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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (128862)	6/14/2008 3:16:21 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Respond to of 306849

Wow, Kunstler gets quoted...in China?! shanghaidaily.com Teetering on the brink of catastrophe Created: 2008-6-14 Author:Wan Lixin CRUDE oil crossed US$137 a barrel last week for the first time in New York and London trade. Across the globe, many car owners have taken to the streets to air their discontent with high fuel prices. Those who have been accustomed to cheap oil are clearly ill-prepared for this. But according to "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century," there has never been a lack of warning signs. "The world has never faced such dangerous circumstances as it does early in the twenty-first century," said author James Howard Kunstler in his book published in 2005. But leading gas guzzlers like Americans simply find it more pleasant to ignore the dire consequences of their lifestyle. "For many Americans, who have never known a way of life without cheap oil, there is a simple inability to manage life without it," the book observes. The pending energy crisis will end the kind of high standard of living people in the West have been enjoying in decades, and culminates in the 'Long Emergency,' which is marked by a series of calamities: drought, famine, diseases, conflicts, and wars. Kunstler goes to developmental psychology for an explanation of this overwhelming collective state of oblivion. As these problems create too much stress, and people have difficulty comprehending conflicting ideas in their effort to make sense of the world, they are said to be unable to handle "cognitive dissonance" - maintaining two contradictory ideas at the same time. One scholar uses "consensus trance" to explain people's failure to understand the reality of diminishing oil reserves. "Consensus trance" refers to the phenomenon that people do not act because other people do not act either. According to one study, the peak of oil production would have come before 2008, but accurate information will be hard to get. As OPEC production quotas are based on its member countries' oil reserves, oil producing nations as a rule overstate their reserves so that they can pump and sell more oil. Consequently, no oil companies would ever use the word "depletion" in regard to oil reserves, because that would hurt their business. One set of projections says that Saudi Arabia, which holds 60 percent of the world's oil reserves, will reach peak production between 2001 and 2020, but the actual figures are considered state secrets. "Once the world is headed firmly down the arc of depletion, fuel supplies will be interrupted by geopolitical contests and cultural clashes," the author predicts. It is no coincidence that many oil producing areas have been fought over by superpowers. For Americans, the implications of depleting oil reserves is obvious. With the end of the age of cheap oil, many American suburban subdivisions will become the slums of the future. Such dramatic social dislocations will be compounded by calamities threatening the very existence of human beings. We have already seen the many manifestations of global warming. According to the author, the hottest 10 years in the nearly 150 years that records have been kept all have fallen since 1990. Supplies of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides will decrease and dry up. These chemicals have drastically increased global grain production, and enable the earth to support a much huge population than natural fields could support. Some will starve. "The World Bank has famously declared, 'The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water'," the book notes. And after water the next resource to battle over will be air.