Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and Word Made By Hand.
I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: The Fate of Flagstaff & Fossil Fuels.
Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, we’re back for another conversation about the end of suburbia, the cheap fuel (fiesta) and other disasters. Do you feel up for the challenge?
James Howard Kunstler: Roll heavy and gun up!
Duncan Crary: You know, lot of listeners probably don’t realize that each program is monitored by Sammy The Wonder Dog. Right?
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah well we’re not quite sure he’s a dog. I tell visitors that he’s a flightless fruit bat.
Duncan Crary: [laughs]
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, he’s here snorching away, making funny little weird little sounds.
Duncan Crary: You get extra credit if you can hear him.
James Howard Kunstler: And identify what part of his body it comes from. [laughter]
Duncan Crary: OK, on that note, we have another listener call. This one comes from Flagstaff, Arizona. So let’s hear what this caller has to say.
Listener Caller: Hi. This is Matt from Flagstaff, Arizona. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I’ve two questions for Mr. Kunstler. First, you visited Flagstaff last year and I agree with your assessment that much of the so-called sunbelt is pretty much f—ed. However, Flagstaff is, I’m sure you noticed, much different from Phoenix.
It is a small city, in many ways similar to the kinds of cities you say will have a better chance of surviving the end of the era of cheap oil although it is fairly sprawling. We also have much better access to water in the form of a very large aquifer than much of the rest of Arizona although there’s little in the way of agriculture in the area. Do you think Flagstaff is better suited to survive than places like Phoenix of Tucson?
Second, in The End of Suburbia you are very critical of hydrogen-powered cars, implying that they were extreme safety hazards. However, Honda is putting a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the road this year and apparently the safety issues have been resolved. Is it possible that technology really might be able to help us avoid the worst of the post-petroleum era? Thank you very much. Bye.
Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, what is the fate that awaits Flagstaff, Arizona?
James Howard Kunstler: By American standards today, especially Western standards, Flagstaff is a fairly pleasant place … because it’s not Phoenix.
Phoenix, which is—I don’t know—about 100 miles south of there is just this unspeakable UFO landing strip that’s just totally out of control and, plus, it has no future. Now, Flagstaff is a much tinier, tinier version of that and as such is more manageable but it still shares the characteristics of most Western places in so far as there’s very little pre-automobile fabric there.
There are very few buildings from the pre-Word War II era. Most of the stuff there comes in the form of the strip mall or the pod or something like it and it’s just unfortunate.
Unfortunately, most of Flagstaff, Arizona looks like the service road that surrounds Newark Airport. It has somewhat more interesting terrain and it’s got some nice pine tree-kind of flora.
Duncan Crary: Well Jim, I’ve never been to Flagstaff, Arizona but I was looking it up on the Internet and I notice that a lot of the people are concerned that tourism is a big draw to Flagstaff—people come for the scenery and the scenery is getting gobbled up by development, which is a common situation. Right?
James Howard Kunstler: That has been the case in a lot of Arizona but, of course, they’re one of the epicenters of the housing bubble implosion so I would say they’re probably nearing the end of building out further and further and further into the mountains there. They’re going to have to face the consequences of that housing bubble which is going to be pretty severe even in Flagstaff.
Phoenix, of course, is just beyond belief and probably beyond help.
Duncan Crary: One thing Flagstaff has going for it, I was reading, it does have some good rail lines going through there.
James Howard Kunstler: Actually, I wouldn’t know about that. I got stuck in the airport in Phoenix. I couldn’t get a connecting flight to Flagstaff, which I was supposed to get.
I had to rent a car to get there and then I had to construct this really elaborate strategy for going to a hotel, leaving at about 3:30 in the morning to avoid the rush hour traffic because to get to Flagstaff from the airport you have to traverse the entire Phoenix metropolitan area from north to south.
I was on the highway at about four o’clock in the morning and you’re already hearing radio bulletins about, “There’s a huge truck trailer wreck over there on Ames Boulevard. Don’t go anywhere near there.” It’s four o’clock in the morning and they’re already having these incredible traffic snarls. But I did manage to get up out of there and get over to Flagstaff. Like I said, like most Western towns, it’s basically pretty grim. The whole thing is sort of like one big strip mall.
Duncan Crary: Well, the second question was about the new Honda hydrogen fuel cell car. What are your thoughts on that?
James Howard Kunstler: The caller suggested that I thought the big problem was merely the storage problem. I mentioned it in the chapter I wrote (in The Long Emergency). But that wasn’t my main beef with the hydrogen car. My main beef with the hydrogen car is that it basically takes more energy to produce the hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen that you’re producing.
So it’s kind of like the old Polish blanket trick, as we used to say, where the guy wants to make his blanket longer so he cuts 12 inches from the top and sews it on to the bottom. Only in this case, you’re cutting 12 inches off the top and you’re hemming it and you’re only getting nine inches on the bottom. Right?
So there’s that issue. There’s a lot of issues with hydrogen. It’s expensive and uneconomical to produce. It’s very hard to transport. You can’t run it through the same kind of pipes that were designed for the natural gas network because it has strange physical properties.
