The coming global oil crisis and climate change, said James Howard Kunstler, are going to destroy culture as Americans know it.

In his lecture titled “The Long Emergency: The Coming Global Oil Crisis and Climate Change,” Kunstler tackled some of the complicated issues he said will result in the fall of civilization.

“Wherever I go, consternation seems to follow, and I don’t know what I’m saying that’s so difficult, but maybe you could tell me later,” Kunstler said.

He said he’d give a bit of background of the oil crisis, but he wanted to focus on its outcome.

“We are in trouble with our energy supply, this has often been expressed as peak oil,” Kunstler said. “I refer to it as the global energy predicament.”

He said a lot of top geologists in the ’90s were working for large oil companies had retired and then began to speak out against the industry.

“They understood that this was a story with a beginning, middle and end,” Kunstler said. “The important thing to know about this is that it’s notabout running out of oil, it’s about what happens on the way down, on the depletion side of the curve.”

He also said American oil production peaked in the 1970s and that the country was able to circumvent this problem by getting enough oil from other countries to support unsustainable habits.

He outlined the major oil exporters in the world and said the Burgan oil field in Kuwait is past depletion, the Russian oil fields are depleting, and the North Sea is also depleting.

He said Mexico is a “poster child” for what happens when oil is exported to depletion.

“It’s our second-largest source of imports, second only to Canada,” Kunstler said. “They also possess one of the great oil fields, and it’s responsible for 60 percent of Mexico’s oil production.”

He said Mexican oil is being depleted so quickly that the world is about to run into huge problems.

“It’s now depleting at unprecedented supernatural rates, meaning in six years, it’s going to be gone,” Kunstler said. ‘We are about to lose, within 24 to 36 months, the second largest source of our oil imports.”

Because the oil industry makes up approximately 40 percent of the Mexican government’s revenue, when it runs out of oil, there will be massive border problems, Kunstler said.

He outlined a few items he said were imperative to the future of America.

“All of this stuff is going to fail. It is insupportable; it will be unsustainable in an energy-scarce future,” Kunstler said.

An entirely new way of surviving must be developed, he said.

“You’ve got to stop talking about just running your cars on different things, when you go to your parties, you’ve got to change the subject,” Kunstler said. “There’s this tremendous fantasy out there that we are going to just unplug from the petroleum oil thing and plug into some other basket of goodies.”

In response to the problems, he developed a set of things people will have to do.

“These aren’t rescue remedies, they aren’t instant gratification – they are a set of things that we have to face,” he said.

Kunstler said people are going to have to raise food differently, conduct retail trade differently, inhabit the terrain of North America differently and operate schools differently.

“The problem with America is not that everything is the same, the problem is that it’s equally miserable, equally low quality and it’s unworthy of us,” he said.

America deposited all of its post-war wealth into infrastructure that isn’t sustainable, Kunstler said. He called it a “living arrangement with no future.”

He said Americans have put so much of themselves and their national identity into an infrastructure that they aren’t willing to give it up.

“The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them is going to allow us to continue to run things the way that we run them,” Kunstler said.

Doug Puffett, senior in agricultural studies, was attending the lecture for a sustainable agriculture class.

“It was announced in class, so I thought I should come,” Puffett said.