Problem is they might not have the chance, thats the rub. Natural gas goes up in price for 2 years straight at 40% a year(already there or close to it), then jumps some more after that. One good hard winter causing shortages and then the price spikes some more. Ok, so your in Kentucky, where it gets warm but not that warm. Now imagine Phoenix, where the "heat island" effect alone is now worth about 10 degrees these days in the summer putting it above 100F ALL day many days thru the summer.......can you live w/o air conditioning? Maybe if your young, but you wont like it. How bout South Florida? My Mom is already stuck there, or take about a 30% bath on her house she cant get rid of already due to the housing market dying in under 4 months. I know she couldnt live w/o it, but she couldnt afford paying $5-$700/month for it either, and it will get that high or higher unless an awful lot of demand goes away.

Then consider this country lives paycheck to paycheck on borrowed money, we dont have enough savings for a bailout plan, at least most dont. Sure, there is an enormous amount of waste and discretionary spending that can be wrung out of the system, still, that leaves the same problems in place. We've spent more than 100 years building a system that doesnt work without fairly cheap energy. Too many people moving and doing so alone and great distances. Our actual home arrangements may last awhile for those within a reasonable distance to work, but transportation will be the first issue added to increased costs for everything else. Without cheap transportation much of what we built doesnt work so well. Adding fuel to the problem is wringing out the excess means a serious downturn in our service economy because we let our base slip away to globalization, that isnt easily reversed.

An investment is only an investment if it returns money, if your upside down and cant hold on to your "investment", then you walk away from it, and under todays new BK laws, you may get stuck. The current inflation rate alone is wiping out or has wiped out most of the gains many have seen, even if they are too out of it to notice, that will get far worse.

Apocalyptic, ya maybe, but for some it will be a boom time, for others it will be ugly. For some its already ugly, almost a year later and the Katrina aftermath is still ever present for example. Depends on your situation and what your prepared to do, most I fear based on my observations wont fare to well in a crisis, and Uncle Sam cant be counted on to help, if anything the govt can be counted on to make things worse.

Yes, places that are 100% percent systhetic like Vegas, Phoenix, SoCal, etc etc that require massive amounts of water and electric just for basic needs will get pinched hard first. Those in more fortunate areas wont wanna sell either. Its a two pronged problem, your house becomes worthless and you cant sell it, but cant move w/o the cash from it, and if you could, finding a new place may be tough. Same with SUV's, they are about to become very very cheap and plentiful. Then because the economy will likely stall at  best and crash at worse, employment goes down the tubes too, what then? How many people do you know can go unemployed and for quite awhile, most cant.

Solutions, sure, lots of those. Most can be done with existing technology, ALL require the same sacrifice, culture change and a drop in living standrds, in a country that has been raised to believe that should never happen and cant happen. The mindset must be fixed first or none of this flies.

It all boils down to timeframe, is it spread out over a decade or more, or is it just a few years? If its soon, most people will be F'd for awhile, just the way it is.

Lou,

"Just once I want to hear Kunstler or one of the people pushing that puerile apocalypse porn provide a detailed analysis of how such a prediction will play out.  How, exactly, are people going to abandon Phoenix or the 'burbs?  Will they simply lock their houses and walk away from the biggest single investment they have?  Will they sell?"

There's a logical problem here: it's not Kunstler's job to explain how people are going to abandon the burbs -- it's YOUR job to explain how they will be able to continue surviving there if gas and oil go way up in price! The fact that all the options are painful or worse has no bearing at all on what will be.

"Given the advances coming very soon in EV's and solar power, the increasing use of ground-loop heating and cooling..."

Ok, let's just say --I don't agree -- but let's just say that takes care of cooling. It certainly doesn't take care of transporation or electricity (or water or food).

"And for all the people who work in an office complex or industrial park that's out in the 'burbs, how do they get there if they can't afford the transportation to travel to and from their prior residences?" Indeed! It seems to me you arguing for Kunstler here, not against him.

Is it that you say gas and oil aren't going to go up quite a bit, and then continue? It is true that there is a large amount of energy waste in our country, some of it not structural -- curable with e.g. better gas mileage, using fans instead of A/C, fluorescent bulbs, etc. BUT, prices won't stop there. What happens then? Then we will have to address structural issues, some of the issues Kunstler addresses. Eventually the car has to go, the McMansions have to go, and the burbs as they exist now have to go. It doesn't matter if it's inconvenient or disastrous even -- if prices go up high enough, then what will be will be.

If you dispute that, then it seems to me the onus is on you. Lay out a scenario in which our current way of life can be continued.

BTW, lots of people got Y2K all wrong, not just Kunstler. Even some big names in computing who should have known better.

[Will they simply lock their houses and walk away from the biggest single investment they have?  Will they sell?  If so, to whom and at what price?]

A couple of points here.  First, during the Depression, people did just walk away; they had no choice.  My folks lost their house but the banks had so many, they just let people stay in them.  Farmers walked away from farms that had been in the family for generations.  So just because we don't like the result doesn't mean the result won't happen.  Second, yes, a house is people's largest investment, or at least largest asset.  But they rarely own it: the bank owns it.  As interest rates go up forcing the adjustment of ARMs, as the cost of driving to work, the cost of food, the cost of everything we buy goes up because of increased energy costs, people can get to a point they cannot afford the mortgage payments.  They have no choice but to walk.

