Agreed that JHK and others are "doomers" only in that we (I have to include myself) have a strong sense of the terrible inertia of cultural patterns;  Tainter, Diamond, Hornborg, Jacobs and others all illuminate in their various ways how cultural patterns (memes, lifeways, whatever you want to call 'em) can trump survival strategy, leading individuals or civilisations to shoot self in foot/head and die.

What Kunstler suggests -- and I've been saying the same things for years so I can hardly tut-tut at him despite his occasionally feverish rhetoric -- is that the "American Way of Life" meme (AWOL is a very good acronym for it, suggesting as it does a flight from responsibility) is such a foundational cultural pattern for the presently living 3 generations or so of residents of the industrial north, and such a powerful salvational mythology for billions in the "developing" south, and such a placebo/opiate for the hundreds of mio of poor within the industrial cultures, that it will be terribly difficult to get people to let go of it and deal with reality.  And Tainter and Diamond are there to remind us what happens when people en masse refuse to deal with pressing realities.

Compounding the traditional problem of an intractable ideology/religion cementing unsurvivable lifeways into place, is the other classic element of civilisational collapse:  an entrenched, highly concentrated elite (X-treme Elite, I guess) with little/no sense of responsibility and an intensified case of the same ideology... in other words, a kingly/priestly caste mesmerised by the same BS they feed the masses, and in possession of such a large chunk of the common wealth and such armed might and surveillance technology that they can by main force prevent the kind of social changes that might assist civilisational survival.  (Though as with many kingly castes they are not quite mad enough not to hedge their bets -- as the Bush Family Hacienda in remote Paraguay, and other bunker-like retreats being established by the aristocracy, suggest...)

These two problems -- intractable cultural mythologies and an overwhelming concentration of wealth and power in an intransigent authoritarian elite -- are two important factors in the inability of other, historical cultures to survive their moment of resource crunch.  The distancing of the US political elite from mainstream opinion "on the street" in their own country can be seen as a symptom of this divorce from reality;  certainly the Famiglia Bush/Cheney and its attempts to censor e.g. climate science fit the pattern of elites in flight from "inconvenient truths".

A fair amount of what ET does, when looked at from a distance, is to nibble away at those intractable mythologies -- the Anglo Disease, etc. -- and loudly discuss inconvenient truths ("feral facts" as Daly and Cobb called them) and hence also at the entitlement and consumption patterns that they justify.  But nibbling is hard and slow work, and events are moving fast.

We aren't Doomed in the sense that there is nothing that could be done -- we may be doomed in a worse, more maddening sense:  that our fate is not inevitable, and yet it seems our hands are tied by inertia and loyalty to outmoded ideas and unrealistic dreams.  That we could have acted in time to bail out the sinking ship, but we were afraid to get our hands dirty, thought bailing was beneath us, or subscribed to some odd millennial belief that the gods would give us gills at the last moment.

I live on an island where agriculture has been allowed to deteriorate to nearly nil activity, because it's "cheaper" to truck and fly in produce from the mainland and from all over the world ("cheaper" here means using wage-slave stoop labour and toxic factory ag methods, of course).  Best guesses are that if the planes and trucks stopped running, the island would run out of food in about 3 or 4 days.  This is, quite frankly, insane.  And yet most "civilised" people in the world are living in some version of the Berlin Airlift, like refugees in an encircled garrison having supplies helidropped daily -- long, frail supply lines utterly dependent on a fuel source that is daily becoming more scarce and hence more expensive, and whose continuing use is threatening the production of the very food products that it's being used to transport.  Seen from an alien perspective it is as bizarre as Napoleon's famous invasion of Russia, and as suicidal...

On reflection, I rest my hope in the legions of those amateurs that François so heartily despises :-) the growing (but fast enough?) groundswell of relocalisers, soil repairers, composters, market gardeners, bricoleurs/euses, young and old farmers, CSA organisers, radical cyclists, alternative currency experimenters, "simpler livers", urban gardeners, squatters and so on who are even now trying out the strategies that if adopted more widely might greatly soften the Thud as we hit the Brick Trifecta of peak oil, climate change, and resource liquidation...  I have a strong sense that it is they, not credentialled experts or government officials, who will hold our communities together and get people fed if we get to Stage 2 or (heaven forbid) Stage 3.  People who know how to make do with baling wire, string, and good faith may be our most valuable resource in another 5 or 10 years...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...