If Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” has a single message, it’s that global warming is bad—very, very bad. Floods, droughts, famine, disease . . . a miasma of End Times calamity caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Even at that, Gore is—at the risk of paraphrasing—a candy-assed optimist, according to James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.”
Whereas Gore and other prophets of climate change believe we still have the time and means to avert the worst consequences of anthropogenic global warming—hybrid cars, solar panels!—Kunstler argues with hellish persuasion that we are basically toast. Why? The entire edifice of American civilization—from our mega-scale methods of food production to our great repositories of national wealth, that is, the equity invested in our sprawling suburbs—is propped up, trembling as if balanced on matchsticks, on cheap oil. And there is no substitute for cheap oil.
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