One final thing worth noting on the subject of rail: From 1890 to about 1920, American localities managed to construct hundreds of local and interurb… - James Howard Kunstler

NASA has no next-generation manned space exploration vehicle offstage. Officials have talked about developing a new rocket to put something out there, but the chatter sounds pretty vague and demoralized. I’m not persuaded that it will amount to anything. The end of the shuttle era was a poignant moment in American science, full of sad resonances for dissolving dreams of adventure in other worlds. The government is out of [real] money, and capital will only get scarcer as our fossil fuel energy inputs decline. Space travel will probably prove to have been another product of the cheap oil age, retrograde as that sounds. The truth works backward and forward, and sometimes it hurts.

I’m aware of having already lived more than a half-century through the greatest fiesta of luxury, comfort, and leisure that the world has ever known. I enjoyed central heating, air conditioning, cheap airfares, cable TV, advanced orthopedic surgery, and computers.

Did Americans sell out their towns, their neighbors, the memory of their ancestors, and the future of their grandchildren because they were helplessly in thrall to the blandishments of a cheap-oil economy? I honestly don’t know, though I tend to view the outcome as the result of many collective bad choices made by the public and its leaders. But were those choices inescapable? Certainly, the process was insidious and played out over several generations.