Wal-Mart will not be able to profitably run its “warehouse on wheels” when the price of oil fluctuates chronically. […] We will never again experienc… - James Howard Kunstler

Industrialism hasn’t been an abiding set of activities in any particular place but rather a dynamic cycle, of takeoff, peak, and ebb. It has rotated from region to region and country to country, along the way disposing of whole classes of people when it was through with them, chewing through habitats, resources, political systems, and landscapes. The working classes of Europe and America had their decades of factory life and the scene has shifted to Asia, which may be peaking now in the face of constraints on fossil fuels. In the United States, the cultural memory lingers on of the brief, ecstatic period after the Second World War when men on the automobile assembly lines made better salaries than college professors and factory workers enjoyed all the blandishments of suburban living. But of course that was the very peak of the cycle in America. The same class of people is now on the scrap heap, reduced to minimum-wage service jobs at best, or relegated to the cottage industry in outlawed drugs, with the gaps filled by subsidized idleness. Great Britain is a similar story, with Germany and France less eager to surrender their manufacturing.

The energy disruptions of the Long Emergency are going to remind us that the skyscraper was an experimental building form. These structures operated successfully during the twentieth century when there was plenty of cheap energy, and after that, they became a problem. Economic disruptions will put an end to many of the large-scale enterprises that remain in our cities, and the megastructures that were built for them. There will be no need for headquarters of national companies because, without cheap energy, continental-scale activities will no longer exist. The companies that service the giant corporations in areas like advertising, marketing, and public relations will also wither. Even operations such as the national media and, yes, book publishing as it is currently organized, may not survive in a nation short of energy, crippled in transport, sinking in production and trade, challenged in food production and distribution, and plagued by political crisis.

According to the , sea levels rose by ten to twenty centimeters during the twentieth century and are currently rising by about two millimeters a year, which is at the upper range of the rate of rise for the last century. With global warming accelerating, this is apt to increase. The accepted prediction is that sea levels will rise during the twenty-first century by about fifty centimeters, or a little under two feet, though some scientists predict a full meter. […] One-sixth of the people in the world live[s] in coastal zones within one meter of sea level. This is the… outside context problem so alien to contemporary experience that the public and its leaders can really find no way to process the information and figure out what to do about it—and for the excellent reason that it is not a problem with a direct solution. It is more [of] a condition without a remedy. If the major shipping ports… end up being submerged, humankind will just have to work around it. The disruptions to world trade might be epochal, gigantic, […] [and] tragic. It seems obvious that the human race will simply have to adjust, even if that means adjusting to a new reality of severely lower expectations in living standards, comfort, and amenities. […] When the time comes, …[we] will just have to move to higher ground.