It’s the lightest of all the elements. It leaks out of almost anything that you contain it in because it can get out of the tiniest little aperture. It tends to eat through the seals that are designed for the valves and for the connectors because it’s an element that wants so much to combine with other elements that it corrodes the things around it very easily.
You can’t transport it by the kind of trucks that we take gasoline on because, being the kind of element that it is, when you compress it, it still takes up so much room that you can only get the equivalent of, like, 800 kilograms of hydrogen on a truck that’s designed to carry 44 tons of gasoline. So the actual, flammable, hazard part of this story is, for me, the smallest part of this story.
I don’t think that the hydrogen car is ever going to really happen. Now, look: you can’t stop the big car companies from producing these stunts and PR shows that they’re putting on. But just because they can produce one—or maybe 20—hydrogen cars doesn’t mean that a system is going to be in place for us to run 100 or 200 million of them. So it’s really very, very unlikely. I think that people who have invested their wishes and hopes in the hydrogen car are going to be very disappointed.
Duncan Crary: Well, I want to talk to you about this. In The Long Emergency you go through a number of different alternative fuel sources, and you basically say they’re all fantasy. I know that people can drive a car across the country on used French fry oil, but as you said, you can’t power the American automobile fleet on this stuff.
James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s a matter of scale. They don’t scale. They don’t scale up. Yeah, you can do all of these things on the science project basis, and you can do some of them even on a somewhat larger basis. But can you do it on the basis of powering the whole society on this? And the answer is, “No.”
We’re already beginning to see all kinds of unanticipated consequences from this ethanol program that we put in place about two years ago. And it’s reverberating in parts of the system, really quickly, that people never expected, that are leading down the path of hunger and famine because gas tanks and hungry bellies are now competing for the grain supply.
Duncan Crary: Jim, what do you say to the people who say, “OK. I know you can’t replace gasoline with one alternative fuel, but how about a cocktail? Let’s use many different types of alternative fuel. That’s the solution to this problem.” What do you say to those folks?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s an understandable wish that we would want to keep our happy motoring system going, because we have invested so much in it, and it’s almost inconceivable to most Americans that we would have to do without it. But I think the truth of the matter is that the automobile and all of the things associated with it are going to be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not.
And what disturbs me—actually, this is a symptom of our even larger inability to have a coherent discussion about our problems in this country. As you go around the country, what you realize is the only thing that we’re talking about is how we’re going to run the cars by some other means than gasoline or diesel fuel. And to me, this is really a tragic thing, because we have to talk about a lot of other things.
Last night, I gave a lecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic (Institute), and one young foreign student—he was from India, actually—got up and was going on at some length about all the technological means for producing new transit systems and new elegant ways of getting people from point A to point B. And my response to him was that the one thing that we’re never talking about is walkable cities or walkable neighborhoods.
And it doesn’t require any heroic new technologies or new discoveries. In fact, it is, when all is said and done, absolutely the most pleasant way to live and to get around. Anybody who’s spent more than an hour and a half in the center of Paris understands this—or for that matter, a dozen other European cities.
Duncan Crary: That’s how I feel when I watch a movie like The Death of the Electric Car. I don’t care if they find some magic fuel. I don’t want to have to drive my car anywhere.
James Howard Kunstler: It’s a total dodge. Dude, listen. I go around, and every college lecture I give, there’s invariably, inevitably, somebody who gets up and says, “I got a brand new Prius.”
Duncan Crary: Yeah. Congratulations.
James Howard Kunstler: Congratulations. “Pin a medal on me. Give me a brownie point.” And then I have to sort of disillusion them and tell them… The problem in America is not that we’re driving the wrong kind of cars, per se.
The trouble in the United States is we’re driving incessantly. We’re driving every kind of car there is, incessantly. And we’ve got to find a way out of the incessant motoring and a way to live without it, and a happy way to live without it—not a punishment way to live without it, but a way to be happy and do it. And it means, really, a completely different paradigm for everyday life.
Duncan Crary: Yeah. I don’t even care if the fuel you’re running your car on is spewing out some gas that’s good for the environment.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, like nitrous oxide. We’d all feel better if the gas is…
Duncan Crary: [laughs] But you’re chewing up every last bit of land to pave—
James Howard Kunstler: By the way, this is characteristic of one of the most famous alternative motoring projects in America, which is Amory Lovins’ Hypercar project at his Rocky Mountain Institute.
It shows how cracked we are, because here you have a guy running this environmental institute, this guy who’s regarded as one of the great geniuses of his generation, Amory Lovins, and he spent 15 years developing this project to design a car that gets such supernaturally wonderful mileage that it’ll be just the greatest thing ever.
And he never realizes that the main unintended consequence of all this is that it just promotes the idea that we can continue being car-dependent. It’s totally, totally insane. And that’s where we’re at as a country.
Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, that’s it for another show. Thanks a lot for talking with us.
James Howard Kunstler: Nice podding with you, Duncan.
Listener Caller: This is Margaret Luckett in New York State—Tivoli, New York. I’m calling because I just found The KunstlerCast, and I’m just so delighted to have found it. So thanks for having it, and I look forward to hearing a lot more shows. Bye-bye.
Duncan Crary: You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast, featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll-free at 866-924-9499.
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I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.
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