kunstler arrives for his monday morning essay on our near future;

Uncertainty rules at the top of our slide into the dark half of the year….

There will be a Great Re-set, of course, but it’s not exactly the one that Western Civ is blabbering about — a mere shuffling of political and financial protocols. It’s happening with or without “Joe Biden,” the EU, and der Hoch Schwabenklaus, though the aggregate stupidity they represent is surely making the entry process worse. The Great Re-set is what happens when the business model goes bust for powering the world with oil and other fossil fuels — even if there is quite a bit of all that stuff left in the ground. Years ago, I called it The Long Emergency.

Everything emanates off of that, including the astonishing bouts of mischief made in attempts to work around it, assign the blame for it, grub money off it, and shift the effects of it from one group of people or one region of the world to another. Steve St. Angelo says it neatly: “Energy drives the economy; finance steers it.” That’s so. When the oil business model broke in 2008, industrial society lost its mojo and, after that, finance steered it into a ditch.

The Great Re-Set is an emergent phenomenon. It unspools naturally out of circumstances that reality presents. It goes its own way and we have to adapt to it, like it or not. Is our climate changing? Maybe. But so what? The climate has changed many times since the Bronze Age. If preventing that is actually out of the question, which it is, then what else are you going to do? The answer is: adapt intelligently to new conditions. When you clear away all the mental resistance to that — which amounts to a titanic struggle to keep things just the way they are — you’re going to have to make changes anyway.

America was, for a time, the greatest industrial society and now that appears to be over. The disorder in all the moving parts of it is probably too gross to arrest at this point. We shoved it into disorder by making some very bad choices, like getting rid of our factories and squandering our wealth on an absurd suburban living arrangement. Shale oil was a financial stunt to keep our set-up going a little longer. It was part of the colossal debt roll-up — the steering function of finance — that was used to compensate for our actual loss of mojo, and now that gambit has hit the wall. You can’t pretend to issue more debt when everyone knows it can never be paid back..........more.....