As we enter the thirtieth year of Social Text, the United States, and with it the rest of the world, is weathering an unprecedented emergency brought on by three intertwined factors: a credit-fueled financial crisis, radically erratic energy prices linked to a speculative bubble brought on by the imminent peaking of oil supplies, and an accelerating climate crisis. If the unfolding climate crisis means that we should make a transition to a zero-carbon economy with the greatest possible dispatch, the coming energy crisis will constrain us to transform our behavior over the next decade as fuel supplies become tighter and hence more expensive. The lineaments of this change remain an open site of political conflict, although the terms of current debates are not really all that new. In fact, some of the key analyses of environmental issues in Social Text over the last several decades have not lost their bite and should help orient us in 

these harrowing times.