Hello America. J. G. Ballard

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       7 The Crisis Years

      Reluctant to sleep, they sat late into the night on the deck of the Apollo, crew and passengers together. Under the pleasant glow of the rigging lights, Wayne listened to Orlowski, Steiner and Anne Summers discuss their revised plans for the expedition. After two days in New York, they were still laboriously trying to make sense of the vast climatic upheaval that had denuded this once powerful and fertile land.

      As Orlowski pointed out, the first ominous signs of the decline and fall of America had become apparent as early as the middle years of the twentieth century. Then a few far-sighted scientists and politicians had warned that the world’s energy resources—in particular, its oil, coal and natural gas—were being consumed at an ever-increasing rate that would exhaust all known reserves well within the lifetimes of their own grandchildren. Needless to say, these warnings were ignored. Despite the emergence of vocal ecology and soft technology movements, the industrialisation of the planet, and especially of the developing nations, continued apace. However, by the 1970s energy sources at last began to run out as predicted. The price of oil, hitherto a small and static fraction in world manufacturing costs, suddenly tripled, quadrupled and by the mid-1980s had risen twenty-fold. An internationally coordinated search for new oil reserves provided a brief respite, but by the 1990s, as the industrial activity of the United States, Japan, Western Europe and the Soviet bloc continued unchecked, the first signs of an insoluble global energy crisis began to appear.

      Unable to pay the vastly increased price for imported oil, a number of once thriving economies abruptly collapsed. Egypt, Ghana, Brazil and the Argentine were forced to cancel huge programmes of industrialisation. The ambitious Western Sahara irrigation project was abandoned, the Upper Amazon dam left uncompleted. The construction of the vast new port complex at Zanzibar, which would have made it the Rotterdam of Central Africa, was halted overnight. Elsewhere, too, the effects were equally unsettling. At the orders of the French and British governments, work ceased on the Cross-Channel Bridge. The approaching arms of the two immense systems of linked suspension bridges were then separated by only a single mile of open water, but since the exhaustion of the North Sea oil and gas fields in the last years of the 1980s it had become clear that the huge volume of road traffic anticipated would never materialise.

      All over the world industrial production began to falter. Stock markets slumped, avalanching numerals in Wall Street, the Bourse and the City of London showed all the signs of an even greater recession than the 1929 Crash. By the mid-1990s the automotive giants of the United States, Europe and Japan had cut car production by a third. As armies of workers were laid off, hundreds of component manufacturers were forced into bankruptcy, factories closed, dole queues formed in once prosperous suburbs. For the first time in more than a century, demographers noticed a small but significant drift from town and city back to the countryside.

      In 1997 the last barrel of crude oil was pumped from an American well. The once huge reservoirs of petroleum which had fuelled the US economy throughout the twentieth century, and made it the greatest industrial power ever known, had at last run dry. From then on, America was forced to rely on an increasingly scarce supply of imported oil. But the planet’s main reserves, in the Middle East and the Soviet Union, were themselves almost exhausted.

      Every industrial nation in the world had now introduced strict fuel rationing, and government action at the highest levels was concentrated on the task of finding new energy sources. A dozen UN agencies initiated crash programmes to develop feasible systems of wave-generated power, plans were drawn up for tidal dams, windmills and solar generators of every conceivable kind. A belated attempt was made to revive the nuclear power industry, whose growth the anti-nuclear lobbies of a dozen countries had effectively suppressed in the 1980s.

      However, these alternative energy sources could only meet a tenth of the needs of the United States, Japan and Europe. The price of gasoline at the American filling station had already climbed from 75c a gallon in 1978 to $5 in 1985, and to $25 in 1990. After the introduction of rationing in 1993, the price of bootleg gasoline on the black market rose to $100 a gallon on the Atlantic coast of the United States, and to over $250 in California.

      The end came quickly. In 1999 General Motors declared itself bankrupt and went into liquidation. A few months later it was followed by Ford, Chrysler, Exxon, Mobil and Texaco. For the first time in over a hundred years no motorcars were manufactured in the United States. In his Millennial Address to Congress in the year 2000, President Brown recited a poignant Zen tantra and then made the momentous announcement that henceforth the operation of private gasoline-driven vehicles would be illegal. Despite this emergency decree, there was a widespread sense that once again the government of the United States had been overtaken by events. Traffic had long ceased to flow along the great turnpikes and interstate highways of America. Waist-high weeds flourished in the cracked concrete of the California freeways, millions of abandoned cars rusted on flattened tyres in the garages and parking lots of the nation.

      No one, however, could have anticipated the rapid collapse of this once powerful industrial nation. The shortage of gasoline had prepared the American public for the rationingof electric power that soon followed. People everywhere tolerated the frequent blackouts, the sudden dimming of their television screens, the failures of water supplies and food deliveries to their neighbourhoods, the long walks and cycle rides to school, office and supermarket.

      But as the traffic drew finally to a halt in the first months of the year 2000, as the silent streets were disturbed only by a few municipal buses and armour-plated vehicles carrying emergency supplies, the whole nation seemed to lose its vitality, its belief in itself and its future. The sight of millions of abandoned vehicles seemed a last judgment on the failure of a people’s will.

      Over the next ten years, life in the United States began to run down, with endless blackouts and rationing, electricity limited to an hour a day. Everywhere industries failed, production lines slowed to a halt. Cities emptied as people drifted back to the small towns, to the safety of rural communities far away from the violence and looting of the dying metropolis.

      However, with almost no sources of energy available, existence soon became untenable except at a primitive agricultural level. The freezing winters and airless summers of the American Midwest sapped the confidence of the struggling farm communities, their subsistence cropping already overburdened by refugees from the cities.

      Already the first Americans had reluctantly packed their bags and set sail across the Atlantic for Europe. Here, conservationist and socialist regimes with long experience of strong centralised government were able to maintain a low-level industrial life. The light bulbs might shine dimly, but at least there was work in the small farm cooperatives and state-run coal mines, in the nationalised engineering factories and food-processing plants, and above all in the vast bureaucracies that stretched СКАЧАТЬ