Predictions . .
Daniel J. Lavigne
I have suggestions for softening the landing, but it ain't going to be
soft no matter what. I'd point up the following things:
(a) Government and big business are so deeply entrenched in a business
as usual model that no constructive action can be expected from them.
Individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods and communities should
plan on going it alone.
(b) The less energy and resources you use now, the less you'll be
impacted when the energy and resources aren't there any more. The more
things you can do for yourself, or get done by people in your local
area, the less dependent you'll be on industrial infrastructures that
will not survive the decline in fossil fuel supplies.
(c) The basic unit of human survival is the community, not the
individual. Anything that can be done to build local community, and to
link up communities with resources directly, is vital. For example, the
spread of community farmers markets -- in which people buy food directly
from local producers -- helps create a new, post-industrial food
distribution infrastructure. Every dollar you spend at a farmers market
rather than a grocery store improves the odds that you and your
neighbors will have something to eat when food can no longer
be shipped halfway around the world.
> This would require an explanation as to why the lights would go off
> first (electrical failure) before anything else and would also require
> an explanation as to why a consensus is emerging as to the overall
> decline in fossil fuels.
I don't think it's a matter of the lights being the first thing to go
out; what Rich has been saying, if I understand him correctly, is that
when the lights *do* go out, that's curtains for modern industrial
society. My take, at least, is that we'll see the following patterns
well in advance of the final blackouts:
(a) uneven, jerky upward movements in all energy and resource costs,
pushing them gradually out of reach of many people;
(b) shortages of goods and services, becoming gradually more frequent
and longer lasting, as transportation and production systems struggle
to cope with rising energy costs;
(c) ever more drastic economic volatility, with some sort of economic
crash and depression once the severity of the swings overwhelms the
ability of central banks to cope;
(d) agricultural failures in the Third World, caused by shortages of
fuel, fertilizer, agricultural chemicals, and water, leading to massive
migration and dieoff;
(e) rising civil unrest in much of the developed world, sparked by
economic contraction due to soaring energy costs;
(f) energy networks of all sorts (electric grid, natural gas
distribution systems, etc.) becoming increasingly unreliable, with spot
outages becoming ever more common as energy costs and dwindling supplies
make it financially impossible to maintain infrastructure and ensure
regular access;
(g) elimination of environmental protections in the hope that this will
allow more exploitation of energy resources, resulting in soaring costs
from damage to ecosystems and public health.
The collapse of the power grids will probably also be a process
stretched out over some years, with frequent smaller blackouts rising
to a peak of continentwide grid failure, then large (especially rural)
sections of the grid being abandoned while power is restored to core
urban and industrial areas, then more blackouts, smaller sections of
grid being restored, and so on until the cumulative damage to the
industrial economy and plummeting supplies of fuel bring the
whole thing to an end.
That's my take, at least.
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