James Howard Kunstler Views a Future Without Cheap Fuels

Where will you be when the oil runs out?

Author and speaker James Howard Kunstler believes we've already run out of the cheap stuff, not just here in the U.S. but around the globe. From here on out, it's going to cost us- and the economy.

He knows something about this subject, too - he's written 4 books about peak oil and what the post-oil world will look like in the future.

In this 50-minute interview with co-host Daniel Kerbein, Kunstler says it's too late to hope that alternative energy sources will keep supporting our wasteful consumption and commuting practices. He even doubts that governments will have the capital any time soon to build the new infrastructure that a massive shift to alternative energy would require.

Instead, he says, it is time to retool our lives and communities to live locally. Jobs and shopping within walking distance. Food raised within a few miles of our plates.The absolute and total end of suburbia (which Kunstler believes will be inevitable with escalating fuel prices.)

James Howard Kunstler is the author of several non-fiction books about urban planning and peak oil, notably The Long Emergency - Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

He has also brought his imagination into the future and written two novels, A World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron, which depict life in an Upstate New York town after the collapse of the cheap oil economy.