All of the easy oil is gone and what's left is requiring more energy and money and this has an effect on everything. Our problem is that we've created an infrastructure that's so dependent on oil. As oil becomes more expensive we're going to be locked into the transportation modes that our economy depends on. So we really need to start building an alternative economy before we get caught in a trap of our own making.

The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.

The real problem is that we use too much oil. It's that simple and that difficult. If we truly want to reduce our vulnerability to high prices, the best way to do so is to reduce consumption.

Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.

We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice - not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives - will have profound ethical and political ramifications.

It is possible to point to hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of imaginative, courageous programs to reduce, recycle, and reuse - yet the overall trajectory of industrial civilization remains relatively unchanged.

As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda--the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government--in their analysis of its authoritarian social program. Indeed, according to Bertram Gross in his startlingly prescient Friendly Fascism (1980), it is possible to achieve fascist goals within an ostensibly democratic society.