The life of the doomsayer. Either you are Cassandra and the future is known to you but nobody will listen. Or you are chicken little screaming about nothing and were duped in to believing a lie. Let me start with pre-empts for the obfuscate rs: I do not think there is a certain date that hydrocarbon energies will cause a massive reorganisation of human civilization. I do not know whether it is near or far, but I do know that as demand and consumption increase exponentially it ca-not be sustained indefinitely.
With the pre-empt out of the way this blog will serve as my tracking of the end of the age of oil. I will start with the article that precipitated my desire to actually create a blog and I will be posting updates on the daily new record prices of oil.
So let me just get real ambitious and make a few predictions about the future based n what I see in the status quo.
1. The price of hydrocarbon energy will continue to go up until we run out of it.
2. the steady increase will be made worse by “shocks” that occur from over consumption and jumps in the market due to lack of fluidity.
3. This steady increase will cause a corresponding increase in all prices of everything that has a monetary value.
5. This will bring about a slow but steady destruction of the middle class
7. The destruction of the middle class leads to politically instability and revolts.
8. As the problem becomes more glaring but people still refuse to address the radical changes needed in the substantive4 structure of society we will see governments toppling and the dominant idea of the nation-state as the organizational entity most preferred by humans will fall out of sway for the first time since the treaty of Westphalia.
This series of events is inevitable without numerous “reforms”. Some of these include the end of the personal automobile, the end of aviation, the end of heating/air conditioning, the end of use of plastic for anything but necessary objects(healthcare, food[farm equipment], irrigation, etc.).
The reason this is inevitable though, is because these reforms cannot take place. In order for them to take place the entire world’s myriad Nation-states would have to all sign a treaty saying that this list of things was the only things they would use hydrocarbon resources for. This is not feasible, hell it is more feasible to say a world government or unipolar hegemon would set these rules up and enforce them with military power.
These actions are not feasible, so it seems that humans are dooming themselves with their greed and sense of self-desert. Well not all humanity but the segment of humanity which is called “civilized” or farther ahead in “progress”. We will find that this accumulation of wealth has a corresponding cost that is relatively far more serious than the gains of our greed.
So what to do? stand on the street corner with sandwich board? Indiscriminately kill people to feel self-righteous euphoria? I think we should all keep in mind that this is not the extinction of humanity that we face, we only face a massive reorganization in our communities and a substantive change in our lifestyles.
With that said this blog is also to categorize my mania and maybe teach myself that my paranoia is unfounded. Also one disclaimer: this will mostly be written while I’m working and thusly have held the control button and rolled the mouse wheel very far back and so cannot see anything that I am writing. Please excuse the armada of spelling and grammar errors.
