Peak Oil Scenarios

related pages:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.
-- Sir Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies, 1964

“If kindness and comfort are, as I suspect, the results of an energy surplus, then, as the supply contracts, we could be expected to start fighting once again like cats in a sack.”
-- George Monbiot

Die Off / Collapse scenarios:
population crash and the collapse of civilization

Permatopia / Powerdown scenarios:
use the remaining oil as a transition to sustainability

No one really knows precisely what will happen to civilization after Peak Oil and climate change continues to intensify. This page highlights a number of possible scenarios from the serious to the unimaginably grim, some variables that need to be considered when considering likely outcomes, and steps that could brings about positive transformations to a healthier way of living.

 

some scenario variables

probably the most important variable: the actual amount of petroleum that is still easily extractable

equally important: the amount of democratic decision making to determine how civilization will cope with natural limits

what we use the rest of the oil for? solar panels or battleships?

violence / non-violence: at community and global levels

regional warlords, neo-feudalism, corporate / government collusion

psychological preparation and reactions - consciousness shift

technological breakthroughs: efficiency, renewables, "free energy"

distractions and denial: abiotic oil, cornucopian / cargo cult, official government claims that Peak Oil will be in the 2030s (not now), Peak Oil an oil company conspiracy

is it profitable - can economics favor means of coping with Peak Oil

no jobs without energy to power economy / no jobs on a dead planet

one percent for peace or 100% for peace

rapture belief - a way to steer attention away from climate change, world war, resource depletion (it's God's will, not Exxon's fault)

perfect storm of climate change, Peak Oil, overpopulation, etc.

9/11 truth and reconciliation

China / US resource competition - and war? the Project for a New American Century versus the Project for a New Chinese Century

biowarfare and genocidal population reduction? OR contraceptives, family planning and the gentle reduction of overpopulation


We have the technical means to feed, clothe, and house all humanity. But legions starve because we have not learned to tolerate and support one another. People’s real problems are not technical, they are social and political.
- Toby Hemenway
http://energybulletin.net/3757.html


from “The Future according to Robert Crumb”
Whole Earth Review, Winter 1988
vote for your preferred future

(the "Fun Future" and the "Ecological Disaster" scenarios are probably the same)

 

www.energybulletin.net/22674.html

Published on 19 Nov 2006 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 19 Nov 2006.
Energy Descent Scenarios: Integrating Climate Change & Peak Oil
by David Holmgren

 

the "unsinkable" Titanic

 

http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3228

The Freezing Point of Industrial Society
Posted by Big Gav on November 14, 2007 - 7:00pm in TOD: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Demand/Consumption
This is a guest post by Kiashu. Kiashu says he has read a lot of books and sometimes been asked to write essays about them, has met a wide variety of people in his life and concluded that no, "they" won't just find an answer to our problems, and we really do have to worry. He is a good example of the fact that in the internet age anyone with a brain and too much time on their hands can find out just about anything and talk about it intelligently.

denying the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and the falling affordability of them means that a society is more likely to collapse directly from a wasteful industrial to a manual economy, while preparing for it allows the possibility of transiting to an ecotechnic economy.


from OilScenarios.info

 

 

Richard Heinberg
"Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World"
www.museletter.com/Powerdown.html

www.museletter.com/partys-over.html
Richard Heinberg
THE PARTY'S OVER Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies

