Quote

The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.

James Howard Kunstler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Howard Kunstler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Live
Decades
Everything
Ahead
Global
Crisis
Fact
Energy
Salient
Facts
Entering
Change
Permanent

More quotes by James Howard Kunstler

Image
I was not a hard-liner against nuclear, because I viewed that as perhaps the only way we might keep the lights on another 25 years. But lately I am on board with Nicole Foss's argument that we will not have the capital or even the social cohesion to build anymore nuke plants.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
Motion is a great tranquilizer.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local main street economies (networks of local economic interdependency).
James Howard Kunstler
Image
People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a time out from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this time out.
James Howard Kunstler
Image
I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.
James Howard Kunstler