Novelist and nonfiction author James Howard Kunstler is perhaps best known as the preeminent critic of American suburbia. In his 1993 book The Geography of Nowhere, he combined moral outrage at the travesty of postwar development with incisive, specific explanations of what had gone wrong and why. Mindless zoning, separation of uses, cheap construction, watered-down modernism—but most of all, an environment built entirely to serve cars rather than people—all conspire to produce a landscape not only soulless but highly impractical in the long term. “More and more,” Kunstler wrote, “we appear to be a nation of overfed clowns living in a hostile cartoon environment… Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.” With The Geography of Nowhere (and its sequel, Home from Nowhere) Kunstler created a vocabulary for suburban dissent, and made a lot of people realize they were neither crazy nor alone in their unarticulated aversion to sprawl development.

With his latest book, The Long Emergency, Kunstler takes on a broader and even more vexing problem, joining a growing chorus of authors who warn that a rapidly approaching energy crisis is about to devastate the global economy and change everything about modern life. Basing their predictions on the work of the late oil geologist M. King Hubbert, these authors say that the world is at or nearing the ultimate global peak of oil production, after which oil supplies will slowly but inexorably deplete. The crisis will begin not when the final drop of oil is pumped, but at the moment production begins to decline and a combination of skyrocketing prices and chronic shortages throws the world economy into permanent recession.

Optimists may believe that high prices will spur investment in energy alternatives, but Kunstler makes a disturbing case that nothing on the horizon can replace oil (or natural gas, which has been depleting in the United States for some time). Instead, he envisions a series of brutal resource wars, followed by a general reversal of industrial progress leading eventually to a far more local, agrarian way of life. Anyone who believes (as most Americans do) that some miracle technology will arise just in time to save us is suffering from what Kunstler calls “the Jiminy Cricket syndrome”—a childish belief that any outcome we want can be had just by wishing for it.

Always witty, frequently caustic, Kunstler is not a writer who minces words or suffers fools gladly. At a time when political commentary either hews tightly to pre-scripted ideology or is so insubstantial as to practically evaporate upon close reading,...