Cheap Oil Is Over: Kiss the Gas-Guzzling NASCAR Era Good-Bye

The following is excerpted from an essay by James Howard Kunstler published in the book Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of Motorized Recreation (Chelsea Green, 2007). It’s really well written and thought provoking, read it all.

It’s compelling to see how NASCAR auto racing has risen to the level of a mania in early 21st century America, as the nation has reached its absolute zenith of automobile use. Even as the world approached the all-time global oil production peak - with its ominous portents for social relations in this country - Americans rallied obliviously to the weekend proving grounds of the stock-car gods. NASCAR has eclipsed baseball, football and basketball in popularity among spectator sports. Of course, in real life, such as it was in America, driving automobiles had come to occupy a huge amount of the public’s time, day in and day out. Many adults were spending a good two hours a day commuting to work and back.

They were spending more time alone in their cars than with their spouses and children. NASCAR was the apotheosis of the same kind of cars that Americans drove to work. The competition vehicles were called stock cars, after all, because they were, theoretically, just souped-up versions of the same models that anyone could find in stock at an ordinary car dealership: Fords, Pontiacs, Chryslers and so on - unlike the Formula One race cars favored in Europe, which were specially designed just for sport (hence the quaint term sports car from the 20th century).

What’s more, the American economy was now mostly based on creating and maintaining the enormous infrastructures of motoring, as in suburbia, just as it had previously centered on the infrastructures of industrial production. So, the masses merely shifted their symbolic behavior focus to watching souped-up ordinary cars move symbolically around in circles. Or more precisely, ovals, which, from the grandstand, was sort of like sitting on a freeway overpass for five hours watching traffic. The NASCAR racetracks evolved from county fair dirt tracks with a few rickety bleachers to gargantuan stadiums with luxury sky boxes accommodating more than a hundred thousand spectators. It was significant, too, that the NASCAR subculture arose in the South, the old Dixie states, where the automobile had had tremendous social transformative power in the previous half century. Prior to the Second World War, Dixie had been an agricultural backwater with few cities of consequence, peopled by (among other groups) a dominant Caucasian peasantry called “rednecks” (because of the effects of the sun on exposed pale skin in the dusty crop rows).

States like Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama were huge. You could fit eleven Connecticuts in Alabama and have room for Rhode Island and Delaware. Unless they lived right along the railroad line, the folks down on the farm were pretty much stuck in place. The automobile liberated the redneck peasantry from the oppression of geography as emancipation had liberated the black peasantry from the legalities of chattel ownership.

In fact, the effect of the car was arguably much greater, since blacks continued to exist in economic quasi-serfdom despite the putative change in their legal status. The car and all its manifold benefits hoisted poor rednecks into a middle-class existence that had seemed like a distant fairytale previously, something only seen in the magazine pages they had used to wallpaper the rooms of their “cracker cottages” (their own typological term for such a dwelling). They became truckers and car dealers and car repairmen and the owners of fried food franchise shacks out on the highway. They made good wages and some became rich. Once a broad money base was established, they excelled at suburban development because rural land was so cheap, and there was so much of it. They worshiped the car more than they worshiped Jesus. The economy of the South was utterly transformed after the Second World War and the new economy was mostly about the car.

Cheap gasoline along with cheap air conditioning made the South livable for people who had a choice about where to make their homes. Cheap air conditioning in particular made city life possible in a region that had lagged hopelessly behind the states of the Old Union - to the degree that Dixie had not a single city substantial enough for a major league baseball team prior to the 1960s. But the cities that arose in Dixie after the war were not like cities elsewhere in physical form.

Orlando, Houston, Charlotte and places like them had gone from being smaller than Buffalo, N.Y., to becoming immense crypto-urbations of ring freeways, radial commercial highway strips and far-flung housing subdivisions around tiny withered peanuts of prewar traditional downtown cores. Houston by the year 2000 was not a city in the traditional sense of being composed of neighborhoods and districts; rather, it was an assemblage of single-use zoning wastelands: the shopping wasteland, the medical-services wasteland, the university wasteland, the cul-de-sac house wasteland and so on, dominated by massive overlays of automobile infrastructure.

The economy of the “New South,” as it liked to call itself in the late 20th century, was more about the making of suburban sprawl than the corporations that were lured down from the north to the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia for the cheap labor available. After all, the factories themselves eventually closed up shop as globalism made even cheaper labor in distant nations more attractive to corporate enterprise; but the sprawl remained, along with the office parks, where obscenely paid top executives now ran things, while the once-mighty working classes slid into a new kind of trailer-trash penury.

And that is where things stand today with the region and the nation it is still attached to, sleepwalking into the early years of a permanent global fossil fuel crisis that will once again transform the nation in ways we can only sketchily imagine.