American life, with its twin engines of suburbanization and factory production of consumer goods for the […] world, became so quickly and obviously s… - James Howard Kunstler

Both the mining and the washing [of hydrocarbons] require huge amounts of energy, and it has been proposed that any commercial exploitation of the Alberta tar sands would take 20 percent of Canada’s total natural gas production. In the long run, it might not be worth expending the energy from gas to get the energy from the tar sands. If oil from the tar sands themselves were used to process more tar sands, the return would be three barrels of oil for every two consumed. […] In the early days of conventional oil in Texas, the formula was very favorable, around twenty to one. The oil was found close to the surface on dry land in temperate places easy to work in, and it gushed out of the ground under its own pressure. […] Going a bit further, the fundamental equations that support all gigantic… organisms, …may no longer obtain, and human life would have to reorganize its activities on a different basis. Also, once these complex systems and their subsystems halt their operations, restarting them may range from difficult to impossible […].

Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohawk River.

Not to say that one would have to go back to a hunter-gatherer [or even a herbivore-insectivore] mode of existence in order to live on a solar budget. Pick any preindustrial culture you like, or pick the best or most relevant parts from any of them to get on with daily life, for instance, the habitations of Edo Japan, the division of labor of the Inca, the diet of the Florentines, the animal husbandry of Georgian England, the costumes of the Ming dynasty. Surely one could contrive life on a solar budget from these modes of daily endeavor and put together a satisfying existence that would amount to being civilized. Anyway, a great many of the useful inventions that made life comfortable and interesting were developed before we began using fossil fuels, quite a few of them in China alone. Add to that some additional knowledge that the human race has acquired since those historical periods, perhaps only the germ theory of disease, and you could enjoy a decent living standard.
Anyway, that’s a theory. History does run backward now and then, and the centers of civilization shift from one place to another, but we've never seen anything like what we face: the crash of a turbocharged cheap energy economy along with an ecological catastrophe perhaps beyond the biblical scale. History is also not symmetrical; you don’t necessarily go down the same way you came, recapitulating earlier arrangements in the same sequence backward. What we might get instead could be just a one-way ticket to Palookaville instead of getting to relive the sixteenth century.