We might hope that the law as a profession does not vanish, because justice may vanish with it - but we could probably do with far fewer lawyers. Since I think agriculture will come back closer to the center of life, I think there will be many vocational opportunities there - especially with the so-called 'value-added' activities associated with food production. That's a windy way to say more local wine and cheese-makers - and probably fewer giant factories producing cheez doodles and Pepsi Cola.

The skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't work well in an energy-starved economy.

Peak oil is already upon us. It is destroying our banking system, that is, our system for marshalling capital, and that is about to put us out of business-as-usual. So, we have to carry on with business-not-so-usual. This could mean anything from your children finding careers in farming (rather than show biz or plastic surgery) to reorganizing households differently to traveling from New York to Boston by boat.

We don't need gold plated highways. We don't need zoning commissions which penalize offices at home and promote car commutes.

Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

I was not a hard-liner against nuclear, because I viewed that as perhaps the only way we might keep the lights on another 25 years. But lately I am on board with Nicole Foss's argument that we will not have the capital or even the social cohesion to build anymore nuke plants.

I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.