Conversations among energy wonks can remind listeners of the adage about the half-full glass. Pessimists think that oil production will peak sometime in this decade; optimists believe that new technologies could extract untapped oil reserves for at least a few decades more. But there is one thing no one disputes: we will soon run out of cheap oil.

A growing, influential body of writers believes that the exhaustion of cheap oil will be disastrous. In this issue, we take a look at The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Howard Kunstler. The author, a novelist and journalist who has written for the Atlantic and Rolling Stone, writes that we will fall into "an abyss of economic and social disorder on a scale that no one has seen before." Are he and his fellow doomsayers right?