Like China, the United States is divided… in half between wet and dry. Though the human population of the United States is proportionately much small… - James Howard Kunstler

[Globalism's] demise will coincide with the end of the cheap-oil age. For better or worse, many of the circumstances we associate with globalism will be reversed. Markets will close as political turbulence and military mischief interrupt trade relations. As markets close, societies will turn increasingly to import replacement[s] for sheer economic survival. The cost of transport will no longer be negligible in a post-cheap-oil age. Many of our agricultural products will have to be produced closer to home, and... by more intensive... labor as oil and natural gas supplies become increasingly unstable. The world will stop shrinking and become larger again. Virtually all... the... relationships... that we have taken for granted as permanent will be radically changed [...]. Life will become intensely and increasingly local.

…Global warming... happens to coincide with our imminent descent down the slippery slope of... [hydrocarbon] depletion, so that all the potential discontinuities of that epochal circumstance will be amplified, ramified, reinforced, and torqued by climate change. If global warming is a result of human activity, fossil fuel-based industrialism, ...then it seems... the prospects are poor that… human[s] …will be able to do anything about it because the journey down the oil depletion arc will be much more disorderly than the journey up was. The disruptions and hardships of decelerating industrialism will destabilize governments and societies to the degree that concerted international action... will never be carried out. In the chaotic world of diminishing and contested... resources, there will simply be a mad scramble to use up whatever... people can manage to lay their hands on. The very idea that we possess any control over the process seems to me further evidence of the delusion gripping our… culture—the fatuous certainty that technology will save us from the diminishing returns of technology.

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 […].