History Is a Prankster, and Jim Kunstler Owes KMO Five Bucks
On March 24, 2020, KMO recorded a conversation with James Howard Kunstler just as the first COVID lockdowns were transforming ordinary life in the United States.
The ostensible occasion was the publication of Kunstler’s new book, Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adopters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward. KMO was one of the people profiled in the book.
But the timing made a normal book interview impossible.
Financial markets had crashed. Businesses were closing. Americans were being told to stay home. Nobody knew whether the disruption would last a few weeks, a few months, or mark the beginning of something much larger.
As KMO put it in the original introduction, the conversation was “supposed to be about his new book,” but given what was happening, it became a conversation about both the book and the historical moment suddenly unfolding around them.
KMO is revisiting this and other old C-Realm conversations as part of Getting Over Collapse, a project examining the collapse worldview that shaped much of the C-Realm Podcast: what it got right, what it got wrong, what assumptions survived contact with reality, and how KMO’s own thinking changed.
The original episode is here:
C-Realm Podcast 554: History Is a Prankster
Peak Oil gets another day in court
Kunstler’s argument was recognizably continuous with the case he had been making since The Long Emergency appeared in 2005.
Peak Oil, he explained, had never meant that petroleum would suddenly disappear. The problem was the depletion of cheap, easily recoverable oil. The shale boom had postponed the reckoning, but at enormous financial cost.
Conventional wells, in Kunstler’s account, had once behaved almost like cash registers: relatively inexpensive to drill, highly productive, and capable of producing for decades. Shale wells cost millions, declined rapidly, and required constant new drilling.
The great American shale boom had nevertheless driven U.S. oil production from under five million barrels per day to roughly thirteen million. That was not nothing. It blew straight through the old U.S. production peak that had figured so prominently in Peak Oil literature.
But Kunstler argued that the achievement had been financed rather than earned. Cheap money, junk bonds, and a decade of easy credit allowed shale producers to keep drilling even though, in his telling, the industry as a whole had failed to demonstrate that it could reliably make money.
Then came March 2020.
The COVID crash looked to Kunstler like the moment when the financial machinery sustaining shale oil—and much else besides—would finally break.
The fork in the road
By then, KMO no longer accepted the larger collapse story.
He reminded Kunstler that the two had reached a fork in the road several years earlier. Kunstler remained convinced that technological civilization could not continue operating at its existing scale. KMO had deliberately stepped away from what he increasingly called “doomerism.”
That disagreement appears throughout the conversation.
When Kunstler described shale oil as scraping the bottom of the barrel, KMO pointed out that most of the hydrocarbons underground had always been in the difficult part of the barrel. The relevant question was not whether difficult resources existed but whether improvements in technology could make more of them economically recoverable.
More broadly, KMO raised the awkward historical record of Peak Oil forecasting.
Charles C. Mann had spent time talking both to Peak Oil pessimists and to people such as Daniel Yergin, who insisted that new extraction technology would expand recoverable supplies. A decade later, whatever one thought of Yergin’s worldview, the technological optimists had done much better as forecasters.
KMO made a similar defense of Ray Kurzweil.
Kunstler grouped Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Silicon Valley technologists and electric-car enthusiasts together as “techno-narcissists” whose visions of Mars colonies, immortality and electrified suburbia would not survive the coming contraction.
KMO pointed out that Kurzweil had been making specific technological forecasts for decades and that his track record was, on the whole, remarkably strong.
Kunstler allowed that Kurzweil was accomplished and intelligent, but offered the memorable judgment that he had “flown up his own butthole intellectually.”
The exchange captures the central disagreement nicely.
Kunstler saw technological progress as a temporary elaboration resting on an energetic and financial foundation that was failing.
KMO increasingly saw technological adaptation itself as the factor collapse thinking repeatedly underestimated.
Going medieval
Kunstler was not predicting a brief recession.
He expected fundamental simplification.
Industrial civilization, he argued, would no longer be able to operate at its previous scale. Food systems would become more local. Household structures might change. Gender roles and labor arrangements could shift. Federal institutions would become increasingly incompetent and impotent. Regions of the country might become more autonomous.
“We’re basically going medieval,” he said, while expressing the hope that the new medievalism might at least include good lighting and plumbing.
The COVID emergency appeared to him not as an interruption of the existing system but as an acceleration of forces that had been building for years.
KMO remained skeptical.
That distinction matters in retrospect. Both men recognized that March 2020 was a genuine crisis. They disagreed about what sort of crisis it was.
For Kunstler, it was confirmation.
For KMO, it was a severe discontinuity that did not necessarily validate the larger collapse model.
History is a prankster
The episode title came out of the political discussion.
Neither participant had much confidence in the existing political order. Both were highly critical of Joe Biden. Both regarded Donald Trump as badly suited to the immediate demands of the pandemic, although both also expressed disgust with much of the Democratic establishment’s opposition to him.
KMO’s political framing had become increasingly economic and populist. He described Trump as a faux populist who served the interests of the wealthy and argued that an actual economic populist could defeat him.
Kunstler saw a political vacuum but was much less certain about what might fill it.
That led him to the French Revolution.
The revolutionaries of 1789 could scarcely have anticipated that, a little more than a decade later, France would be ruled by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Political convulsions, Kunstler argued, rarely end where their participants imagine they will.
History is a prankster.
That was his larger point. Predictions that seem implausible under one political arrangement can become obvious after a sufficiently violent discontinuity.
He entertained possibilities ranging from military intervention in American governance to regional fragmentation of the United States.
The precise scenario mattered less than the warning against assuming that current institutions would remain the permanent container for future events.
On that point, at least, the two men were closer together.
Then they put five dollars on it
Near the end of the interview, the disagreement became unusually testable.
