Nov. 8--In 2004, writer David Owen wrote a piece for The New Yorker magazine that knocked conventional environmental thinking on its ear. His thesis was that if you look at what's important -- the amount of fossil fuels burned per capita -- the greenest city in the country, far and away, is New York, N.Y. Loud, smelly, gritty Gotham, the Big Apple, is greener than Portland, Seattle, Austin or anywhere in Vermont.

I happened to run into Owen at a conference earlier this year, and he said he had expanded the magazine piece into a book. I wished him well but wondered if there was enough more to say to fill a book.

There is. He did. "Green Metropolis -- What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability"(Riverhead Books) is a marvelously clear-eyed analysis of the growing energy/ environmental crisis.

"Every serious discussion of the environment ... is ultimately about oil, whether it specifically mentions oil or not," Owen writes. The explosive growth and general prosperity of the past century have been made possible by the "prodigious abundance" of oil; the problems of the coming century will involve "oil's increasing scarcity and cost."

Owen is not a crank or true believer about peak oil; he reports that the decline of oil production has been predicted for nearly a century. He looks at what we know for sure: However much oil is left, it's being used up at a rate of about 350 billion gallons a day; it's getting more expensive to produce; and demand is growing as China and India push ahead to repeat America's mistakes.

About two-thirds of all the oil produced in the U.S. and Canada goes to transportation, mainly cars, "a use for which there is currently no attractive fuel substitute."

And it's not just the Hummer in the driveway, Owen observes, it's everything the Hummer makes possible -- sprawl and its duplication of the built environment, oversized houses and irrigated lawns, added roads, costly extension of the power grid, 100-mile commutes, etc.

This whole way of life is dependent on cheap oil. Sooner or later, cheap oil will be over. Then what?

Make no mistake, it is going to be really, really hard to change, to restructure the American lifestyle. We like it and don't want to hear the clock strike 12. Most Americans are at least vaguely aware that importing foreign oil has a downside, yet continue to buy cars that are too big and to drive them too fast.

And it's not just cars: Petroleum products are part of the cost of everything we buy and do -- plastics, food products, clothing, etc. We're not taking a little gasoline with dinner, we are pounding it back all day.