There is much that individuals and communities can do to prepare for the energy crunch. Anything that promotes individual self-reliance (gardening, energy conservation, and voluntary simplicity) will help. But the strategy of individualist survivalism will offer only temporary and uncertain refuge during the energy down-slope. True individual and family security will come only with community solidarity and interdependence. Living in a community that is weathering the downslope well will enhance personal chances of surviving and prospering far more than will individual efforts at stockpiling tools or growing food.
Meanwhile, nations must adopt radical energy conservation measures, invest in renewable energy research, support sustainable local food systems instead of giant biotech agribusiness, adopt no-growth economic and population policies, and strive for international resource cooperation agreements.
These suggestions describe a fundamental change of direction for industrial societies -- from the larger, faster, and more centralized, to the smaller, slower, and more locally-based; from competition to cooperation; and from boundless growth to self-limitation.
If such recommendations were taken seriously, they could lead to a world a century from now with fewer people using less energy per capita, all of it from renewable sources, while enjoying a quality of life perhaps enviable by the typical industrial urbanite of today. Human inventiveness could be put to the task, not of making ways to use more resources, but of expanding artistic satisfaction, finding just and convivial social arrangements, and deepening the spiritual experience of being human. Living in smaller communities, people would enjoy having more control over their lives. Traveling less, they would have more of a sense of rootedness, and more of a feeling of being at home in the natural world. Renewable energy sources would provide some conveniences, but not nearly on the scale of fossil-fueled industrialism.
This will not, however, be an automatic outcome of the energy decline. Such a happy result can only come about through considerable effort.
There are many hopeful indications that a shift toward sustainability is beginning. But there are also discouraging signs that large political and economic institutions will resist change in that direction. Therefore much depends upon the public coming to understand the situation, taking personal steps, and demanding action from local and national governments.


Richard Heinberg, "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," (New Society Publishers, 2003):

For the next half-century there will be just enough energy resources left to enable either a horrific and futile contest for the remaining spoils, or a heroic cooperative effort toward radical conservation and transition to a post-fossil-fuel energy regime.

The next century will see the end of global geopolitics, one way or another. If our descendants are fortunate, the ultimate outcome will be a world of modest, bioregionally organized communities living on received solar energy.

 

note: This second possibility would require investing some of the remaining cheap oil in renewable energy technology, relocalizing food production, and a democratic revival in the United States.


www.ranprieur.com/essays/slowcrash.html
"The Slow Crash" by Ran Prieur

 

www.ranprieur.com

November 7 (2007). So the dollar is in free fall, global oil extraction has peaked, and crash news sites like LATOC are scarier than ever -- a hundred years from now, they'll file 2007 with 1929... yet when you look around, it's hard to see anything changing. Gasoline and milk are more expensive, one of your neighbors moved away and nobody moved in, and your credit card just sent you a few pages of fine print about some new ways they can charge you 29%.

I've been saying this for years: The Road Warrior crash scenario is not something we fear, but something we fantasize about, something we secretly hope for, because it would make life simple and raw -- the winners would have a fun time and the losers would not have to suffer long. The real crash will be in many ways more painful: you'll still have to go to your job and pay bills and get stuck in traffic, but everything will be a little crummier, a little less predictable. You will see more depressed people and rambling crazies and potholes and buses that never come and long lines and important phone numbers where nobody answers. Your whole city will not be wiped out by a biowar super-plague, but here and there someone you know will die of cancer or MRSA. Even when oil is $200 a barrel, I predict that more people will die of car crashes than starvation.

Of course I could be wrong. It's prudent to prepare for worse than you're expecting, which is why I bought land with drinkable water and stocked it with quinoa and red wheat and honey, and spent more than $2000 on food-bearing perennials and really good tools. If you have some dollars you need to dump while they're still worth something, I recommend apple trees and blueberry bushes and a solar oven and a Gransfors Bruks small forest axe and a solar battery charger and a Sierra zip stove and a good sleeping bag and a good pair of boots and a bicycle with racks and panniers and maybe a five gallon bucket of nitrogen-packed quinoa, or a course in wilderness survival or permaculture. But I really think if you're healthy and adaptable, you can make zero preparations and do better than the most prepared person who is not adaptable.

You know how Windows Vista sucks so bad that it's driving people to Linux? The same thing is going to happen with the "operating system" of our whole global society. Many doors will close, but if you know how to look, and how to change your ways, you will find the doors that are opening.

