Julian Lincoln Simon once called energy the master resource, and he wasn’t engaging in poetic exaggeration. Without cheap, reliable energy, every other resource either stays buried, dormant, untapped—or, worse, everything previously built simply withers and dies like a neglected plant. That’s precisely what we are watching now in New York: the slow suffocation of a city that once strutted as if it were immune to gravity and immune to consequence. A city that shrugged off disaster and downturn for generations is discovering that even legends eventually run out of miracles.
Every civilization death spiral starts the same way: with arrogance, selective amnesia, and the delusion that the good times are structural rather than conditional. New York was always an improbable beast, a monument standing on sheer force of human will and relentless energy throughput. A city is, at its core, an artificial organism. It’s a knot of human bodies, commerce, infrastructure, exchange, and consumption—utterly incapable of sustaining itself without massive, constant input. And when that input becomes unreliable, expensive, or politically sabotaged, it doesn’t politely scale back. It collapses.
People forget how fragile cities actually are. They look permanent because they’re made of stone, steel, and glass, but their survival depends on a fragile web of “ins and outs”—goods flowing in, value flowing out, services, fuel, food, money, trust, opportunity. Take away the incentive to maintain those interfaces and they don’t merely deteriorate; they vanish. Whoever thinks this is just about energy prices is deluding themselves. It’s about whether the organism still has enough blood pressure to keep its organs alive.
In a crisis, cities are the worst place to be. The glamour evaporates, the entertainment dies, the “efficiency” narrative dissolves into chaos, and you’re left with a giant dependency machine gasping like a fish on concrete. New York always prided itself on being indestructible—resilient, undefeatable, eternally bouncing back. Fine. Even titans bleed out when you puncture the arteries deeply enough and let ideology do the rest.New York was always going to be hard to kill. But “hard” is not the same as “impossible.” Take away energy, take away incentive, take away the invisible scaffolding that keeps everything upright, and even the mother of cities can be brought to its knees. And right now, that’s exactly what we’re watching: not a tragedy of fate, but a slow-motion execution carried out by stupidity.
https://www.cfact.org/2025/12/22/fuel-rationing-chaos-looms-in-new-york-state/