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

The entropic mess that our economy has become is the final blowoff of… industrialism. The destructive practices known as "free-market globalism" were engendered by our run-up to and arrival at the world oil production peak. It was the logical climax of the oil "story." It required the breakdown of all previous constraints… to maximize the present at the expense of the future and to do so for the benefit of a very few at the expense of the many. […] Free-market globalism became the reigning orthodoxy […], challenged only by cranks… at the very margins of society. The moment that the world recognizes the passing of the oil production peak as a reality, globalism will be dead both in theory and practice.

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 […].

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.