Mr. Kunstler's latest continues his persistently pessimistic view of the modern world. It would be easy to dismiss him as a professional curmudgeon or even as a crank if there weren't some points in his work that can't be ignored.
The book is divided into three sections: the first explains why the predictions he made in "The Long Emergency" didn't happen they way he said they would - and updates them. We didn't see the collapse of world oil supplies for example because fracking has created an extremely temporary glut. He essentially describes it as a rolling con game as extraction companies race to stay ahead of the debt they're piling up as they move from drilling site to drilling site.
The middle section is a travelogue, where he journeys around the country visiting people he has chosen as living the kind of life he expects we are headed for. It will be a world where technology has proven unable to keep propping up the status quo, large scale organization has collapsed under its own weight, and the struggle to survive will be a localized, smaller community-based effort surviving on local resources.
The last section is a roving assessment of the world according to Kunstler. Although he identifies himself as a Democrat, this part of the book reads like something from a libertarian-conservative Neo-Luddite. He has nothing good to say about Obama or Hillary Clinton, has bought into the Deep State theory of opposition to Trump along with Clinton CT, and has little to say about Trump other than an unflattering characterization of him as a jumped-up real estate developer.
He expects the international financial system is going to collapse under unsustainable debt that has been piling up. He expects fossil fuel supplies to collapse and alternative energy will not be able to ramp up to meet the demands of the world. He does not expect technology to save us, nor do he have any faith in government to do so either, at least not on a large scale. On the climate crisis he claims to be agnostic about the causes, but details what it is going to do: mass extinctions, worldwide crop failures, and more and bigger weather events. He describes politics devolving in disinformation as the culture it reflects dissolves. (His opinions on the root causes of this have led to charges of racism and misogyny.)
Short version: Kuntsler is not a happy camper.
The book ends with a coda laying out what he has been doing with his own life. He's moved to a small community in upstate New York, is trying to grow more of his own food, has adopted a version of the lifestyle he sees as the only viable future. He claims to be happy with the turn his life has taken of late. The last happy paragraph of the book contradicts the tenor of the rest of the tome.
My take on all this is mixed. Kunstler isn't wrong about the threats facing civilization: energy, climate, political, economic. It's possible to take serious issue with his conclusions though.
While Kunstler is relentlessly pessimistic about the odds of things as they are continuing, his opinions about the what he says is the way forward are wildly overoptimistic. There is no easy path to the post-industrial, post-global world he envisions.
What he fails to bring up if the collapse he predicts come to pass, the results will include mass famine, population collapse, epidemics, war, and the rise of authoritarian regimes. Religious strife, racial conflict, tribalism - it's inevitable if things go the way Kunstler predicts. His happy view of a pastoral world arising (if it does) from the ashes glosses over the bloodbath on the way there.
Kunstler isn't wrong about the seriousness of the challenges facing us, but his rejection of the tools that are the best chance for addressing them are counter-productive. He's living in the wrong century.
Read him for perspective, but don't read him uncritically.
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