James Howard Kunstler is an entertainingly cranky writer based in the upstate New York town of Saratoga Springs. He is inordinately fond of the adjective ‘necrotic’ when describing the contemporary American landscape, he maintains a blog with the somewhat no-holds-barred title of Clusterfuck Nation, and has just written a book that predicts that many of his fellow countrymen will be forced this century to return to a way of living not too far removed from the hardscrabble existence of the sharecropper. In The Long Emergency, an extract of which is available on the Rolling Stone site, Kunstler envisions a future in which peak production of oil has come and gone. With the end of cheap oil, the whole infrastructure supporting the American way of life–increasingly the world’s way of life–will come to an messy end. Suburbia, out-of-town malls, cheap air travel, and industrial-scale agriculture are all likely to go the way of the Dodo.Conjuring up scenarios that make a J.G. Ballard novel seem like a futurist think-piece commissioned by Shell, Kunstler’s apocalyptic visions are as much a vehicle for his critique of the strip-mall nation as a sober prediction of how the world will look in, say, 2050. Personally I’m more sanguine (or deluded) about the energy crisis. Mainstream oil experts dismiss the Peak Oil theory, which pops up whenever there’s a spike in prices (the current rises are more a product of increased demand and a legacy of decades of underinvestment in exploration and production capacity). The more pressing and less disputed threat from climate change will–if responded to correctly–initiate a new generation of far more efficient vehicles as SUVs are replaced by 100 mpg diesels. These developments, along with the inevitable re-embracing of nuclear energy, could push the oil crunch point out as far as the end of this century! By that stage (he says, increasingly sounding like one of those petroleum-funded “visions of the future” papers mocked earlier), it’s possible that nuclear fusion, nanotechnology (creating new fuels at the molecular level), or something not even considered yet will have revolutionized the energy problem.Anyway, Kunstler would scoff at such Candide-like musings (or techno-hubris as he terms it). According to him, it’s only a matter of time before liana vines start to poke through the asphalt of deserted highway ramps. Regardless, I’ll definitely look out for his work when I’m wandering around the aircraft-hanger-sized Border’s bookshop when I’m visiting my wife’s family in Arizona at the end of this month. Of course, if Kunstler’s right, Border’s and Arizona (as we know it) mightn’t be around much longer.By the way, Three Monkeys Online, always prescient, features an interview with Kunstler and an article over the debate over “Peak Oil.” Both are by Robert Looby and both are worth reading.