I would have honestly thought that there would a certain number of non-drivers who are proud of that fact, as in Germany. But then, the level of awareness of vegetarian eating, as taken for granted in Britain (like the labelling, or the number of good places to eat where meatless menu items are a given) is pretty much unknown in Germany. It was always a problem finding somewhere good to eat with English speakers who were vegetarians, especially British women, since in Germany, about the only acceptable places to eat were Indian or Greek.

And this is one of the points why both sides of the broader peak oil debate seem so extreme through an American lens.

I tend to be in the pessimistic camp for many factually based reasons, but it is also my general outlook. But part of my pessimism may be because I am an American living in Germany, and can see just how much America lacks in comparison, in part because so much of that was bulldozered away throughout my life.

America will have to undergo wrenching changes that it has spent my entire life avoiding, except for a brief phase which most Americans seem to consider a low point of their history, and quite honestly, I think America will break in the process.

But that is not the same as saying the people living there will not find good ways to live, or be unable to meet different challenges. It is just that those people will be unlikely to consider themselves Americans after they have mastered those challenges. For example, a future death of what is now considered the 'American Dream' of a large car in the suburbs while getting rich and ignoring everything in the pursuit of the happiness of personal consumption will sadly take a lot of current American values with it, possibly to the point that only a small number of people will want to be called 'American' in a generation. (I am being gentle here - there is a concrete parallel to point to, after all, of a society that sacrificed everything in attempting to achieve its vision, which was seen as horrendous by most other people, though obviously, the comparison is not possible to draw correctly, and is based on a very dark view of wars fought defending dreams, using lies and deceit and the common human desire to enjoy a good life, whatever the ignored cost for others.)

I am a big fan of complexity theory (the concept of local maxima) and of evolutionary dynamics as applied to organisations.

You hinted at it in your post (more than hinted, you described it without using the word): ie that dominant forms (organisms, organisations, societies, civilisations) optimise around their local environmental conditions (the Mayans built elaborate systems to supply water, for example).

If and when those conditions change (soil salination, water depletion, energy depletion) then successful organisations will change and adapt, and unsuccessful ones die.

I keep thinking of the end of medieval civilisation.  Many of the greatest Gothic Cathedrals, among the most marvellous buildings ever built by human beings, were started in the late 1200s or early 1300s.

But by 1350 construction had stopped on many, never to be completed, or to be completed in radically changed form decades later.

Medieval civilisation was swept over by a wave of plagues, wars, starvation, soil exhaustion, trade disruption.  In part, all of this may have been due to the 'little Ice Age' although that is hotly debated.

After the Black Death, which first reached Europe in 1346, but struck again and again, the peasants were in a much stronger position to negotiate on wages-- as much as half the medieval population of Europe was dead.  This led to enormous social upheaval and turmoil (see 'The Peasants Revolt' in England, 1380s).

Contemporaries at the time thought the end of the world had come and the Second Coming was upon them.  The Turks conquered their way to Vienna, cleaving off the Balkans for another 500 years.  The Polish empire, stretching to the Black Sea, went into a sunset from which it never recovered.

Eventually, in the early 1400s, the Renaissance broke out in Italy, and spread over time to places as far flung as England and Poland, over the next 100 years or so.  The final nail in the coffin was the explosion of the Protestant Reformation: parallel religious uprisings or heresies in medieval times were decisively defeated, but not this time.

But medieval society was dead, and gone. It had adapted, and was still recognisably Christian, but it was no longer feudal.  Kingdoms had gone: Gascony was no longer a province of the English King.  Italy was a dependency of Spain, etc.

Something similar may be happening to our civilisation.  The test in the next 50 years will be to evolve from a carbon-fuelled civilisation, to something else.  I suspect the else is some amalgam of low or zero carbon technologies: nuclear, wind, solar.

But from the top of our little peak now, virtually any way we choose to go involves going downhill for a while and our political system is not equipped to deal with that.

that is the challenge we face.

I don't think the USA or any other country is uniquely well or badly positioned to deal with this.  Europe burns less energy, but it has less energy to burn (and declining demographics).  The US issues are well known.