A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

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

The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease.

The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.

We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.

People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.

My own opinion is that the suburban project is over. We are done. We don't know it yet. For about five years or so the people who deliver all that crap - developers, realtors, various money people - have kicked back waiting for the system to get going again, to resume all their accustomed behavior. They wait in vain. They just haven't figured out that we face a new disposition of things.