As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disneyworld is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become--for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.

The increment of new development will be the single building lot, if we are lucky, and most of the codes that are now enforced will be ignored because the redundancies they mandate will not be affordable.

I believe we are deluded about alternative energy. The key is, whatever we do, we're going to have to do on a very modest scale. It's all about scale. We're not going to build giant wind farms with Godzilla-sized turbines all over the place. That's a fantasy.

The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.

What we face is a comprehensive contraction of our activities, due to declining fossil fuel resources and other growing scarcities. Our failure is the failure to manage contraction. It requires a thoroughgoing reorganization of daily life. No political faction currently operating in the USA gets this. Hence, it is liable to be settled by a contest for dwindling resources and there are many ways in which this won't be pretty.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies.