Kunstler, Y2K, and the "Long Emergency"

I'm not really a "fan" of James Kunstler. I'm interested in what he has to say, and I think he's a gifted, literary, interesting writer. I first heard him talk at the PopTech! conference in Maine a few years ago, when he quite humorously presented a sideshow of pictures that gave his take on suburbia. I reviewed The Long Emergency for a little newspaper in Maine, and after that read The Geography of Nowhere. Lord knows I'm no fan of suburbia, although having lived in Portland the last six months I've learned that suburbia, whatever its faults, is a good deal quieter than the city. (Though the city has its advantages.)

So I was very interested to read that Kunstler took the Y2K crisis quite seriously, believing even that people might die as a result of it. Needless to say, he was about as wrong as one can be on the Y2K crisis:

...Y2K is real. Y2K is going to rock our world.

People will consequently suffer. I don’t know how much. Some people may lose their lives - but more likely at the hands of a disabled medical establishment than because of civil disorder, loss of power, starvation, bad water, or other projected horrors (though these, too, are possible). Some will suffer the loss of fortunes, some of any income whatsoever, and many of something in between. Quite a few will find themselves suddenly without an occupation, and few ideas about how to make themselves useful to other people (without occupations themselves). Many will suffer a loss of comfort and modern convenience, and if that goes on any longer than a week, it may escalate into serious problems of public sanitation and infectious disease.

I have to admit that since learning about Kunstler's Y2K beliefs last week he's come down several pegs in my book. I mean, fool me once.... But fool me twice--I don't think so. The man seems to have a proclivity for doom, and seems determined to make money off of it one way or the other.

I think the world is probably due for some Peak Oil shortcomings--in 10 or 25 years--and that oil is only going to be more expensive in the near- and long-term future. But technology does adapt, as it did with Y2K. People adapt. Programmers recognize their code's shortcomings and fix it.

(And yes, it was possible to view the Y2K issue as a computing problem that programmers needed to fix, but which did not imply the end of the world. I wrote such a perspective in a now-defunct magazine in 1997: "The Year 2000: Software Hits the Wall," Internet World, January 1997, p. 68.)

Mostly I don't know whether Peak Oil will "rock our world." But Kunstler did (and does) claim to know, and after one massively blown prediction his stock falls considerably in my eyes. I won't view what he writes in the same way ever again.