KMO invoked Warren Buffett’s familiar advice to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
Stocks had undergone a historic panic sell-off. KMO’s expectation was that investors buying viable companies during the crash would eventually do very well. The market might not immediately return to its old highs, but he expected it to recover substantially.
Kunstler disagreed.
He predicted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, then around 20,000, would eventually fall to roughly 5,000 over the following 18 to 24 months.
KMO made his own prediction:
“I think a year from now it will be above 20,000.”
Kunstler replied:
“Well, OK, I’ll bet you five bucks.”
KMO accepted.
On March 24, 2021, the Dow closed at 32,420.06.
On March 24, 2022—roughly the far end of Kunstler’s expanded 18-to-24-month window—it closed at 34,707.94.
It never came remotely close to 5,000.
So, unless the wager has somehow been settled off the books:
James Howard Kunstler owes KMO five dollars.
The more interesting part comes after the interview
The closing monologue may be more revealing for the Getting Over Collapse project than the interview itself.
KMO explicitly described the intellectual shift he had been making.
He had rejected what he called catastrophism: the habit of taking an ominous set of facts and extrapolating toward the worst plausible outcome.
That rejection was not merely intellectual.
KMO said that embracing catastrophism for years had done real damage to his life.
He also recognized the danger of overcorrecting. Having spent so long expecting collapse, he knew he might now be psychologically motivated to dismiss genuine signs of trouble.
The timing was almost comical.
About a year earlier, while KMO was explaining his new rejection of Peak Oil doomerism, his friend Doug had joked that he should stop before he “jinxed” civilization: if KMO stopped believing in doom, doom would finally arrive.
Then came COVID.
A genuine discontinuity had appeared almost on cue.
But KMO still did not think the pandemic meant Kunstler’s long emergency had finally arrived.
He expected some kind of recovery.
The more important question, in his view, was: recovery for whom?
Collapse gives way to class
This is one of the clearest transitional moments in KMO’s thinking.
The organizing concern was no longer primarily energy depletion.
It was class.
The recovery from the 2008 financial crisis had restored asset prices and produced new market highs, while large portions of the population had experienced stagnation, addiction, precarity and downward mobility.
KMO expected American institutions to respond to COVID in much the same way: rescuing owners of financial assets while allowing ordinary workers to absorb the damage.
During the interview, he put the question plainly:
“Which side are you on? Are you on the side of working people or are you on the side of the hyper-wealthy?”
He explicitly disavowed Marxism, but said his class consciousness had been increasing for years.
In the postscript he returned to the point. His own financial circumstances had improved compared with earlier periods of his life, yet his anger toward the American oligarchic class had never been stronger.
He imagined—briefly and hopefully—a different outcome: a moment in which people who already had more wealth than they could possibly use stopped trying to acquire still more and instead devoted serious attention to maintaining the viability of the working and middle classes.
That possibility seemed unlikely.
But it seemed considerably more useful to think about than Peak Oil.
No guillotines
The postscript also contains an important qualification.
Class anger can readily turn into fantasies of revenge.
KMO admitted that he had entertained fantasies of rich people being publicly executed before cheering crowds.
He immediately rejected that outcome.
The problem was not simply sympathy for the prospective victims. Political violence degrades the people who perform it and the society that celebrates it.
KMO cited John Michael Greer’s recurring warning that what follows a violent revolution is usually worse than what preceded it. Kunstler’s own discussion of the French Revolution supplied an obvious example: the revolutionaries themselves eventually went under the guillotine.
KMO also invoked Andrew Yang’s response when asked during a Democratic debate whether a Yang administration would prosecute Donald Trump. Yang observed that countries in which outgoing leaders are routinely imprisoned or executed tend not to be countries where people want to live.
The larger point was that oligarchic behavior could be both intolerable and self-destructive without revolutionary bloodletting becoming desirable.
KMO ended that section with a very different moral image, drawn from Bob Dylan: even someone who has become so corrupt that everyone close to him has given up can still retain the capacity to mend his ways.
That is a long distance from “eat the rich.”
March 2020, preserved in amber
The final minutes are also a small time capsule of the first lockdown.
KMO had recently traveled to Puerto Rico and was considering moving there. The pandemic abruptly placed those plans on indefinite hold.
He was living in Bellows Falls, Vermont, working largely from home and already finding the isolation psychologically difficult before most of the country suddenly joined him in it.
Municipal video work disappeared because public meetings moved to Zoom.
He worried that more of his income would follow.
Earth Day events were canceled.
He invited listeners to email simply to say how they were doing.
The internet, for all its obvious defects, had suddenly become the thing allowing isolated people to remain in contact.
“As long as the internet is still working,” KMO concluded, “let’s use it for good purposes.”
Six years later
The most useful thing about revisiting this episode is not tallying who got every prediction right.
Kunstler was right that March 2020 represented a major historical discontinuity. He was right that supply chains, political legitimacy, class tensions and institutional competence would become major issues during the years that followed.
But the larger collapse forecast did not materialize.
The Dow did not fall to 5,000.
The dollar did not disappear.
American shale production did not simply collapse.
Industrial civilization did not go medieval.
And the technological futurists whom Kunstler dismissed did not fade into irrelevance. Quite the opposite.
By 2026, the technological trajectory that looked fanciful to much of the Peak Oil world in 2005 is impossible to ignore. Artificial intelligence is no longer an obscure futurist subject. Electric vehicles are ordinary products. Commercial rockets land themselves. The argument about technological acceleration has moved from whether it will happen to what society should do about it.
That does not mean every techno-optimist was right or every collapse concern was foolish.
It means history was, indeed, a prankster.
Just not in the way Kunstler expected.
And he still owes KMO five bucks.
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