Too Much Good News Lately?

With two hurricanes having come right into the heart of the nation's oil refinery capacity and disrupting distribution in ways that aren't yet clear, it's time to catch up with James Howard Kunstler. He's been casting a jaundiced eye on our energy dependency at The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle and making drastic predictions of what it all means. These latest disasters seem to make those predictions that much more likely. Here's part of what he wrote today:

Rita might have spared the nation's fourth biggest metroplex, and most of the chemical-cracking infrastructure on-shore around it. But clawing up between Beaumont and Lake Charles, she cut a path through the densest concentration of offshore oil and gas rigs in the whole Gulf of Mexico. We don't know they all came through yet, or how the pipelines below the surface fared.

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Half the houses in America are heated with natural gas and most of them are elsewhere than the Gulf Coast. On the markets, the price of gas is now heading north of $15 a unit (1000 cubic feet). It could easily hit $20 by Christmas, which would be about 700 percent higher than the price in 2002. Everyone in the non-Sunbelt is going to feel the pain this winter, and quite a few of the poor and infirm may freeze to death.

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The political allegiance of the American public will be fully in play. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and we are likely to see the emergence of something new, perhaps something like the British National Party (BNP) which combines a very aggressive agenda on energy policy with overt fascism. The American people will be starved for action, too, and will be waiting for a man of action to embody their desperation. Let's hope that the characters who percolate out of this mess are not maniacs.

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By Christmas, gasoline pump prices will have joined home heating prices in a vicious pincer around the neck of the non-rich classes.

The serious public conversation of our energy predicament has not begun, and when it does it will be too late. In the background of all this, an economy based on suburban sprawl and easy motoring is going to absolutely fall on its ass, and that means a much quicker end to the housing bubble than we might have expected a month ago. It might also lead to both the demise of the airline industry and the nationalization of what remains of it. It will certainly quash any remaining faith that such an economy can produce wealth, which is what the financial markets are based on, so look out below on Wall Street.

Sleep tight.