This poor nation is faced with the tasks of completely retooling its economy in a way that it can’t bear to imagine, and of also reforming its grotesque social behavior. One might follow the other in a better world, but our prospects for the moment are not so bright. My own camp is inclined to expect an anguished collapse rather than any deliberate reformation. We’ve set ourselves up for it.

The future we don’t want to think about is an economy focused on food production at the local scale, along with the activities that support it and add value to its products, and the labor required to do all that. There’s a fair chance that we will fail altogether to ever get it running. In any case, the officially-sanctioned future that so many people are expecting—the digital wonderland economy—will not survive the energy and capital scarcities ahead.

James Howard Kunstler, “Mr. Bad Example”