Quotes from book
The Long Emergency

Name: The Long Emergency
Author: James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler

“The energy disruptions of the Long Emergency are going to remind us that the skyscraper was an experimental building form.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 7, p. 253.

“[…] The human race living off the "drawdown" of nonrenewable fossil fuel resources is the equivalent of the algae […] enjoying a temporary rush of nutrients […].”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 6, p. 208.

“We used [oil] […] as if there was no tomorrow. Now there may not be one. That's how special oil has been.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 2, p. 31.

“The age of fossil fuels is about to end. There is no replacement for them at hand.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 2, p. 23.

“The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 1, p. 20.

“Everything can tend toward diminishing returns and unsustainability, […] even in the short term.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 7, p. 240.

“Many individual immune systems will be compromised by the hardships of the Long Emergency and disease will seize the opportunities presented, as it always has. […] Millions of human beings are going to die.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 182.

“Our brains are […] not equipped to process events on the geologic scale—at least in reference to how we choose to live, or what we choose to do in the here-and-now.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 148.

“The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, […] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the Indian summer of the fossil fuel era.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 1, p. 12.

“[…] Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's climate is inherently very unstable. The period in which human civilization developed has been if anything, an anomalous ten-thousand-year epoch of remarkable stability.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 149.

“Our brains are […] not equipped to process events on […] scale[s] [larger than a human lifetime] […].”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 148.

“The economic stress [struggle] among […] all nations, […] will be considerable and is certain to lead to increasingly desperate competition for diminishing supplies of oil and every other resource.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 3, p. 68.

“[…] Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's [sic] climate is inherently very unstable.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 149.

“Whole ideologies had to be constructed to account for being modern and to explain it.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 2, p. 22.

“Oil is the world's most critical resource. Without it, nothing works in industrial civilization as currently configured. Few people dispute the idea that the world will eventually run out of oil, and there is a broad recognition that it will happen [...].”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 3, p. 64.

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