Is the long emergency beginning?

I read James Kunstler's The Long Emergency in 2005, and I let several smart people I know borrow my copy. One of them commented afterwards: "The problem I have is that I can't come up with many good arguments to counter Kunstler's predictions."

This was the book that introduced me to peak oil, the notion that once we've recovered half of the world's petroleum reserves, the remainder will be increasingly difficult to recover. For the last hundred years or so, we've built our society on cheap fossil fuels. Once we've used up the easily recoverable deposits, the remainder become increasingly difficult to recover, and prices will skyrocket.

Kunstler commented on America's suburbanization as one of the most wasteful uses of tax dollars ever: by subsidizing developments that require that people drive long distances to work and shop, we've exacerbated the problems that our society will face when energy prices rise.

And rise they have. The Wall Street Journal discusses the possibility of $7/gallon gasoline in the next few years, and the New York Times reports on how higher gas prices are already affecting the desirability of life far from metropolitan centers, including the outer suburbs. And then there's the impact to the airlines...

Fasten your seat belts, it may be a bumpy ride.