Pretty positive outlook, I wished I could share in it. We aren't at the end of the crisis, but at the beginning. Oil is running out and our economy is based on cheap oil, we have nothing that can conceivably replace it and we have to face that fact instead of wishing in make-believe magical technological advances. Wind power, solar power, hydrogen, ethanol and yes, even nuclear fusion are all useful and we will need them in the future, but they cannot replace oil, even if combined together.

People are too busy living in a world of magic and deceit, or willful ignorance. We dream that as things have been for 70 years, so will they be for the rest of time. I think the last 70 years of gluttony will soon extinguish. We only have 30 years of oil left at current rates of consumption, even when you consider the reserves we think we may have.

We will be the generation that is introduced to a new age, not of space age technology and ever improving technology, but rather of an age with a world that has become much bigger, small and locally scaled. We will have to face hard labor and work for our food once again, instead of buying it at a store we drive to, and eat food that was shipped across the world. We will have our cars but we won't be driving them everywhere, long distance travel will be restricted to trains and waterways because personal transportation will be too expensive to maintain over long distances.

It will be an interesting age because many aspects of the lives of our predecessors will return, and yet, we will still have technology. It will be an interesting fusion of the living conditions of the pre-atomic age with the post-atomic age.

We are in for some hard times ahead and we cannot and should not be satisfied with people who try to pull the wool over our eyes so they can make the biggest profit before it ends. The oil companies want us to believe in cheap oil and the abundance of it. Our politician's jobs are to convince us they can make things better and that things are getting better.

The truth is that they simply aren't going to get better, and sadly it isn't something we can control without changing everyone in the nation. The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring are probably just the early tremors for the challenges that lay ahead. Our conflicts in the middle East pale in comparison to what will happen as nations fight for resources they've depleted.

Our generation also believes in climate change, even while older generations don't. The simple fact is that even if the US alters itself drastically, it won't stop the change. If climate change is caused by man, we can't force the whole world to change enough to stop it. If it is not caused by man, there isn't a thing we can do to stop it. We will have to adapt just like our evolutionary ancestors did.

It isn't all doom and gloom. I take out a lot of hope from this. While things will be hard, at the end, things will be more humane. We will have each other and our communities and families will be stronger units because of it and because conditions will require us to band together instead of isolating ourselves in our homes, cars and cubicles. No it isn't doomsday and it isn't the apocalypse, it is simply a change that we will have to adapt to. We can't kick around nature and our evolution, we can't expect to sustain the unsustainable. But the change will ultimately set us free, truly free.

I look forward to the future because while I and others like me believe it's going to get worse, the other side of the valley is green and prosperous, just not the way we think of in our post-atomic frame of mind. We can also grow up knowing that our children will grow up and become adults and be able to live in a world without the handcuffs of our lives today.