Clusterfuck Nation

We’ve mentioned (and interviewed and quoted and reviewed) writer James Howard Kunstler a number of times over the years. He’s written The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, among others. His blog is incredibly interesting, cantankerous and profane all-around, but he really connects the dots between oil prices and floods, war and housing prices, and what it means for us. It can be scary in a shaken-to-the-core, “where will we get food?” way. But reading Kunstler (and the people who argue with him) is a good—and quick—intro to the question that we can’t afford to ignore: How are we going to live in a world without cheap energy?