Don't you wonder why practically every house built in America after World War Two is a design abortion? The answer is actually simple but a little abstruse: ugliness is entropy made visible. When you live in a high entropy society, as we do, the entropy manifests in many ways...

Until yesterday I had never heard of James Kunstler. This I know for a fact. And yet, reading an excerpt from his latest book in “Rolling Stone”, I got the feeling that I knew him of old, that he and I had a history of sorts, twice removed. It was quite uncanny really, as though some bizarre matter-transmitter tragedy had created a new author by fusing the molecules of Jeremy Rifkin with those of Paul Ehrlich, generating a monstrous, yet all too familiar hybrid. Forget about the Brundlefly, we’ve got the Kunstleria Riflichus. Or would that be the Rifkinia Kunstlich?

It saddens me that I actually agree with the man, to a point. America is not as beautiful as I might wish it to be. Thankfully however, our responses to that simple fact differ crucially. Mine is to shrug and avert my eyes. Within fairly broad limits, it’s none of my business how other folks choose to live. His is to write book after book detailing our esthetic crimes, all the while hoping that some horrific (though well deserved) social or environmental calamity will steer us back toward craftsman style bungalows.

Include me out. Arch social critic James “Hurricane” Wolcott may think the man is insightful, but from where I’m standing, he’s just another doom-monger.

What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

Here’s a little bit of recycled Ehrlich. Compare and contrast.

What are the prospects for the future? We are facing within the next three decades, the disintegration of an unstable world of nation-states infected with growthmania....This is what underlies the sudden, seemingly mysterious shortages and the widespread inflation that have plagued the world.

Here's Mr. Kunstler again.

It has been very hard for Americans…to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society…

Mr. Kunstler, on the other hand, has it all figured out.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life…

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument…

That's because we’re idiots. But luckily, there are really smart guys like James Kunstler to explain it all to us.

The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline.

Man, that is lucid.

It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left…It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us…

Oh. Well then we’re going to have to spend more for a full tank, right? Wrong. It's much worse than that.

The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however…the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.

Our doom, long foretold, is now upon us.

It will change everything about how we live.

Seems like it always does.

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

Permanent, huh? So, we won’t be able to invent our way out of it this time. Oh no, THIS time escape is impossible.

We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

Maybe the three of them roomed together at college.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome…

“No combination.” All he’s trying to say here is that we’re doomed, no matter what shabby little technological fix is proposed. We’ve definitely got no hope unless we follow the Prescriptions of the Prophet. It’s just that simple. Why don’t you people ever listen? We need comprehensive social change!

The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas.

Actually, Rifkin was bullish on hydrogen just a couple of years ago. Does this make him guilty of perpetrating a “cruel hoax”? Nah. Kunstler is probably referring to Bush’s state of the union address…

The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

God knows we wouldn’t want to emulate French power generation. We’re probably not smart enough. However, alternative-energy wonk Amory Lovins says he is wrong about the hydrogen transport (interesting rebuttal here). And he has his own Institute. So there.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy…

Didn’t I read this back in 1980? Yeah, more than once. I think Rifkin said it, then changed his mind.

Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas "inputs"…

Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks…You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means…

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war…

If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia -- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it…

…the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. 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…

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.

There is no doubt that we are in for a massive institutional realignment….But before we can even begin to broadly outline the nature of agriculture, industry, and commerce in a low-entropy society, we must turn our attention to first principles….the Big Questions of the past are destined to re-emerge in the low-entropy world that awaits us…

And, a little Kunstler from 2005…

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…will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away…

As industrial agriculture fails…we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture…This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work…Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades.

And a little Rifkin…

Agriculture, which will no longer be able to continue its mechanized farming techniques, will also become far more labor intensive….

We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers…These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security…

In a low-entropy culture the individual is expected to live a much more frugal or Spartan life-style….In the new age, the less production and consumption necessary to maintain a healthy, decent life, the better….

Aaand, back to the future…

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy…

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower…

Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale…

…society is deluged by a plethora of material effluence—microwave ovens, hair dryers, automobiles that poison the air, and prescription drugs that poison the body….

That was Rifkin again, presaging the future. Here’s Kunstler, today.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes…

Along with the scaling down of cities, transportation systems are also going to be vastly reoriented in the years to come. The high cost of energy is going to force a fundamental shift in the pattern of travel away from automobiles and trucks and toward greater mass transit and long-distance rail use…

…if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish…

Heavy industry...may undergo very little further increase. Some types of manufacturing indeed may even collapse abruptly, depending on the availability of raw materials and energy and on the course of events. The most unnecessary, wasteful, and antisocial activities-such as the packaging and bottling industries, some kinds of weapons, aircraft, cheap plastic products, etc.-are likely to be eliminated either in a conventional depression or the real energy crunch.

Four years later, Jeremy Rifkin added his two cents.

Many industries will not be able to withstand the transition to a low energy flow. Unable to adapt to the new economic environment, the automotive, aerospace, petrochemical, and other industries will slide into extinction.

“This has all happened before. This will all happen again.”

