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.

I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.

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

We will have to make new arrangements, or revive bygone ones. We may, for another example, see the return of the boarding house.

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

The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century.

I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.