The denial about [the] global peak in the United States is already fierce, as investments in car-dependent, oil-addicted infrastructure are greater h… - James Howard Kunstler

In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. A few elderly dairymen hung on. Many let their fields and pastures go to scrub. Some sold out to what used to be called developers, and they'd put in five or ten poorly built houses. Now, […] there were far fewer people, and many houses outside [the] town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food.

A UN ceasefire ended hostilities on October 22, 1973, but the OPEC embargo against the United States remained in force while the organization further increased the price per barrel to the rest of the world. What followed was an interesting case study in network breakdown and cascading failure. In fact, the embargo never actually achieved a shutoff of OPEC oil imports to the United States. All but about 5 percent of the needed supply found its way to America by a circuitous route as allocations to other nations were surreptitiously redirected. But the base price of a barrel of oil did eventually more than quadruple by the time the embargo was called off in March 1974. And the price rise, alone staggered the West and Japan. Already at that time, public transit was a thing of the past and about 85 percent of Americans drove to work every day.

You could argue people are generally better off now mentally than they were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We're not jacked up on coffee and television and... advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills.