If these doom-sayers are right, it’s a truly terrifying prospect. Everything in modern life is made from, by or with oil. The clothes we wear: manufactured in oil-powered factories, shipped from Mexico or South Asia by oil-powered freight. The food we eat: grown with oil-based fertilizers, pesticides and other petrochemicals, sowed by oil-powered tractors and machinery. Even our cities, which form the basis of where and how we live, are laid out according to the logic of cars, on the presumption that you can drive from place to place to place.

If oil goes (they say), so goes with it a special, hundred-year period in human history: the age of oil. The age of cars and of highways, of electric lights and manufactured goods and consumer society. Of agribusiness. Of recorded music. In short, everything we identify as modern life. And it could well be accompanied by massive social, political, and economic upheaval, as the world scrambles for the last of the oil, struggles to figure out alternatives, and undergoes massive reorganization.

Are you scared yet? Or do you think these folks are crying wolf? Are we really at the end of the oil age? What would that even look like? And can anything (more drilling, alternative energy sources, something, anything) possibly save us?

In Brief: James Kunstler and Michael Lynch debate peak oil and the sustainability of suburbia.
James Howard Kunstler, author of the Long Emergency, and Michael Lynch, President, Strategic Energy & Economic Research Inc., debate peak oil and the unsustainability of suburbia with on Open Source, a public radio show with Christopher Lydon.