by Frank Johnson
The End of the Age of Excess (2008 – 2010)
For people living in there twenties in most western nations, this period of time will consist mainly of inconveniences, changes of plans, and lost dreams. Economic realities will be the first to strike before any actual resource frenzy. There will be less to go around for everyone, but luckily we waste so much there will be plenty of fat to cut. Costs of necessities like food, fuels, clothing, and anything imported will soar. Non-essential portions of the economy will suffer huge blows, trendy malls will be vacant, and five-dollar-a-cup-coffee shops will be scoffed at. You’ll wait in lines for hours to buy a rationed share of toilet paper, flour, sugar, and of course gasoline.
If you are attending or have recently graduated from a university, you may come to the realization that your education will not support the lifestyle you had expected it would or pay off the debts it cost you. You may get stuck working long term in jobs or organizations you once considered merely stepping stones or side jobs or even end up wondering what to do after being laid off from such a job.
You may return to live with your parents out of necessity (yours or theirs!) or stick in places with many roommates instead of living alone. The military will be a common alternative to under and unemployment to avoid debts. The path to the future will seem unclear to many as we watch many first time home buyers only slightly older than us lose their jobs and homes due to the constricting economy.
Limitations on transportation fuels will render some previous work, study, and living arrangements too costly to maintain. Air travel will become prohibitively expensive for those of us who used to fly to visit family or to attend school. Studying or traveling over seas will become much less common.
Political involvement will be popular as young people with little money and lots of time on hand to protest the lack of opportunities and voice their demands for ‘change’, however these proposed changes will be mainly window dressings and do little to address the real issue of resource depletion and peak oil.
At this stage it will be difficult to avoid noticing the growing numbers of the poor who did not have a “fallback” option in the economy like many middle class young people still do today. Poor neighborhoods will quickly become crime ridden “no go zones” for under funded police departments with low morale. Half vacant suburbs will fill with growing numbers of homeless. The remaining areas of commerce may only remain safe and orderly due to the presence of armed National Guard troops or paramilitary types, and trade may only consist of ration tickets or alternative currencies. Crime will be a real problem and the night will become more dangerous.
Immigration issues could be a hot point. As bad as it might become in the United States, peak oil could easily affect places in Latin America harder and sooner, sparking larger waves of immigration into a less well off, more edgy America. The inability of the government to assist so many people, and the competition for limited resources could rekindle racial tensions. Immigrants could become scapegoats for the economic troubles they had little to do with, while others may point out they add a greater burden to a struggling system.
The key point to realize here is during the initial phases of peak oil, the government will do its utmost to conceal the decline in production as a normal economic pattern, that while troubling, can be fixed and the good ole days will be back with the next bill to be passed, technology to be discovered, or currency to be unified. This will be a lie.
Break Point: The Furious Charge (2011-2019)
At some point in the future as most of us enter our thirties the world will undergo a great change. It may not happen all at once, and the changes will vary depending on the previous conditions, the culture of the area and what resources are available, but the general trend will be the same. Important government services will come from only local sources, not distant national ones. People will cling to the ideals of nations and democracy, but more overt control over government by those who control and operate vital local resources is much more likely.
Not all major cities or local governments will survive the transition from free close-knit states into linked but isolated units of power. Some locations might fall victim to civil unrest, natural disasters, or terrorism and become unsalvageable in the climate of limited resources. People in these areas could easily become victims of crime, refugees in their own nation, new members of the growing underclass in neighboring areas. Instant communications, once taken for granted, will be gone. News will be difficult to come by, and then will be tainted with misinformation, rumors, and propaganda.
Other more isolated areas may simply lack dense enough resources to be important to the new militant-utilitarian inspired United City-States of America and be left to fend for themselves the vast majority of the time. This will be a double-edged sword for people living in these more rural areas. The people will likely have to subsist totally on locally obtained food, provide their own security from numerous threats, and organize new local levels of government with no practical models currently existing for any of it today. While these people may have irregular contact with some sort of central government, they will more or less be on their own, or be forced to enter one of the major “federal ghettos”. What is worse is that the contact the outsiders do have with the government could very well just be the military collecting its “taxes” in kind at gunpoint. The major cities that do survive will be under martial law. The only operating organ of the government will be the military and it will be involved with every vital resource.
Wars, their duration, intensity, and results will also drastically change our future. Which regional power happens to dominate the remaining oil resources will be able to temporarily shift the burden of energy poverty on to other states. The wars themselves could be worse than simply going without fuel, if indeed nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction are used. To speculate further into such a future accurately is impossible.
