The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.

Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.

Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.

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.

For instance, the most common type of "affordable housing" in the world comes in the form of apartments over stores.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

Once energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence.