Oil is the world's most critical resource. Without it, nothing works in industrial civilization as currently configured. Few people dispute the idea … - James Howard Kunstler

The entropy produced in World War II was much more widespread and profound than that of World War I. In World War I the action had taken place… entirely on rural terrain, classic battlefields. In World War II, much of the warfare was urban. The long-range bomber had reached a high stage of refinement in the twenty-plus years between world wars. None of the major capitals had been damaged in World War I. In World War II, hundreds of towns and cities were destroyed in Europe and Asia. Berlin was reduced to gravel; London was badly mutilated; and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive ashtrays. The casualties of World War I had been enormous, astonishing, [and] appalling beyond civilized peoples’ wildest dreams, but the victims had been overwhelmingly soldiers. The casualties in World War II were overwhelmingly civilians and in much greater aggregate numbers.

Without the Gulf Stream, Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia would have a climate like Labrador’s, colder by in annual mean. The Gulf Stream has been likened to an oceanic conveyor belt. The force of the warm water flowing north has been described as equal to the volume of seventy-five Amazon rivers.

Western Civ[ilization]’s most infamous encounter with pandemic disease, so far, was the big first wave of the Black Death that had a marathon run from 1346 to 1353. That bug was the real deal. It killed folks left and right, every age group, every social station, and it killed them ugly. Few who caught it survived. Up to half the population of Europe perished, along with a lot of their social and economic ways. The cause of the Black Death was subject to every possible explanation except the actual one, Yersina pestis, a bacterium associated with rats and their insect parasites, fleas and lice, who also enjoyed an association with humans living in the generally squalid conditions of the day ­— the ancient Roman habit of bathing long forgotten. At the top of their list of causes was an angry God, and his wicked erstwhile subordinate, Satan. The “experts” of that time tended to cluster in the church hierarchy, with its drear obsessions and compulsions. The squishy boundary between the supernatural and reality loosed all manner of derangement. The Jews came in for much vilification, leading to massacres in Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne. On the whole, the episode represented a terrific humbling of humanity. The allegory of the Dance Macabre summed it up in [hu]mankind’s universal antic journey to… death. On the plus side, as modern interpolators [historians]… say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, [the] land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance [which led to the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution], the Enlightenment [which led to the Industrial Revolution which, in turn, led] eventually [to] our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity [which led to the problems we face today].