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Frank Johnson is a 25 year old single male who graduated from the University of Houston, with a BA in History, minor in Chinese Studies. Beyond history, his interests are the civilization series of strategy games, computers, and Japanese animation, and now clearly, peak oil. It would be fair to say unlike many others who have approached peak oil from a left-leaning political perspective of environmentalism, Frank very much came from a more historical, right-wing influenced position, but to the same ultimate conclusion.
About Kathy McMahon
There is no real way to predict how and where civil unrest might happen. I’m in my late 20′s and have been peak oil aware for 4 years. I think that if governments take a different approach to building codes, renewable energy, walkable neighborhoods, local food production and other serious transitional issues we will get through all this. If they don’t and let the philosophy of survival of the best or most fit take hold, we will be in serious trouble. I’m in Canada and politicians seem to do things for the greater good up here. It has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
I’m starting a new career as a financial planner and it’s funny how my company doesn’t want me talking about energy scarcity. They say it’s unprovable even though I sent them government statistics from the United States Military and Canadian Geological Survey. The older “suits” are flying blind and will protect their “entitlements” to the end. This type of behaviour makes me angry and afraid.
I guess we will wait and see.
Thanks.
Dusko.
Its interesting (and quite scary ) to read this because it echoes so closely an e-mail I sent out to several friends a few months ago that I called ‘The Next 5 Years”. You are completely correct that we are entering an unprecedented and under appreciated crisis. I personally like J. Kunslers description of ‘Long Emergency’ because that is exactly what it is. I get so tired of trying to explain to people that we are NEVER going to get back to ‘normal’ there IS no NORMAL dammit. The best way to characterize the past 100 years is as a highly ABNORMAL period and we are about to return to the mean in big way.
I do have to point out that you fail to mention the financial aspect of the coming crisis and this is critical because I believe that it will grease the skids so to speak and make a bad situation much worse in many areas. Catabolic collapse can be sudden and quite severe. Particularly in areas with already thin margins.
In my own situation, Baltimore City and the greater mid-atlantic region, I hope that we can re-tool and re-localize quickly enough to avoid all out social collapse. There is a lot of pent up anger and hatred among the disadvantaged classes here and things could get bloody pretty quickly. Again, I get so sick of telling people that their gated communities and fancy houses don’t protect them when just a few miles away it’s ALREADY like a third world country.
I have been trying to get out ahead of this juggernaut mentally and emotionally but I feel as helpless as anyone. There are days I wish in a way I DIDN’T know about all of this because it often terrifies me but I won’t back away from the challenge.
Its up to your generation to really re-interpret your lives to the radically different reality that is coming. My generation, the X’s and Y’s have enjoyed our privileges and have become quite spoiled. We will be playing a painful game of catch-up and it is our responsibility to apply the lessons you learn or find ourselves ground to dust by the changes that are coming.
Mike and Dusko,
firstly, I took the time today to read your letters above, I find that here in Australia as a general rule that most people dont know about peak oil, its certainly NEVER spoken of in the mainstream media and most people I meet think that technology will save the day, I myself have trouble adjusting to not having ” plenty” I am in the baby boomer era, so I grew up with being able to find a job easy, better and better techology and cheaper cars and so on, I feel sad and angry because my son who is going through University won’t have what I had, that his studies may be wasted…..but he is aware of what is going on, I talk to him and we have a good relationship, but his studies will cost him alot in debt back to the Goverment! , also I can see what the future is to an extent, I just dont know fully yet how to cope( eg. my wife who I love dearly uses hair dye, to color her hair to hide some grey coming through, how do you tell a woman that she may not have hair dye to hide the grey?…she does it not for vanity…..but so she wont feel ” old”….is that unreasonable?)…and yes I am talking to her about peak oil and she is learning more to her credit.
Also in my case I went through a divorce about 10 years ago and had most things financial along with tools taken from me, so I am on a budget….after paying child support….you get the picture right ?, so how does one prepare? there must be MANY in my predicament, who helps them ?how do they get by ? I suspect they dont, they then become the disenfranchised, the desperate and hungry, a very volatile situation and at the time of me writiing this, so far just in the big city where I live, over 500 families have so their homes to the banks because of the sub prime crisis in the USA. and there are so far over 300,000 others ready to lose their homes if home borrowing rates go up much further……scary stuff, there is no end in sight…..
I am committed to learning more on permaculture and learning lots of new skills to be more useful.
more later
I have been investing in brass (9mm) and rice/pasta for awhile. Good thing, people are going to start getting hungry. When they do, they get motivated to eat… even if it means YOUR food.