James Howard Kunstler takes a sober, pessimistic look at what happens when cheap oil goes away — in Rolling Stone, of all places.
America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
Serious, scary, and alarmist. Whether justifiably so or not, I can’t tell, but his arguments about oil’s centrality to our economy are hard to refute. If oil production really does decline, and oil prices spike up permanently, he’s no doubt right that it will cause a huge number of problems.
(I recently posted about an interview with Kunstler that is even more direct than the Rolling Stone article.)
Also, Kunstler has a searing, angry weblog called Clusterfuck Nation. Great reading!
