Part 2 in the “Impending Economic Disaster” Series
DAILY HEIGHTS confuses a lot of people. Why the obsession with Home Heating Oil? Is it a hip and ironic club, or a workaday storefront business trafficking in fossil fuel-related products? And what’s the point of a website that forces focus on one tiny neighborhood? Isn’t the Web all about global communities that transcend those pesky geographical barriers?
To introduce more confusion (and fear) on the issues of fossil fuel and the new localism, we now present excerpts from 
[ROAD WARRIORS: Marauding thugs pursue an oil tanker in the outback. Could we too, one day, be forced to live like Australians?]
KUNSTLER in ROLLING STONE: “…America is still sleepwalking into the future … we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era … The most knowledgeable experts … now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production. … In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that and states plainly that ‘the world has never faced a problem like this’ …”
“The circumstances … will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it … Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are … The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish.“
“Food production is going to be an enormous problem … The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not “services” like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists … We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class … composed largely of … economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream …”
“New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities’ problems.”
“We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage … If there is any positive side … it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom.”
Have a nice day.
