Jim Kunstler, author of a ton of great books on New Urbanism and weekly guest on the Kunstlercast, posted a writeup on his blog today that ended with a fantastic summary about how things have to change to stave off utter societal collapse. Read the whole post! But to summarize, I wanted to post his conclusion,

There are plenty of things you can state about the economy past and future with some confidence right now:
– Cheap energy is over and our wishes for alt.energy are currently inconsistent with reality, meaning we have to live differently.
– We have to downscale and re-localize our major economic activities: food production, commerce and manufacturing, banking, schooling, etc.
– We can’t hope to have a stable money system unless we allow a workout of unpayable debt to proceed.
– Even if we can do this, universal easy credit is a thing of the past. From now on, we have to save for the things we want and run our businesses and households on accounts receivable.
– Major demographic shifts are inevitable as it becomes necessary to let go of suburbia and reactivate our derelict towns and smaller cities (and allow our giant metroplexes to contract).
– We have to face the truth that our major social contracts cannot be met, namely the continuation of social security as we know it and probably all pension arrangements. We’ll probably have to change household arrangements to make up for these losses.
– Health care will have to go through a revolution more comprehensive than just changing how we pay for it. Like everything else, it will have to downscale, re-localize, and become more rigorous.

We’re not going to rescue the banks. The collateral for their loans is no good and it will only lose more value. All those tract houses on the cul-de-sacs of America and scattered on the out-parcels of our tragically subdivided farming landscape will only lose value, one way or another, in the years ahead. Right now they’re simply losing inflated cash value — and that has been bad enough to sink the banks. In the months and years ahead, they’ll lose their sheer usefulness as the distances once mitigated by cheap gasoline loom larger again, and the jobs vanish and incomes with them, and the supermarket shelves cease to groan with eighty-seven different varieties of flavored coffee creamers, and one-by-one the national chain stores shutter, and the theme parks, and the Nascar ovals, and the malls, and the colossal superfluous cretin-cargo of consumer nonsense that we’ve been daydreaming in gets blown away in a hurricane of change that we were not ready to believe in.