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands…Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities…New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties…They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia…

The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race…If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors…

Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

I’m sorry I can’t take all this gloom and doom seriously. But then, I’ve seen it before. And thinking about it, I see that there’s more doom than gloom, if you take my meaning. Mister K. actually seems pretty chipper about the situation, considering. You might think he’s, you know, looking forward to it. Turns out he has been, for quite some time. Get a load of this…

Writing this in April of ‘99, I believe that we are in for a serious event. Systems will fail, crash, seize up, cease to function. Not all systems, maybe only a fraction, but enough, and enough interdependent systems to affect many other systems. Y2K is real. Y2K is going to rock our world.

Now we’re talking, baby. Y2K. The end is nigh.

People will consequently suffer. I don’t know how much. Some people may lose their lives - but more likely at the hands of a disabled medical establishment than because of civil disorder, loss of power, starvation, bad water, or other projected horrors (though these, too, are possible). Some will suffer the loss of fortunes, some of any income whatsoever, and many of something in between…

We have been barraged with pieces of falling sky that never hit. Mischievous boys have talked up pack after pack of wolves that never bit. Lake Erie didn’t die. The whales were saved. Y2K did nothing to anyone. A body could be forgiven for tiring of this incessant crisis mongering.

Someday we’ll wish we had listened better. I think of it as the Jor-El syndrome. If the Kyptonian ruling council had listened to Jor-El, the entire planet could have been saved from the impending cataclysm. They were warned. But they didn’t listen, did they? Perhaps they too had been inundated with false alarms that didn’t pan out. Perhaps one partisan lobbyist too many had come through their doors that week. Boom. Planet gone.

So is this Kunstler fellow another Jor-El (Cassandra, if you prefer), or is he just a noisy crank? Well, we already know he’s a crank, so the categories aren’t mutually exclusive. But is he correct? Perhaps, but only in part. His diagnosis may be correct. His prognosis is almost certainly wrong, and I would strenuously advise against swallowing his prescribed remedies.

The foregoing may seem to be little more than unsupported generality. I will be more specific below. I won't knock myself out trying to empirically demonstrate the "truth" of these assertions. It seems to me that the Y2K problem is so broad, systemic, and unprecedented that imagining its repercussions calls for something beside conventional thinking…

Since the effects of Y2K are apt to follow fractal pathways of self-organization - with strange, surprising twists - understanding them may be better served by a mind in free flight. These scenarios therefore should be taken for what they are: an exercise in human imagining.

I assume that anyone reading this already knows enough about underlying problem. I am more interested in the social, economic, cultural, and political ramifications. Personally, I have moved from an emotional state of surprise, to alarm, to despair, and now to hopeful anticipation of Y2K in the months since I first heard my wake-up call.

It was a lovely July day, 1998. I was driving to Schroon Lake on the Adirondack Northway (I-87) when Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah) came on a noontime NPR broadcast and told the audience that Y2K was a global problem that had to be taken very very seriously. He explained why. It was all new to me…

I was stunned and fascinated by the implications. In the months that followed, I read whatever I could find about Y2K. Coverage in the regular media turned out to be rather sparse and shallow…The poor quality of their coverage may be more a reflection of the public’s ridiculously short attention span these days…

Two of my books, The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere, are about the mess we’ve made of the American landscape and the degradation of our towns and cities. Even before I ever heard of Y2K, I concluded that our practices and habits in placemaking the past half century have resulted in a human habitat that is ecologically catastrophic, economically insane, socially toxic, spiritually degrading, and fundamentally unsustainable.

To plagiarize myself: we have built a land of scary places and become a nation of scary people.

For five years, I had been flying around the country telling college lecture audiences and conference-goers that our fucked up everyday environment…was liable to put us out of business as a civilization. I asserted that the culture growing in this foul medium had gotten so bloated and diseased that it would succumb sooner rather than later to its own idiot inertia.

…at the present time no single leader or ideology on this planet can effectively address the universal crisis at hand, because all are committed to the existing world view, one that is diseased and dying and is contaminating everything it gave birth to.

That last was Jeremy Rifkin again. If I hadn’t told you, would you have guessed? Back to Kunstler.

I still believe that today. It is both a conviction and a wish, because to go on in our current mode would be culturally suicidal.

During this period I became active in the Congress for the New Urbanism…While I wholeheartedly support its goals, I have doubted that this reform process would occur without a painful and disorderly period of transition. Our investment in the status quo is too enormous.

The strip mall developers, the highway builders, the trucking interests, the realtors, the auto-makers, the jet-ski manufacturers, the hamburger franchisers, the theme park owners - all those contributing to the cancerous process that politicians call "growth" - will not quit what they’re doing, and find something less destructive to do, without a crisis in the cultural medium that supports their activities…

…I now see Y2K as the mechanism that will force events to a tipping point much more quickly and surely. Over the next year, many elements of "normal" American life are going to hit a wall of dysfunction…There will be a lot of economic losers, including people who thought they had it made…It’s going to be a hairy time. Y2K is a bitch-slap upside the head of American culture. With a two-by-four.

Y2K will converge with and amplify other forces already in motion around the world…I believe it will deeply affect the economies-of-scale of virtually all activities in the United States, essentially requiring us to downsize and localize everything from government to retail merchandising to farming.