Is your position that these apocalyptic views can't or won't happen because they seem too bad a result?  If that's the case, none of this peak oil stuff can happen because the result is too bad.  So let's just continue along with mainstream America and deny it and be happy because as long as we deny it, it can't happen.  I like to think the apocalyptic version won't happen either, but I can certainly envision a lot of scenarios in which that is the inevitable result.  If peak oil hits in the next few years, what will be the impact on our economy?  If we slide into recession or depression, from where do we get the massive capital necessary to implement all these necessary alternatives to overcome peak oil on the scale necessary?  From our bankrupt government?  Borrow it from the people who can barely (or can't) afford food for their kids and the higher costs of their mortgage?

There may be no point in Kustler obsessing on the collapse of Phoenix and the southwest.  At the same time, if you had your kids there and that collapse were a reasonable possibility, would you rather be made aware in time to protect your family?  Kunstler does provide a service because he is one of the few really giving a view over the edge.  If you think the edge doesn't exist (and this isn't to say going over is inevitable), you have far more faith in human nature than I.  

Y2K could indeed have been serious if it weren't for the massive preparation program put into place. Kunstler was wrong because he thought nobody would do anything about it, not because the problem didn't exist.

Here's a problem, though, Lou. Yeah, Kunstler overstates his case and overly neglects adaptation and change. He's selling books after all. But have you ever been to Phoenix?

Believe it or not, Phoenix has an old downtown. But it's very tiny, the size of a city of oh, maybe 15000. That's because before airconditioning, hardly anyone in his or her right mind wanted to live there. Before heating and cooling, you could always throw on more clothing in a cool climate, however lice-ridden that clothing might have been. But there was never anything you could do about 110 degree heat, except die of heatstroke if you weren't young and strapping anymore. Most of the U.S. population, including the population of Phoenix, is not young and strapping anymore. Even much of the young population is not particularly strapping.

You don't need a Kunstler-style collapse to make Phoenix a truly dangerous location for most people. All you need is an electricity supply that's a bit unreliable. And it's easy to make the electricity supply a bit unreliable. Simply create a political Global Warming panic, and have our corrupt, incompetent politicians ride their hobby horses into the fray. Voila.

The same is true - to a lesser degree - for virtually all of our southern cities. Very few people lived there before airconditioning, relative to cities elsewhere. From June through September everything not cooled unremittingly drips humidity and reeks of mildew.

N.B. a similar problem may arise with cities that are too densely populated, in any area, hot or cold. After our politicians, egged on by GW doomers who are selling books too - run for the hills, we think the oceans might possibly be deeper 1000 years from now - have messed up the electricity supply, life is not going to be any fun for people who have to decide between walking up 20 floors, or else risking being stuck all day in a dangerously hot airless elevator.

LouCrinzon and ThatsItImOut - your objections to Kunstler's scenarios seem to be due to; 1) your distaste for the idea (this is an emotional and irrational response and not worth further discussion), and 2) your Ignorance of the Possible Mechanisms of by which the burbs and cities could decay during an indefinate energy crisis.

The problem is you both seem to focus only on your own life experience in Modern, Fully Energized First World Cities.  So no wonder it's so difficult to imagine the collapse of a major urban center.

But consider looking to history for examples - both modern and ancient times - when resources could no longer support cities or countries...  

Or you could watch in Real-Time how First- and Second-World Cities are currently experiencing urban/economic decay (eg. India, Pakistan, S. Africa {www.allafrica.com]).  You can See the effects of the Power Shortages and interuptions on sewer and water services, the lack of reliable employment due to unpredictable power outages on industry, decling property values, and heavy tax burdens for those who try to stick it out... there are many, many symptoms and issues far beyond simple AC for the hot summer.  People may not want to leave their homes but might be Forced too - either because they lost their homes for foreclosure or because their city is becoming virtually unlivable.  

Shaw, don't you think demand destruction will hit a lot of things before A/C?

Could the problem with all those new houses in Arizona be that they were designed for an Ohio climate. For centuries if not longer the main building material in Arizona was adobe not plywood and vinyl. Thick adobe walls create a thermal link with the lower temperature ground 10 feet down which kept interior temps comfy without modern A/C. I see no reason why a thick adobe shell could not be built around modern houses as an energy conservation measure.  The materials are dirt cheap and require little skill to build. Just wait until winter to avoid heat stroke during construction.

Yeah, I generally agree.

"substitute nuclear for wind as the other source to gain market share in the intermediate and long term."

Yeah, I'm thinking of the short term: the next 10 years.  At the end of that time there's a good chance wind will be bumping up against the roughly 15% market share limit caused by intermittency.  

At about 10 years new nuclear, and solar, will likely become major players.  Storage from plug-in hybrids, smart meters and demand management will start to provide more flexibility for wind, nuclear and solar, probably raising the market share limits for all three.