21st-Century Possibilities ; Crises of Global Proportions

Summary

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$60 a barrel oil. China poised to pounce on hapless Taiwan. A Chinese oil company, China National Offshore Oil Corp., bidding for ownership of Unocal. These are just a few of summer 2005's news items, the first fat raindrops of an oncoming deluge of bad news. The newswires throb with tension from the weight of pending catastrophes.

Americans can finally see the end of endless bounty, and of its attendant luxury of taking human progress for granted. No longer will our political discourse be shaped around issues of class entitlement, affective discourse and all of the other rancid tropes that were unavoidable at the end of the last century. We now live, in the Confucian sense, in "interesting times." Or to put it another way, as widely published social commentator James Howard Kunstler does in his most recent book, we face the opening salvos of a "long emergency."

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21st-Century Possibilities ; Crises of Global Proportions

Driving this emergency or, as Mr. Kunstler's subtitle would have it, the "converging catastrophes of the 21st century" is global demand for petroleum. Relentlessly, Mr. Kunstler argues that global...

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