Today, I read a sobering and well-thought out projection of what our future will be like when the inevitable happens and our sources of petroleum run out. I highly recommend you take the time to read it yourself, but be warned--it's a bit lengthy. Allow 10 to 15 minutes for this one. Set them aside--write it in your calendar, if you have to. It's time for all of us to "wake up and smell the future"--and if it does play out as predicted in this article, there will be many good things, but many not-so-good things that it's best to be prepared for.

We Must Imagine a Future Without Cars (by James Howard Kunstler, taken from alternet.org): "Two years ago in my book The Long Emergency I wrote that our nation was sleepwalking into an era of unprecedented hardship and disorder -- largely due to the end of reliably cheap and abundant oil. We're still blindly following that path into a dangerous future, lost in dark raptures of infotainment, diverted by inane preoccupations with sex and celebrity, made frantic by incessant motoring.

"The coming age of energy scarcity will change everything about how we live in this country. It will ignite more desperate contests between nations for the remaining oil and natural gas around the world. It will alter the fundamental terms of industrial economies. It will ramify and amplify many of the problems presented by climate change. It will require us to behave differently. But we are not paying attention."