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There is a prevailing fallacy, despite warning signs to the contrary (looming peak oil, fragile markets, and climate weirdness, among others), that we can continue in perpetuity the lifestyle to which we\u2019ve become accustomed. All we need to do is to pump into The System more debt or more political insanity, or hope that alternative energies or some new techno-solution will bail us out.\nBut, at best, all debt-fueled growth, shale oil \u201cmiracles\u201d and green fuels can do by themselves is to make the Long Emergency just \u201ca little bit longer.\u201d\n\u201cThe Long Emergency\u201d is a phrase coined by James Howard Kunstler to describe the economic, political and social upheavals that will dominate the first decades of the 21st-century as the honeymoon of affordable energy comes to a close. It is also the name of Kunstler\u2019s seminal book on the topic. (The Long Emergency is one of fifteen books on our \u201cEssential Reading List for the Strong Towns Thinker.\u201d)\nJames Howard Kunstler is our very special guest on today\u2019s episode of the Strong Towns podcast. He is the author of more than 20 books, including The Geography of Nowhere, Too Much Magic, and the World Made By Hand novel series.\nIn this episode, Strong Towns president Charles Marohn talks with Kunstler about what has changed\u2014or perhaps what hasn\u2019t changed\u2014since The Long Emergency was first published in 2005. Kunstler explains why the \u201cpsychology of previous investment\u201d (4:45) makes it so hard for most people to imagine living differently. Marohn and Kunstler also discuss (17:00) what\u2019s wrong with the Green Revolution narrative that we can keep doing everything we\u2019re doing now, if just \u201cdo it green\u201d:\n\u201cAmerica is going to be very disappointed how that works out,\u201d says Kunstler. \u201cIt ain\u2019t gonna happen. We\u2019re not going to run the interstate highway system, Walt Disney World, suburbia, all the stuff we\u2019re running now, the U.S. military, on any combination of green alternative fuels. It just isn\u2019t going to happen. So the whole thing\u2019s a fantasy. Really what we have to do is downscale all the activities in American life\u2014including the distances we travel, the scale of our living places, the scale of our cities, the scale of the corporate activity that we do\u2014it\u2019s all going to have to get smaller.\u201d\nOther topics:\n18:40 - Why people may be using \u201cinsane political behavior\u201d as a substitute for the harder work of changing the way we live24:00 - Why Seattle and other cities with absurdly high housing costs are signs of an irrational market and may not be fixable except by a \u201crestart\u201d35:30 - Why modern monetary theory may end up being, in Chuck\u2019s words, the \u201cpeak delusion of the Long Emergency\u201d36:40 - The fatal delusion that being able to measure something equates to being able to control it41:10 - How to \u201cchange our living arrangements in a way that comports with the circumstances that are coming at us\u201d (Kunstler)\nBy turns provocative, prescient, prophetic, and personal, this episode is just what we\u2019ve come to expect from James Howard Kunstler.