From 2001 through 2005, consumer spending and residential construction had together accounted for 90 percent of the total growth in GDP, while over two-fifths of all private sector jobs created since 2001 were in housing-related sectors, such as construction, real estate and mortgage brokering. Much of the money spent did not really exist except as credit — incomes as yet unearned, hallucinated liquidity, wished-for wealth, all based on the expectation that house values would continue to rise at 10 to 20 percent a year forever. It became a reckless racket, all predicated on sustaining an economy that had lost its other means for generating wealth — foremost its infrastructure for making things besides suburban houses.

This housing bubble economy represented, holistically speaking, the wish to maintain a sense of normality in American life, under conditions of disintegrating normality, and it is no symbolic accident that it centered on the images of hearth and home, because fundamental comforts were what many Americans actually stand to lose in a reality-based future. The decay of standards and norms in banking behavior applied-to-housing started, as in the case of the proverbial rotting dead fish, at the head, the federal reserve, and infected every lowly loan officer through the body until, in effect, lending standards ceased to exist.

The suburban housing bubble and its related activities were predicated on the idea that we could continue building out a living arrangement dependent on cheap oil and methane gas, and that all the subdivisions and strip malls would retain value for decades to come. Of course, this was the central delusion of the suburban sprawl economy, because it was obvious to anyone who gave the situation more than a cursory glance that cheap oil and gas were the things we were least likely to have in the decades to come.

The end of oil means a radical change in our way of life. But the truth is that oil has been sowing the seeds of our destruction and the sooner we give it up, the better.

If the peak comes soon we can be thankful because more oil would just dig us deeper into the climate change hole. Climate change appears to be accelerating more rapidly than predicted. We can live without oil and coal. We cannot live without a habitable climate. The worst-case scenarios for climate change involve dying, acid oceans and an atmosphere full of methane. The not-so-bad scenarios could still wipe out agriculture over large regions and drown every coastal city.

We are like the addict who would have died of an overdose if he hadn’t run out of smack first, so let’s be thankful that our supply is being cut off.