Book club participants made astute observations about The Long Emergency and how reading the book affected their thoughts on oil dependence. A sampling from the blog:

Artie: It's one thing to assume that technology will find clever replacements to heat and cool us, and for the internal combustion engine to transport all 6 billion of us to our individual daily destinations. But it's quite another to imagine a replacement system for our present oil- and natural gas-based agriculture. In this respect, the agrarian practices of the 1800s will have enormous value to future generations, who will have to feed themselves without the incredible, portable power of gasoline and diesel to run tractors, tillers, threshers and the whole motor pool of modern agricultural equipment.

Ken: Remember, cheap fossil fuels were the bequest of hundreds of millions of years of geologic processes storing away the sun's energy. (We've half exhausted this endowment in less than 100 years.) This did not happen overnight, and I'm not optimistic that any substitute will be commercialized at scale in the near future. But I hope I'm wrong.

Brad: The more widely I read, the more I lost faith that there was a coherent plan to intelligently deal with what we're facing. I also believe that our political so-called leaders have zero faith that the citizenry will want to make hard choices; they'll make them for us.

Rachel D.: Americans need to hear some straight talk from our leaders about the fact that Islamic extremists are far more dangerous than greedy capitalists when one considers that the extremists don't care if they make a dime selling oil to the West (particularly America). They would much rather destroy the supply and watch our system fail.

Sandra R.: Last week, my family and I returned from vacation in Ireland and the U.K. Every small village there was connected by train. We saw rich and poor, old and young benefiting from sunup to sundown by this one marvel of (old) technology. ... These small, dense settlements benefit greatly from giving up one car/one driver. And they foster a lifestyle much greater than Puritanicals ever dreamed of – irrespective of whether we've reached peak oil.

Pat J.: With liberals, things are always somehow better overseas. And yet, they continue to live here. Go figure!

Victoria O.: Maybe Kunstler is a little heavy-handed and pessimistic, but I think that's what it takes to get many people to wake up and listen. ... We all need to hear this wake up call and start living differently – now. It is the decisions that mainstream Americans make in the next few years that will affect how quickly new technologies will be introduced into the energy market.

Jim Johnson: If you don't consider our circumstances today to be an emergency, just what would you call it?

Jared C.: Peak oil is real, and you better start getting used to the idea of losing those cellphones, SUVs and plastic wrap, and changing over from an iPod culture to an iPlow one.

Richard F.: Take a deep breath. Make some adjustments. Ride a bike. Whatever. Just calm down a little. We will get through this. ... It WON'T be business as usual ... but we will emerge from this situation into a changed world because our creative engineers and our entrepreneurs will do what they do best. The engineers will develop the technology, and the entrepreneurs will find a way to make money selling it.

Gary H.: We all learned in school, or should have, the definitions of "fossil fuels" and "finite resources." As a junior high earth science teacher, I promise to make sure all of my students understand the underlying science and make wise decisions about conservation and alternative fuels. This conversation should have started 25 years ago.

Tyler: Peak oil or no, we can't domestically produce what we need without going further into debt as a nation – not at the present rates of consumption, at least. ... We are a nation that wants something for nothing. A stern warning is found wanting.

Steve T.: We are facing what I call a great fossil fuel crisis, with its twin prongs of depletion and pollution. Given that, the timing of the peak of world oil production is irrelevant. We need to stop looking for more oil (and coal, for that matter) and face the fact that we must get our energy from other sources or risk destroying our world. [an error occurred while processing this directive]