WORLD NEWS TRUST: Coup de Grace (James Kunstler)

(World News Trust) -- As I write at 6:30 Eastern Daylight Time, Hurricane Gustave grinds out of the Gulf of Mexico to make landfall on the Louisiana Coast at Port Fourchon, the marshalling yard for the oil and gas industry -- where the oil companies move people and equipment to the rig zone offshore. The storm spent the wee hours of the morning chewing through a wad of offshore drilling platforms and, perhaps more importantly, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (or LOOP), where all the oil supertanker ships from Middle East come to offload their cargos. It will probably be days before we know what was chewed up out there -- not to mention the spaghetti-like network of pipelines that run all over the shallow bottom to carry the oil and gas from the platforms to the refineries just up the Mississippi corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

So, at this hour nobody knows yet what the outcome will be, either for the city of New Orleans and its suburbs, or for the oil and gas industry. My guess is that enough oil and gas will come off-line, be shut-in, or get disrupted to severely affect the normal operations of America for a couple of weeks. At the least, our just-in-time gasoline and diesel supply system will take a forced time-out. Those refineries on-shore are in the path to get hit. If they are damaged then we'll probably see shortages of motor fuels all over the eastern United States.

If we see a shortage of motor fuels, we may also get a disruption of trucking for the just-in-time food delivery system that keeps the supermarkets stocked. So, there is a possibility that Americans will experience both fuel and food shortages this back-to-school week -- and in some places it may be be the not-back-to-school week if there is any trouble getting fuel for the yellow bus fleets. There has also been chatter about possible far-reaching damage to the old-and-fragile electric grid if this storm trips just the right switches, but that's in the category of idle talk for now.

All the above is unknown so far, and I won't even venture to guess what may happen in the city of New Orleans itself -- except that the morale of its citizens must be badly strained as three years of re-building gets undone and the long-term future becomes an even more dubious proposition.

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