One of my drinking buddies is friends with Kunstler, who lives about half an hour from here... he's going to try to get him to come down to the bar one of these nights. I have a lot to ask him!
What are you going to ask him?
Reactions and Criticisms
Charles Bensinger, co-founder of Renewable Energy Partners of New Mexico, describes Kunstler's views as "fashionably fear-mongering" and uninformed regarding the potential of renewable energy, biofuels, energy efficiency and smart-growth policies to eliminate the need for fossil fuels.[2] Contrarily, Paul Salopek of The Chicago Tribune finds that, "Kunstler has plotted energy starvation to its logical extremes" and points to the US Department of Energy Hirsch report as drawing similar conclusions[3] while David Ehrenfeld writing for American Scientist sees Kunstler delivering a "powerful integration of science, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change" with a "lengthy discussion of the alternatives to cheap oil."[4]
Kunstler, who majored in Theater at college and has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates, made similar predictions for Y2K as he makes for peak oil.[5][6] Kunstler responds to this criticism by saying that a Y2K catastrophe was averted by the hundreds of billions of dollars that were spent fixing the problem, a lot of it "in secret," he claims.[7]
In June 2005 and again in early 2006, Kunstler predicted that the Dow would crash to 4,000 by the end of the year.[8] [9] The Dow in fact reached a new peak by 2007. In his predictions for 2007, however, Kunstler admitted his mistake stating "Let's get this out of the way up front: the worst call I made last year was for the Dow to crumble down to 4000 when, in fact, it melted up to a new all-time record high of about 12,500. The reason we saw this, in my opinion, was that inertia combined with sheer luck to keep the finance sector decoupled from reality…". He also predicted, however, that in 2006 the United States housing bubble would start to deflate, which appears to be borne out by latest data. [10] However, unlike Kunstler's Dow predictions, which were uniquely his, the bursting of the United States housing bubble was widely forecast before Kunstler began discussing it. [11]
Though criticized by some for his dire predictions regarding Peak Oil, the price of a barrel of crude oil did indeed witness a sharp and dramatic increase in 2007, rising some 57% and ending the year near $96/barrel. Energy analysts are already warning that crude prices will breach the $100 mark in 2008. It should be noted however, that this was not a hard prediction to make as the price of oil has been rising for years."
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