By the mid-1920s, the great wave of immigration suddenly ended. The National Origins Act of 1924 and other measures set new highly restrictive immigr… - James Howard Kunstler

We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the form of environmental devastation. Of the earth’s estimated 10 million species, 300,000 have vanished in the past fifty years. Each year, 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct, an all-time high for the last 65 million years. Within one hundred years, between one-third and two-thirds of all birds, animals, plants, and other species will be lost. Nearly 25 percent of the 4,630 known mammal species are now threatened with extinction, along with 34 percent of fish, 25 percent of amphibians, 20 percent of reptiles, and 11 percent of birds. Even more, species are having population declines. Environmental scientists speak of an “omega point” at which the vast interconnected networks of Earth’s ecologies are so weakened that human existence is no longer possible. This is a variant of the die-off theme […], but it does raise grave questions about the ongoing project of civilization. How long might the Long Emergency last? […] Of course, after a while, an emergency becomes the norm and is no longer an emergency.
Global warming is no longer a theory being disputed by political interests, but an established scientific consensus. The possible effects range from events as drastic as a hydrothermal shutdown of the Gulf Stream—meaning a much colder Europe with much-reduced agriculture—to [the] desertification of major world crop-growing areas, to the invasion of temperate regions by diseases formerly limited to the tropics, to the loss of harbor cities all over the world. Whether the cause of global warming is human activity and “greenhouse emissions,” a result of naturally occurring cycles, or a combination of the two, this does not alter the fact that it is having swift and tremendous impacts on civilization and that its effects will contribute greatly to the Long Emergency.

The corporations benefiting from this regime often had no physical home of their own, even in their country of origin—and not a few American corporations had moved their official address to … pseudo nations, where the banking and tax laws were more agreeable. The corporations had no allegiance to any… place or the people of that place, so the destruction they wreaked was as manifest in the ravaged towns of Ohio and upstate New York as in the environmental degradation of China. America was hardly immune to the consequences of free-market globalism. In effect, the American heartland was overtaken by a new… corporate colonialism, emanating from our own culture, but no less destructive than the imposition of foreign rule.

Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized… diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children… survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn’t compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland’s oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. The only comparative advantage that these people possessed was their willingness to work for next to nothing. Cheap oil and free-market globalism turned comparative advantage into a new kind of feudalism, with the corporations as the lords and the overabundant locals as the serfs. And then, when the comparative advantage of cheap labor… of one place, […] was superseded by the cheaper labor… of another place, […] the corporations just moved their operations.