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

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.

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

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.

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

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

Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.