“Kunstler is trashing the trump agenda....”
I respectfully disagree.
I read this article as saying that Trump is our best possible hope in what is most likely a hopeless situation.
If Trump actually reset the financial system to a sustainable path while avoiding what appears to be unavoidable chaos, he will truly be a man for the ages.
In all Kunstler’s self promoting history, his strongest suits have remained constant. He’s anti Swamp and acutely aware of resource constraints.
He does get points for a career that did not derive from trust funds. He did oddjobs to fund his very skilled writing. And that writing has sold.
As for content, his wiki, or whoever edited it, slams his Peak Oil errors. You can always tell the oil uninformed by the phrase “technological progress that created fracking”. Fracking has been known about for many decades. It got underway in the US in about 2008-9 timeframe for the obvious reason that loans to fund it carried interest rates of near 0%.
He is resource educated. He went out and learned the realities. Peak Oil has a very specific and precise definition. It means oil flow rate from a new well climbs to a level, maybe 1000 barrels/day for fracked shale or 10,000 barrels/day for a non fracked conventional well. And then from that level is declines. The rate climbs, peaks and declines. Every oil well ever drilled does this.
You can drill and frack adjacent to it to get oil from elsewhere to flow to that well and disrupt the peak curvature, but that’s like saying an oil field is declining, and then the next year you redraw the boundaries that define that field, making it bigger, and all of a sudden the field output looks like it’s rising.
But anyway, that’s the definition of Peak Oil. You can find an avalanche of articles saying things like “Peak Oil tells us that the world will run out of oil in XXX years”. Peak Oil says nothing about this. It says very precisely and specifically what I just noted.
Anyway, Kunstler is aware of the constraints of resources and how he hopes Trump can stop flow of them outwards from the US and save them. This exact overall concept affects things in Ukraine. “Cut off Russian oil. Tell Saudi Arabia to produce more oil and cut Russia off from China and India.” Why should Kingdom of Saudi Arabia do this? Why should they care about US desires? They agreed to buy some arms from the US with their infinite money mostly to ensure the US doesn’t pursue criminal charges against MBS for the murder of that journalist a few yrs ago.