Peak Oil...The Fast Crash Scenario

VIA Peak Energy

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse Jan Lundberg brings us the Fast Crash Scenario: Goodbye American Dreamland

The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices up skyward. And as supplies can no longer slake daily world demand of over 80 million barrels a day, the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and even daily living in "advanced" societies. There may be an event that appears to trigger this final energy crash, but the overall cause will be the huge consumption on a finite planet

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. The damage that several days' oil shortage and outage will do will soon wreak permanent damage that starts with companies and consumers not paying their bills and not going to work.

After an almost instant depression seizes the modern industrialized world, and nation-states break down, the frantic attempts of people to feed themselves, stay warm and obtain fresh water (pumped presently via petroleum to a great extent), there will be no rescue. Die-off begins. The least petroleum-dependent communities will survive best. These "backward" nations will be emulated by the scrounging survivors of the U.S. and the rest of the "developed" world, as far as local food production will be tried -- in a paved-over, toxic landscape by people who have lost touch with the land

What about renewable energy and other alternatives? They are not ready and will never be as long as oil is king. This is something not acknowledged by the boosters of the technofix. When oil abdicates, no one can fill the shoes. (See Culture Change Letters on the Technofix such as # 77.)

However, there will be replacement societies, starting with bands, tribes and rural communities that will start cooperating amongst themselves as never before. The Age of Bioregional Countries, based on cooperation and mutual aid will begin. A main job-category will be restoration of the land so as to provide a semblance of the diversity of food that Earth provided prior to petroleum farming. Social structures will no longer lend themselves to overcrowded workforces dependent on the dollar to buy goods and services from huge, distant and unaccountable corporations. Argentina may be a guide to post collapse society, with its egalitarian and worker/citizen controlled systems.

He concludes with the following:

There is much to be said to a Congress that approved drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, invading Iraq, and passes huge budgets for more roads. The news media are loathe to offer up a spokesperson for the fringe who offends corporate sponsors of news programs. But the fringe is on the rise, and the message is actually all-inclusive and embraces humanity -- if only people can rouse themselves from the deceptive, destructive dream before a most rude awakening.
We must seize and create opportunities to connect people across the land to creative solutions and grassroots organizations.

I suggest you read the entire article and check out the references at the end. It's not too late but almost.