Predicting the future isn't something people can do. We suck at it, are super biased, and never seem to get things right.

The US may do well, it may not. You can pick any factors, or not pick any factors, and come to whatever conclusions you want. Anyone making claims should just be ignored in favor of pure, short-term, mathematical predictions and not broad far-off ones that have no real backing.

I know that some of my American readers will be shocked out of their socks to hear this, but the United States is not the whole world.

It's comments like this that really show how arrogant and idiotic this person is. It's a big statement that says only "I know some of you are stupid, but X fact is true".

If the United States implodes over the next two decades, leaving behind a series of bankrupt failed states to squabble over its territory and the little that remains of its once-lavish resource base, that process will be a great source of gaudy and gruesome stories for the news media of the world’s other continents, but it won’t affect the lives of the readers of those stories much more than equivalent events in Africa and the Middle East affect the lives of Americans today.

This person doesn't have a fucking clue how global trade works, and how truly interconnected the world is now-a-days.

The US isn't the center of the world, but you don't have the largest economy in the world, one of the largest producers of many food resources, the nation that supports militarizes that help to keep the whole world from building their own, and so on, without global consequences.

Greece, a single European nation with a GDP less than some US states, upon having issues, brought down the economies of other nations.

over the next one to three centuries, the benefits of industrial civilization are going to go away for everyone.

See above, you don't have a fucking clue what's going to happen in the next three centuries, and neither do I. Statements like this are false unless you have a time machine to tell you what will happen.

The next technology to change the world could be just around the corner, as easily as the next disaster to destroy it. Three centuries is a long time.

the immense treasure trove of concentrated energy embodied in fossil fuels, and that alone, made possible the sky-high levels of energy per capita that gave the world’s industrial nations their brief era of exuberance; as fossil fuels deplete, and remaining reserves require higher and higher energy inputs to extract, the levels of energy per capita the industrial nations are used to having will go away forever.

Fusion power, solar power, wind power, there is a massive ton of energy just waiting to be extracted, and we have the ability to easily create and distribute these things if we put the money behind it.

We will kill ourselves a thousand times over through global warming before we run out of oil anyways.

As those run out, the remaining energy resources—almost all of them renewables—will certainly sustain a variety of human societies, and some of those will be able to achieve a fairly high level of complexity and maintain some kinds of advanced technologies.

However, in the next three centuries the benefits of industry are totally going away?

The kind of absurd extravagance that passes for a normal standard of living among the more privileged inmates of the industrial nations is another matter

Is this person an engineer? A scientist? Someone who knows what the fuck they are saying? Lets see!

is an American author, independent scholar, historian of ideas, cultural critic, neopagan archdruid, geomancer, Hermeticist, environmentalist/conservationist, blogger, novelist, and occultist/esotericist.

Lol, culture critical, neopaegan, ocultist.

I'm done with this. This is pages of shit smeared on the internet by someone who doesn't know what the hell they are talking about.

I do find it interesting. Part of me agrees with him, and part of me does not. The part that doesn't still finds the discourse helpful because it may help some people reconsider their positions on stuff.

The author is spot on when it comes to fossil energy, in my opinion. Fossil energy alone is what catapulted civilization beyond burning wood for everything. And some key aspects of fossil fuels simply have no current replacement. The energy density of batteries is no match for a tank of gasoline or diesel or a pile of coal.

I disagree, however, that loss of access to electricity could occur in the US in just a few decades. Two things could limit access: insufficient generation or lack of wires. The wires are easy, and I think society will take reduced safety before losing access altogether. Generation would take a similar road, with people burning coal and garbage with the ash and flue gases going straight up the stack with no emissions controls. Nuclear would go a similar route, lifting or ignoring safety regulations to keep lights on. I think those are necessary first steps before any significant lack of access, and we aren't there yet.