 

www.ranprieur.com/essays/fallsix.html

Fall Down Six Times
by Ran Prieur
March 15, 2006


 

www.freepress.org/departments/display/3/2007/2564

Green Beacon
By Robert C. Koehler
Created Apr 26 2007

Harvey Wasserman's newly published "Solartopia!" is a breath of fresh air, blowing -- well, whipping, at Great Plains velocity --across the thinking person's vision of the future. What a gift this book is: an informed, science-savvy vision of tomorrow that isn't an eco-nightmare.
Rather, it's an enthusiastically optimistic look at a rational, very green near future. (To order, go to solartopia.org [1].) The setting is 2030; the premise is a flight in a hydrogen-fueled airship from Hamburg to Honolulu, with Wasserman serving as tour guide and eco-historian as we watch the world unfold beneath us and gradually learn about the death of King CONG, the joyous global proliferation of rooftop gardens and how all those giant wind turbines wound up off the coast of Holland, among much else.
King CONG, an acronym of Wasserman's coinage -- Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas -- is the fossil-fuel addicted junkie-beast we think of today simply as reality, but to the relaxed narrator of "Solartopia!," this beast, which in 2007 seemingly runs the world and holds it hostage to its appetites, is nothing more than a historical curiosity.
Listen up, boys and girls: We make it! We survive as a species. King CONG collapses of its own irrationality. Mind you, it ain't pretty, but by 2030 its death throes, its meltdowns and final mad wars of resource acquisition (though not, of course, its radioactive waste and eco-dead zones) are behind us, and renewable-resource technology -- wind, solar and biomass, along with extreme techno-efficiency -- powers the human race to a sustainable, prosperous and democratic future, in which healing can begin.
This isn't sci-fi. Wasserman, prolific author and long-time environmental activist, describes a world that has rethought and rebuilt itself on the basis of what we know right this moment. "All the technology that was ever needed for a post-pollution world was available in 2007," he writes. He also makes the point that this technology, once the foot of King CONG is off its chest, is hugely profitable. That's the clincher.
" Solartopia!" powers along, as we silently cross Europe in the hydro-jet, then glide across the Atlantic Ocean and the North American continent, with nonstop ironic wonder that the world below us was once run by self-destructive fools.
" Nuke weapons were once tested here," our guide, for instance, informs us as we cross Nevada. "Then King CONG tried to stuff the place with radioactive waste. The dormant volcano at Yucca Mountain was once drilled with a $10 billion tunnel-and-train gizmo meant to accept huge quantities of spent reactor rods. Now it's just another offbeat tourist attraction, with slot machines in the caverns and a spa in one of the would-have-been waste chambers."
The pervading good sense that prevails in Wasserman's 2030 is predicated on the existence of a human survival instinct that, while responsive to fear, is not centered in the reptilian (fight or flight) brain. Oh my, I hope he's right.
When "people began keeling over dead from China's brown, filthy air," the guide notes, and "the wrath of climate chaos drowned millions and starved more," what happened wasn't the worst of human nature coming to the fore but -- my God, finally -- the emergence of our capacity to take the long view.
A sustainable world "became less an impossible dream than a fervent prayer for deliverance," he writes. "And it demanded, first and foremost, that we 'face the waste.' To avoid extinction, ultra-efficiency became a vital necessity. . . . Nothing -- NOTHING -- on 'Spaceship Earth' is manufactured that cannot be . . . recycled or composted."
Wasserman even cites a late-20th-century cultural reference point for inspiration: the 1995 Ron Howard/Tom Hanks movie "Apollo 13," about the ill-fated 1969 moon expedition that, following a shipboard explosion on the return trip, "could only limp back to Earth by preserving every electron their damaged craft could muster." This heroic flight becomes the metaphor for the plight of the whole planet.
In the twilight of the era of King CONG, Wasserman writes, "the West wasted fully half the juice it produced" and the emerging economies of Asia were even worse. Turning this around was not simply a matter of "super-compact fluorescents, ultra-light composites, mega-efficient manufacturing, totally tight solar building designs," but also, ahem, the rational recycling of waste, human and otherwise.
" Sewage systems everywhere," he writes, "double as energy-generating compost operations" and have morphed into "the trillion-dollar business of converting waste to power. Few today can comprehend it . . . but this country once actually dumped human waste onto the lands and into the oceans!"
The only downside to this book is that it ends, and we're left treading the polluted water and grappling with the flaky politics of 2007. The book returns us to a world that believes far more in guns than recycling; and our survival -- our willingness to make peace with the planet -- is still very much in doubt. But with "Solartopia!" Wasserman has planted a beacon two decades into the future to guide us past the rough spots.

