I just read the beginning of Chapter One from Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben.
http://www.billmckibben.com/deep-economy-excerpt.html

Wow. He is totally spot on about the end of the surge of the Industrial Revolution. All of this, all of what we know was the boon from the discovery of coal and oil and of man's discovery of how to put it to use for us. But we've now passed over the the halfway mark and are in the decline. Those supplies are drying up, we have to acknowledge that we can't rely on fossil fuels forever and that a new reality has to emerge for how we live and who we are, not just as Americans but as humans.

As we sit, those fuel supplies are being depleted minute after minute. As individuals it feels powerless to watch as industry bypasses us, raping the environment, lining their pockets with profits all at the expense of the average worker and meanwhile we settle into deep decline. There has to be a major shift in the way we experience life, not just how we do business. The point McKibben makes about economic GROWTH as the be all, end all of global industry for the last two centuries explains this, that we live the 'bigger is better' mentality without even thinking. But in order to escape, to break free and change direction, we need a new mentality, that bigger is not always better it's just bigger and sometimes more fragile and prone to breakage (as in the adage "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."). America as an empire is in decline, economically, socially, industrially, agriculturally. We have to find a way to arrest the crash of our civilization, slow it down to a plateau of live-ability. We cannot continue to grow indefinitely. There is a ceiling and all evidence is showing that we have not only hit that ceiling, we have splattered ourselves against it and are now watching as the broken pieces rain down upon us, confused and utterly ignorant to the consequences; that we may choke on our own matter. As the fallout rises, we drown in our greed.

I think the only way we are going to back away from this crisis is the general consensus of the voices of those who are feeling it the most and those who hear their cry. But it's certainly not something that those in power will relinquish easily. Who wants to abandon their home in the Hamptons, their Hummer or their 5 million dollar home?
I'm not advocating a socialist population or government in any way, but the way that wealth is distributed in 2008 in America is beyond stratospheric. The gulph between the "have's" and "have-nots" has never been wider. There is nothing left for all of us to do but fall down.