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

It is true that we need a consensus to go forward with restoring passenger rail in America, and often a consensus is formed by political action, via government. That is all true. But we have no such consensus, and no one in government or politics these days has the will or the force of personality or perhaps even the understanding of the situation to get on with job of forming a consensus supporting rail.

Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.)

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

Societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.

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.

We have to grow our food differently because industrial farming will soon end. That means growing more food locally on smaller farms with more human attention.