We're not going to reform our moronic land-use laws, which mandate suburban sprawl one way or another. They're simply going to be ignored when it becomes self-evident that we cannot build stuff that way anymore.

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.

Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.

We could do some household and neighborhood or town wind energy. But even this will run up eventually against the problem of needing an underlying fossil fuel economy to fabricate the hardware. Same with photovoltaic (solar) energy. We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us.

I do not believe we will get to Ray Kurzweil's proposed "singularity" in which human minds meld with machines to produce, in effect, synthetic human evolution. Our basic problems with maintaining the electric grid argue against that fantasy.

When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.

Societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.