Does it Really Matter?

I'll be out most of the day so I'll leave you with this to think about.

I have been quick to rant about Social Security, the debacle in Iraq, the Bankruptcy Bill, Bush's attempt to stack the courts with Christo-Fascists and other issues. But there is always this little voice asking "does this really matter?" That voice became very loud the other day while I was doing the post Peak Oil...The Fast Crash Scenario.

I have thought for the last twenty or thirty years that this civilization we are part of is in the declining portion of the sine curve. Having studied world history and archeology I was aware that this civilization would not be the first to reach it's "peak" and start to decline. I had always assumed that the decline would be slow however. Reading the work of Jared Diamond on the decline of the Easter Island (Easter Island's End ) and Mayan (The Last Americans Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization) civilizations I became aware that civilizations can decline very rapidly.

One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realize that a primary cause of the collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended. Fewer still appreciate that many of those civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth, and power.

Some civilizations like the Anasazi in the American Southwest, declined because of climate change. So that brings us to oil based Western Civilization. The people of Easter Island cut down all the trees they required to sustain their civilization. Our oil based civilization will soon pump the last drop of oil. Jan Lundberg's scenario in Goodbye American Dreamland sounds similar:

"The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart. Or Safeway or other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno-toys and whatnot from China will have no fuel. There will be fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger outages, violence and chaos. For only a short time will the police and military be able to maintain order, if at all."

That certainly sounds like the end of a civilization to me. It may happen very soon, it may happen latter but I fear it will happen. It's too late to adapt to a world with less oil now, we really needed to start 30 or 40 years ago. It's not easy to assign blame. The Republicans are to blame, the Democrats are to blame, the French are to blame and now even the Chinese are to blame. Most of all the citizens of this civilization are to blame. Would a politician who told an American he had to make radical life style changes ever get elected. I don't think so.

So what will happen? When will it happen? I don't have a clue but it doesn't look good. I suspect we are already in the beginning of the end of the world oil based economy. Political events could hasten the decline. I think major attacks on the Saudi Arabian oil infra-structure are inevitable. One or two major attacks could drive the price of oil over $100 a barrel over night. Declining civilizations do desperate things and wars will break out over the remaining oil; in fact of course they already have. This Bush administrations fascination with nuclear weapons is frightening. I'm 59 years old and we will see the collapse of the oil civilization in my lifetime and geo-political events could result in it happening very soon indeed.