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My copy is held up at Amazon waiting for another book I ordered. I'm looking forward to it.
I would just point out that if major cities were destroyed by war, it wouldn't be such a stretch to think that oil would not be as widely available as it is today. Wars require a great deal of fossil fuel and fuel supply lines are always among the first targets. JHK is simply putting together the ideas that we are already fighting wars over oil, if oil becomes less available we are likely to fight even more over it, and after such a war access won't be as great for the winners as it was when things were peaceful and plentiful. Presumably the US didn't win the war in the novel, so oil is even less available for the losing countries like the US.
John Michael Greer discusses linear thinking in his essay today. The idea that we'll progress smoothly from peak production to 10-15 years after peak is a form of linear thinking. It's much more likely that things will be fairly chaotic, and war is certainly a possibility. Given that we're already securing democracy in Iraq, it's a little hard to imagine there won't be more military adventures.
I tend to agree with JMG's catabolic collapse concept too. It matches what I see of reality, where I often notice that events seem to move both very rapidly and excruciatingly slow. So it makes sense that there will be step changes and times of relative calm. Some of those steps might be pretty big though.
My biggest reservation with the idea of catabolic collapse is that the use of fossil fuels has allowed us build up a much bigger population very rapidly, and that may mean the downside will also be more extreme. Especially when combined with the confluence of issues at hand.
Oh, and I would have died at 2wks of age, my teeth would be crooked (that is if I lived, which I wouldn't have), and my eyesight might have been a problem. I often wonder about eyesight - would it have been better without all the close up work? Is people's vision worse now than it was a couple of hundred years ago, or did they just deal with it? If I were an optometrist, I would learn how to grind lenses.
Conventional wars may require lots of oil, but nuclear war just requires someone to push the big red button. Perhaps in the oil wars of the future, if there is a serious shortage of oil for the military it would be tempting to use nukes to soften the opposition thus saving a lot of the oil used for conventional warfare.