The Get-Ready Men

Prophets have been warning Americans of the terrible things in store for decades, but Kunstler joins a fresh corps whose numbers seem to have been increasing as quickly as the price of gas. The past two years have seen books with titles like Paul Roberts’s The End of Oil, Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over, Tom Mast’s Over a Barrel, and David Goodstein’s Out of Gas and a film called The End of Suburbia by Gregory Greene, to name a few, and to leave out their long and unsettling subtitles, most of which approximate Roberts’s choice, which is On the Edge of a Perilous New World. These authors may someday join the ranks of the dated alarmists–Jeremy Rifkin, among countless others, issued similar warnings in Entropy in 1980–but then again, they may be right. One may demonstrate that the alarm rings too often and too soon, but that does not mean that danger will never come.
Technology Review