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

In the Long Emergency, some regions of the United States will do better than others and some will suffer deeply. Places that benefited disproportionately during the cheap-oil blowout will find themselves steeply challenged when those benefits, and the entitlement psychology that grew out of them, are withdrawn in the face of new, austere circumstances. The so-called Sunbelt presents extraordinary problems. This is not a good time to begin thinking about moving to Phoenix or Las Vegas. Parts of the Southwest may be significantly depopulated, starved for energy, and thirsting for water that depended on cheap energy. Other parts may become contested territory with Mexico. The prospect for disorder in the southeastern states is especially high, given the extremes of religiosity, hyperindividualism, and cultural disinhibition regarding violence. The social glue holding communities and regions together will be severely strained by the loss of amenities presumed to be normal.
[…] We have lived through as a narrative episode in a greater saga of human history. The industrial story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It begins in the mid-eighteenth century with coal and the first steam engines, proceeds to a robust second act climaxing in the years before World War I, and moves toward a third act resolution now that we can anticipate with some precision the depletion of the resources that made the industrial episode possible. As the industrial story ends, the greater saga of [hu]mankind will move on into a new episode, the Long Emergency. This is… a self-evident point, but throughout history, even the most important and self-evident trends are often completely ignored because the changes they foreshadow are simply unthinkable. That process is sometimes referred to as an “outside context problem,” something so far beyond the ordinary experience of those dwelling in a certain time and place that they cannot make sense of available information. The collective mental static preventing comprehension is also sometimes referred to as “cognitive dissonance,” a term borrowed from developmental psychology. It helps explain why the… public has been sleepwalking into the future.
The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political [and social] turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it.

The Southwest also faces increasing friction with adjoining Mexico. This is not a racist provocation but a description of reality. No other first-world country has such an extensive land frontier with a third-world country. The income gap between the United States and Mexico is greater than that between any other two contiguous countries in the world.

The Long Emergency will cause unprecedented social and economic dislocation, and the outcome may be a world we would barely recognize. The... egalitarian society we knew in the... twentieth century may become drastically more hierarchical as large numbers of desperate people place themselves in the service of those who control land, especially following a period of anarchy. Under such harsh conditions, the weaker individuals will sell their allegiance in return for security.