In terms of the domino effect of collapsing economies, everybody around the world with the seeming exception of Norway is mortgaged to the hilt, so if France, for instance, found itself unable to pay their debts to Germany, for instance, then Germany would in turn be unable to pay its debts to the US, who would then be unable to pay its debt to Japan, or China. (Without just printing up piles of dollars, which of course is one of the things that led to the hyperinflation of the '30s.) If climate change is a reality, and the "thermohaline conveyor", that "heat pump" that we learned about in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" loses its salinity and thus its motive force, expect a lot of financial trouble at the very least.

In terms of changing our economy, there is one set of ideas that keeps on resurfacing--the ideas posited by the Apollo Alliance, who have a plan to revivify the economy by trying to position the US as a world leader in one of the three products that everybody needs more of: Energy. (the others are food and water,

Check 'em out. http://www.apolloalliance.org/

There's a lot of money to be made in new energy concepts, somebody's going to do it, and it may as well be us. One of the reasons I've been so opposed to the Republicans in office is that they are so married to and invested in the oil business that not only have they not pursued this fortune in alternative fuels, but they have actively blocked a lot of worthy efforrts in that direction, as has Detroit.