About author Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bob@commonwonders.com [1]
Source URL:
www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7065

 


www.cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/Apocalypse_and_NWO.html

Apocalypse Now and the Brave New World
Richard Moore

21 Sep 2005

We are now on the cusp of one of the most momentous historical episodes of all time — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are about to ride. Peak oil is the primary underlying condition forcing change, and Apocalypse is the action plan ruling elites have chosen as their response to that condition. Not only does this response make a great deal of sense, from their Machiavellian perspective, but by their recent actions they have clearly signaled the scope and direction of their intentions. Furthermore, their planned response is in complete alignment with earlier responses to similar situations in the past — by these same people or by their direct predecessors.

The Four Horsemen of this Apocalypse:

  • Collapse
  • Genocide
  • War
  • Fascism

Peak oil is real. That is to say, we have reached the point where our annual consumption of oil is considerably greater than our annual ability to develop new sources. While global consumption continues to increase, potential sources can only decrease. No matter what anyone does, our oil-based global economy cannot continue for much longer in its current form — at current population levels. At the same time, we must remember that the remaining reserves are vast — perhaps the same amount remains as has ever been pumped, although it will become increasingly expensive to extract.

The fact of peak oil, in itself, does not necessarily imply that apocalypse is inevitable. If humanity were to face this problem in a sensible way, there is much that could be done to alleviate the crisis, re-organize our societies and economies, localize our production and consumption, reduce our wasteful practices, move to appropriate technologies, develop alternative energy sources and transport methods, etc. But it is not ‘humanity’ that is in the driver’s seat


www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1813695_1,00.html

The Sunday Times October 16, 2005
Waiting for the lights to go out
We've taken the past 200 years of prosperity for granted. Humanity's progress is stalling, we are facing a new era of decay, and nobody is clever enough to fix it. Is the future really that black, asks Bryan Appleyard

The greatest getting-and-spending spree in the history of the world is about to end. The 200-year boom that gave citizens of the industrial world levels of wealth, health and longevity beyond anything previously known to humanity is threatened on every side. Oil is running out; the climate is changing at a potentially catastrophic rate; wars over scarce resources are brewing; finally, most shocking of all, we don't seem to be having enough ideas about how to fix any of these things.

It's been said before, of course: people are always saying the world will end and it never does. Maybe it won't this time, either. But, frankly, it's not looking good. Almost daily, new evidence is emerging that progress can no longer be taken for granted, that a new Dark Age is lying in wait for ourselves and our children.


Domino Effect and Interdependencies
Powerswitch


Solstice 2100

http://energybulletin.net/23432.html


The "Doctor Strangelove" solution to Peak Oil (biological warfare)
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2005/05/voyage-of-beagle.html


http://peakoil.net/

Association for the Study of Peak Oil - Newsletter 52 - April 2005

530 Reacting to terminal illness

Brian Regan makes a telling comparison, commenting as follows:

It has occurred to me that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' "grief cycle," initially discovered by her as the typical path of a patient’s reaction to the unwelcome news of terminal illness, might also be applied to the end of cheap, suitable oil. I am listing it here, with my own guesses (in parentheses) about the reactions to peak oil, and some conjectures respecting the time frames of such reactions. I think it sums up much that has been written about the future effects of the phenomenon.

