta to Houston to Colorado, keeping an open mind about the subject, but also envisioning a “worst-case scenario” straight out of “The Road Warrior” — “neo-barbarians” slaughtering each other over an ever-dwindling supply of bubbling crude.
The gap between what we think we should be doing and the way we actually live is illustrated in a hilarious encounter with Howard Kunstler —“perhaps America’s most prominent scourge of suburbia…a hair-raising pessimist.”
Kunkel assumes Kunstler will agree with him about the absurdity of the meat-locker air-conditioned temperature in the Houston hotel where the “peak oil” guru is scheduled to speak.
“Well that’s true,” Kunstler says. “But if you go outside, it’s like walking into a dog’s mouth!”
