[editor's note, by Stuart Staniford] This is a guest post from Southsider1 who is a recovering historian. He made some comments to me once about the Black Death as an analogy for peak oil. I don't personally think peak oil is likely to be nearly as bad as the Black Death, but I thought his general insights on what happened then were very interesting.

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I'm wary of the more extreme doom-and-gloom predictions about life on the downward side of the peak. When folks like Jan Lundberg write,

It is becoming clear to more and more energy analysts that the United States of America as we know it will not endure for long.

I say, how does he know, and how can anyone know in what way a nation or a civilization will respond to a catastrophe?