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

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson warns that China's current program to mitigate huge population increases with gigantic water projects may have dire consequences. Irrigation and other withdrawals have already depleted the , which, starting in 1972, has run bone-dry part of the year in province, where one-fifth of China's wheat and one-seventh of its corn is produced. In 1997, the river stopped flowing for a record 226 days. The groundwater levels of the northern China plains have plummeted. The water table in major grain-producing areas is falling at the rate of five feet a year. Of China's 617 cities, three hundred already face water shortages. Of China's approximately 23,000 miles of major rivers, 80 percent no longer support fish life. The Xiaolangdi dam project now underway along the Yellow River in north China is exceeded in size only by the on the in South China. In addition, the Chinese government intends to siphon water from the Yangtze… and send it over by a canal system to the Yellow River and Beijing, respectively. When it is running, the Yellow River is already one of the most particle-laden in the world. Because of that, it is estimated that the Xiaolangdi dam would silt up within thirty years of completion. The… project is reminiscent of another centrally planned mega-project that ended in grief: the Soviet Union's scheme to drain the to irrigate gigantic cotton farms in Kazakhstan. The project turned one of the world's largest inland bodies of fresh water into [a] salty desert. The potential for calamity in China is therefore huge as it skirts a range of forces presented by the Long Emergency, any one of which, or some combination, could send it reeling over its tipping point: the effects of global climate change, competition for [every resource including] oil, extremes of pollution, disease, and war, either with its neighbors or internally. Despite the current veneer of prosperity and stability, China has tremendous potential for political chaos. As Wilson fearlessly points out, the pressure on China's agriculture and water resources is intensified by the predicament shared by many countries: runaway population growth [caused by industrialization]. Population growth rates may be mitigated… from culture to culture by economic advance (which tends to lower reproductive rates by channeling women into the workplace), but economic development produces other not-so-benign consequences. Developing [systems like] nation[-state]s invariably increase their energy use [as they grow complex]. More cars are used, more electricity [is] generated, [and] more greenhouse emissions [are] sent into the atmosphere. In the Long Emergency, …“there will only be two types of nations: the over-developed and those which will never develop.” China may represent an amalgamation of those two conditions in one nation-state.

Oil and gas were generally so cheap and plentiful throughout the twentieth century that even those in the lowest ranks of the social order enjoyed its benefits—electrified homes, cars, televisions, [and] air conditioning. Oil is an amazing substance. It stores a tremendous amount of energy per weight and volume. It is easy to transport. It stores easily at regular air temperature in unpressurized metal tanks, and it can sit there indefinitely without degrading. You can pump it through a pipe, you can send it all over the world in ships, you can haul it around in trains, cars, and trucks, [and] you can even fly it in tanker planes and refuel other airplanes in flight. It is flammable but has proven to be safe to handle with a modest amount of care by people with double-digit IQs. It can be refined by straightforward distillation into many grades of fuel—gasoline, diesel, kerosene, aviation fuel, heating oil—and into innumerable useful products—plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fabrics, [and] lubricants.
Nothing really matches oil for power, versatility, transportability, or ease of storage. It is all these things, plus it has been cheap and plentiful. […] The lack of these qualities is among the problems with the putative alternative fuels proposed for the post-cheap-energy era. Cheap, abundant, versatile. Oil led the human race to a threshold of nearly godlike power to transform the world. It was right there in the ground, easy to get. We used it as if there was no tomorrow. Now there may not be one. That's how special oil has been.

In any case, it is human nature to consider a place “home” if you were born there, […] have family there, or have spent some portion of your life there, and people are naturally reluctant to leave home. I daresay that many Americans now living in the Southwest will not be disposed to understand what is really happening—that the carrying capacity of their home region has been suddenly and drastically reduced—and they will hunker down hoping for a return to better times.
The vested owners of all those sun-drenched tract houses may stick around for a while and fight over the region, perhaps thinking that they are reenacting the great historical dramas of the nineteenth century—such is the long-term effect of canned entertainment on the collective imagination. The violence and loss of resources will surely send some American citizens fleeing. After a while, it will be obvious to even the staunch defenders that places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque will never again support the populations that were possible during the height of the cheap-oil blowoff in the late twentieth century. They will then pack up and move elsewhere, sacrificing their houses and ties to a disintegrating community. These new refugees may move into careers that they never could have conceived of twenty years earlier, when they were young college graduates: farmer, farm laborer. Wherever they go, they are going to discover a nation preoccupied with food production above all other activities.