If you can’t downsize and localize today, hold on. Stand fast. A new crisis should be along any time now.

If nothing else, I expect Y2K to destabilize world petroleum markets. These disruptions will be at least as bad as those produced by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo (so-called). The aftershocks of that event thundered through the American economy for the rest of the decade…

At every stage of the supply line, oil is vulnerable to disruption. The supply infrastructure of the oil industry is among the most computer and embedded chip dependent of all industries…Without oil, there are no other industries, in the modern sense of the word. If somewhere between five and 30 percent of our imported oil fails to get here, I think you can be sure that we are in for an economic kick in the ass far more severe than the 1973 OPEC embargo.

Such an oil shortfall would put at hazard such "normal" American activities as national chain retail and industrialized agriculture. I doubt that the WalMarts and K-Marts of the land will survive Y2K…They will not be able to adapt to even modest changes, and especially fluctuations, in their business equation.

…we are going to need local agriculture again, practiced on a smaller and more organic scale. We are going to regret turning some of our best farmland proximate to towns and cities into shopping malls and suburban housing tracts.

The more intractably car-dependent a place is, the more people will suffer in it. In an oil crunch as bad or worse than 1973, places like Long Island, Northern New Jersey, the San Fernando Valley, Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, Las Vegas…are apt to become uninhabitable…I believe that we will see astonishing losses in the value of suburban real estate of all types…The sheer equity losses emanating out of Y2K will make the Savings and Loan disaster look like a small-time re-po job.

We have been living in a nation where local economies and local cultures have been practically exterminated by large scale national corporate enterprise…The small farm was put out of business. Local commerce was effectively exterminated…Local manufacturing was superseded first by industrial giantism and centralization, and then shifted altogether out of the country to places where foreign peasants worked for peanuts…American communities imploded. With no merchant class, many small towns across America lost the caretakers of their local civic institutions. With damaged community institutions, and no useful honorable work, social norms disintegrated and, even in the lily-white small town backwaters, we got an underclass culture of criminality, teen parenthood, domestic violence, illiteracy.

Each day we awake to a world that appears more confused and disordered than the one we left the night before. Nothing seems to work anymore…Our leaders are forever lamenting and apologizing…The powers that be continue to address the problems at hand with solutions that create even greater problems than the ones they were meant to solve...

That was Rifkin again.

The aftermath of Y2K will require us to do things differently. We are going to have to live more locally, and more self-dependently. All our activities will have to be conducted on a finer scale…There will be less room in our lives for junk of all kinds…We are going to have to re-invent smaller-scaled farms (with value-adding activities), and we’re going to have to localize, or at least regionalize, commerce.

Surely a sizable fraction of the American people are going to be very pissed off by the need to change. They will view these events as a swindle cooked up by imagined "enemies" and they will look for scapegoats. As a nominal Jew, the prospect of this naturally makes me nervous, but not enough to deny the possibility of it happening.

Y2K will not "strike" at the midnight hour on 1/1/00. It will unfold fractally as a series of events over the next several years, with accelerating disruptions across the remainder of 1999, a "spike" of failures around New Year 2000, and a ripple of consequences accumulating, amplifying, and reverberating for months and even years afterward. I expect problems with business and government to be evident by the middle of 1999. A lot of failures will not be announced to the public until well after the fact…

Why start hedging now? I say go for broke. And don't say fractally.

I believe the aggregate economic effect of these failures will be a worldwide deflationary depression. I will not be surprised if it is as bad in terms of unemployment and hardship as the 1930s. I expect that it will be attended by international political and military mischief…in such a climate there are good reasons to anticipate domestic political trouble, too - America may turn to some charismatic political maniac…

If we are fortunate and intelligent, Y2K will prompt us to reduce the scale of our cities, reduce the role of the private automobile in our lives generally, and humanize our surroundings with purposeful design and deliberate attempts to create beauty. This is perhaps wishful and idealistic, but isn’t in the nature of human aspiration to hope for better things [like a global depression] and undertake to make them happen? Besides, what is the alternative? Obviously, I believe that a continuation of the status quo will not be possible under any circumstances…

The most deeply humanistic of Y2K writers, Wheatley and Charmichael, have the right idea, I think, when they say we should regard Y2K as a "teacher," that we should learn from this set of potential tribulations, and use the harsh lessons it offers as an opportunity to make a better world, starting with our own communities

History is merciless. History is not shedding any tears for the Pharoanic Egyptians, for the Hittites, the Minoans, the Romans, the Maya, the Soviet Leninists, or any other culture that has poured itself down a rathole. History is merciless, but the human race is resilient. Personally, I’m confident that life will go on, that civilization will pick itself up, slog forward, and eventually advance one way or another. Cycles are endemic to the human condition. We may cycle into a period of cultural darkness as a result of Y2K. If that is our destiny, tough noogies for us. We should have known better. We had some good things going for us: democracy, the movies, space travel, indoor plumbing, painless dentistry, jazz, great restaurants, a beautiful country. . . . We became a fat, complacent, and slovenly culture. I hope that our grandchildren do better.

Gird your loins and God bless us all.