Edited sentence: Charles Bensinger, co-founder of Renewable Energy Partners of New Mexico, describes Kunstler's views as "fashionably fear-mongering" and uninformed regarding the potential of renewable energy, biofuels, energy efficiency and smart-growth policies to eliminate the need for fossil fuels.Contrarily, Paul Salopek of The Chicago Tribune finds that, "Kunstler has plotted energy starvation to its logical extremes" and points to the US Department of Energy Hirsch report as drawing similar conclusions while David Ehrenfeld writing for American Scientist sees Kunstler delivering a "powerful integration of science, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change" with a "lengthy discussion of the alternatives to cheap oil.He also predicted, however, that in 2006 the United States housing bubble would start to deflate, which appears to be borne out by latest data.However, unlike Kunstler's Dow predictions, which were uniquely his, the bursting of the United States housing bubble was widely forecast before Kunstler began discussing it.In June 2005 and again in early 2006, Kunstler predicted that the Dow would crash to 4,000 by the end of the year.In his predictions for 2007, however, Kunstler admitted his mistake stating "Let's get this out of the way up front: the worst call I made last year was for the Dow to crumble down to 4000 when, in fact, it melted up to a new all-time record high of about 12,500.Kunstler responds to this criticism by saying that a Y2K catastrophe was averted by the hundreds of billions of dollars that were spent fixing the problem, a lot of it in secret, he claims.Kunstler, who majored in Theater at college and has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates, made similar predictions for Y2K as he makes for peak oil.The Dow in fact reached a new peak by 2007.The reason we saw this, in my opinion, was that inertia combined with sheer luck to keep the finance sector decoupled from reality…"