I got rid of my car and rode a bicycle everywhere. I wasn't even in a car, except maybe one or two times in two years.
So yeah, I'm a fan of bicycling, and I'm a fan of mass transit. When I lived in the LA area, mass transit was some kind of joke.
People thought I was crazy because I refused to own a car back then; people think I'm crazy for other reasons today. However they all - this was LA after all, the city of vanity - were admiring and in some cases jealous of the splendid physical condition I was in. (I'm a physical wreck now, and I do own a car.)
I will note that I was injured on multiple occasions, one time severely enough to be checked to see if my organs should be donated, by collisions between cars and me while I was riding my bike. It was a tad unpleasant.
I can't say I spent a lot of time hanging around Peak Oilers - I had some exposure to them at Daily Kos before I was banned there for telling the truth - but to the extent they agree on climate, they're OK, I guess. I think I may have even posted on "The Oil Drum" a few times; I had some flirtations if I recall. I also recall seeing a few "we're all going to die without oil" types. Fracking drove the "peak oilers" underground though, even though fracking destroyed what's really underground basically forever.
City life is fine, if one can afford it, although clearly many coastal cities are threatened by the fact that anything we do now is too little to late. NY looks to have been severely damaged as I see it this morning. My heart is breaking when I see the videos of the subways. (My sister in law in Staten Island texted to say she expected to die, and asked us to take care of her cat. She eventually got home, and she lives on the fourth floor of an apartment building.)
Whatever.
The reality is however, that a great deal more than Kunstler knows or is qualified to know is available to view, and on some level his "solution," such as it is, is almost as simplistic as the "we can stop climate change with wind turbines" rhetoric one still regretfully and regularly hears.
For most of my adult life the general public consensus has seemed to be that we "need" oil more than we need air and water. There are people - Kunstler may have been among them, I don't remember - who think we can't have food without oil. The effects of these nonsensical ideas are becoming graphic.
We need energy, not oil, compact and sustainable energy, more dense and easier to contain than oil. We don't need to conserve energy, we need to make it accessible and clean. We need to consider access to energy as a basic human right so that human beings have more to do than fuck and have babies.
Energy conservation that is mass intensive which is what my somewhat badly written OP was supposed to discuss, is simply a shell game. Substituting "peak cobalt" or "peak neodymium" for "peak oil" is just silly.
A kilogram of plutonium has the energy content (80.028 terajoules, neutrino free) of 1917 tons of oil, using the IEA definition of "million tons oil equivalent," MTOE, which is 41,868 Terajoules or 41.868 gigajoules per ton. Since this energy, that obtained from plutonium, is reliable and has no need for redundancy, it will greatly reduce the requirements for neodymium and dysprosium, for two examples. (Neodymium is a fission product.)
I don't recall if little Jimmy ever paid a shred of attention to that fact, but I'm not going to check back on him to find out. He's little else than an amusing memory for me now. He's a tiny piece of the sordid history of my generation, which in many cases valued oil above human life, making it far more important than it ever should have been.
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