The end is near ...

James Howard Kunstler, a blogger I enjoy reading, was on the Colbert Report tonight to shill for his latest book, A World Made by Hand, a dystopian story of life after the oil runs out. I haven't read it, but it is published by Atlantic Monthly Books, and that has to be a respectable house. He didn't do so well with Colbert, but not many do unless Colbert gives them a pass. Kunstler is deadly earnest, always a disadvantage with Stephen, and perhaps essentially humorless excepting sarcasm, and he's gracelessly gleeful at the prospect of the indignities that await us after the oil is gone. It's not, though, that I think he's wrong in his conviction that our current way of life is unsustainable in a world without cheap energy. There won't be any magical formula to make the 50s and 20¢ gasoline come back, and we will have to do some things differently.