This guy's already written it off.

There are people out there that believe our coming collapse is, pragmatically speaking, inevitable. We theoretically could do something about it, but the change required is too great, and societal structures are too entrenched for any realistic progress to occur.

So, he believes the only thing to consider is what to do to keep some measure of civilization alive. His advice is ultimately to form local communities that are as self-sustaining as possible.

"Can global civilization adapt successfully to degradation of the biosphere and depletion of fossil fuels? I argue that it cannot. Important elements of all constituent societies would have to be reformed. Reform would have to be radical and would be uncertain of success. It could be undertaken only in the presence of incontrovertible necessity—a necessity that will reveal itself incontrovertibly only when catastrophic collapse has become unavoidable. I conclude that those who seek to preserve civilization should plan for its survival in restricted regions."

"There is a great need for a culture of guerilla relocalisation—a movement that would have as its goal to partially prepare communities so that they may coalesce more readily into autonomous regions when the need becomes apparent."

http://geocities.com/davidmdelaney/what-to-do-in-a-failing-civilization.html

I've been trying to find credentials on the guy, David Delaney, but to no avail. Regardless, he represents one (rather frightening) edge of thinking on the coming crisis, and he is not alone.

Thoughts?

Small communities of people helping people. More 'united' as human beings...with more autonomous, less 'united' states. Worse things could happen.

Payback is a ..... :)

then no centralized and consolidated center of power would have ever needed to expand.

Why waste the time?

He wrote "The Long Emergency". Or Eric Pianka, Prof of Zoology at UT Austin? As I said, there are others who share this view. Here's an excerpt from a piece by Kunstler for Orion:

"The popular idea, expressed incessantly in the news media, is that if you run out of energy, you just go out and find some “new technology” to keep things running. We’ll learn that this doesn’t comport with reality. For example, commercial airplanes are either going to run on cheap liquid hydrocarbon fuels or we’re not going to have commercial aviation as we have known it. No other energy source is concentrated enough by weight, affordable enough by volume, and abundant enough in supply to do the necessary work to overcome gravity in a loaded airplane, repeated thousands of times each day by airlines around the world."

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7/