The End of the World as We Know It.

I read James H. Kunstler's book The Long Emergency over the Thanksgvng holiday and am still in shock. This book maybe the only xmas gift I buy for you this year. He delves into the economic jackpot of the petroeconomy, it's ability to help us enjoy an unsustainable lifestyle outside of what earth's parameters allow and what happens when the oil runs out. The truth hurts. This article is a brief introduction to the idea:

If you really want to understand the U.S. public’s penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period. This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the “housing bubble") has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.

Visit his blog at ClusterFuckNation.

You've been warned. Act and plan appropriately. I'm off to buy more guns and ammo.