Finance came to be viewed as a productive activity itself rather than a means to promote production. The public was no longer buying stock to invest … - James Howard Kunstler

The gigantic smear of suburbia that runs… without interruption from north of Boston through Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington, and northern Virginia is not going to be a happy place.

The attrition of global populations by disease[s] may be unavoidable. Some... may regard it as the inevitable revenge of nature against the hubris of a human species arrogantly exceeding the carrying capacity of its habitat. Some may regard it as a moral victory against wickedness. Some may view it in the therapeutic mode as a positive development for the health of the planet. Many self-conscious "humanists" have militated for the goal of reducing population growth—though most of them would have... preferred widespread birth control [using contraceptive methods like the birth pill and condoms, ironically made from cheap oil] to a die-off. But that kind of thinking might have been just another product of the narcotic comfort of cheap oil, as merely stabilizing the earth’s population at current levels (or even 1968 levels) would arguably still have left humanity beyond the earth’s carrying capacity. Apart from these issues of attitude and ethics, however, a major decline in world population, or change in demographic profiles, is apt to have profound and strange repercussions on everyday life.

I don’t think the previous Dark Age that followed the collapse of Rome was quite the same as what we’re facing. That involved a profound and incremental series of losses in knowledge, technique, and the ability to do things, everything from making good pottery and concrete to ways of organizing work. Our situation now has much more potential for cultural damage, because our conditioning in technological progress is so extreme. The letdown may be awful when it becomes evident we’re not going to solve our energy problems with algae secretions, solar, wind, or other alternative fuel schemes–that we’re not going to run [high-energy things like] , the , , and the military on any combination of other energy systems. […] This has enormous potential for disrupting our sense of reality. It’s hard to predict the kinds of reaction[s] that this may generate, but I think you will have a society so profoundly disappointed by science and technology that it could propel us into a new dark age of superstition.