I’m a huge fan of James Kunstler’s blog, Clusterfuck Nation but hadn’t read this excerpt from his book, The Long Emergency, about life after peak oil and how that will fundamentally change how Americans live:
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away.
Summary: Our economy depends on cheap oil. Which is going away. Alternative energy can’t deliver. The centrality of the car will disappear. Suburbs will starve. Industrial agriculture will collapse. Cities without food supplies will whither.
Ah, happy thoughts. Makes me want to go read My Pet Goat.
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