>Kunstler is so certain that we've entered, as Susan Sontag put it
>(describing alarmism about AIDS) "apocalypse from now on" that he's
>completely blind to the possibility of new forms of civilization which
>aren't built upon his idyllic New England village. He's also certain
>that the disappearance of oil will mean the complete disappearance of
>advanced technology even though it's likely that people surrounded by
>tools and machinery will create new things instead of merely re-doing
>what their great-great grandparents achieved.
Why is he so sure that the disappearance of cheap energy will destroy civilisation? That is to say, what is the fatal flaw in (nominally) somewhat more expensive energy, like solar, geo-thermal, wind, etc? I've never understood this alarmism myself. Actually these other forms of energy aren't really more expensive at all, when you take into account the environmental costs.
But putting that aside, oil is only one form of fossil energy. There's no danger of us running out of coal for a very long time, at least not before we bump up the CO2 level in the atmosphere to a level where the environment becomes uninhabitable for Homo Sapiens. So in practical terms we can have cheap energy as long as the human species survives as a species. If we don't mind that being a relatively short period.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell tas