Shock Stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news. (Inability to relate the prospect of growth cessation to anything in past experience.) ca. 2000

Denial Stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable. (Rigid refusal to accept the outlandish notion that cheap oil of the right kind will end soon.) 2000-2007

Anger Stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion. (Outrage at "Big Oil," Saudi Arabia, China, government taxation, etc.) 2005-2009

Bargaining Stage: Seeking in vain for a way out. ("Throw the bums out" by electing new leaders, heavy investing in expensive alternatives, calls for "science" to save us, expecting a deus ex machina.) 2008-2012

Depression Stage: Final realization of the inevitable. (Even flat-earth economists surrender, presidential politicians state facts publicly, businesses begin collapsing in droves, return of the Great Depression foretokens collapse.) 2011-2015

Testing Stage: Seeking realistic solutions. (National impoverishment forces abandonment of socialist policies and international development aid, various alternative-energy schemes tested and most abandoned, local farming grows, large cities wither, beginnings of martial law to keep order, interregional conflicts.) 2013-2025

Acceptance Stage: Finally finding the way forward. (War, collapse.) 2018-2075


www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/040505Stanton/040505stanton.html

Overview: The Great Energy War
US & Allies Neutralized, World War III Ends
By John Stanton
Online Journal Contributing Writer

The Treaty of Jakarta, signed in 2045, brought an end to the global conflagration that was World War III.
That conflict saw the US, Pakistan, Israel, Japan, Taiwan, England and Australia in bloody conflict against China, India, Russia, France, Germany, Iran, Venezuela and Brazil. Other nations joined the fray and formed uneasy alliances with one side or the other. For example, Vietnam lent its considerable knowledge of combat against US forces to China. Mexico took sides with the US and put its population surplus at the disposal of the US military apparatus. The war killed billions, put to waste and made uninhabitable sizeable areas of the globe, and led to a global pandemic that killed millions more.
WWIII was initiated by the US, a nation with 4.5 percent of the world's population that, until war's end, was consuming over 50 percent of the world's resources. At issue was the US attempt to dominate oil and gas supply, demand and transit.


www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/BreakingNews.html
Matt Savinar

I tell people when they ask me for the "good news" about the coming collapse:

"Well, if we don't get a total collapse, the government / corporations are going to have us all chipped, tagged, drugged, and living in slums patrolled by Chinese- made robotic soldiers with strangely familiar sounding Austrian accents."

 

www.inthewake.org/savinar1.html
Matt Savinar, LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net

People tend to think of alternatives to oil as somehow independent from oil. In reality, the alternatives to oil are more accurately described as "derivatives of oil." It takes massive amounts of oil and other scarce resources to locate and mine the raw materials (silver, copper, platinum, uranium, etc.) necessary to build solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants. It takes more oil to construct these alternatives and even more oil to distribute them, maintain them, and adapt current infrastructure to run on them. ...

it is still possible for the world economy to run on a basket of alternative sources of energy - so long as we immediately get all of the following:

  1. A few dozen technological breakthroughs;
  2. Unprecedented political will and bipartisan cooperation;
  3. Tremendous international collaboration;
  4. Massive amounts of investment capital,
  5. Fundamental reforms to the structure of the international banking system;
  6. No interference from the oil-and-gas industries;
  7. About 25-50 years of general peace and prosperity to retrofit the world's $45 trillion dollar per year economy, including it transportation and telecommunications networks, manufacturing base, and agricultural systems to run on these new sources of energy;

If we get all of the above, we might be able to get the energy equivalent of 3-5 billion barrels of oil per year from alternative sources.

That's a tremendous amount of oil - about as much as the entire world used per year during World War II, but it's nowhere near enough to keep our currently mammoth-sized yet highly volatile global economic system going. The world currently requires over 30 billion barrels/1.2 trillion gallons of oil per year to support economic growth. That requirement will only increase as time goes on due to population growth, debt servicing, and the industrialization of countries like China and India.

So even if the delusionally optimistic scenario described above is somehow miraculously manifested, we're still facing a full-blown meltdown of petrochemical civilization.

-- Matt Savinar, lifeaftertheoilcrash.net


The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers: a demographic explosion that triggers social chaos and spreads death, nuclear delirium and the quasi-annihilation of the species... Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.
-- Jacques Cousteau

October 29, 2004 © IN THESE TIMES

The End is Near
By Kurt Vonnegut

I am writing this before the election, so I cannot know whether George W. Bush or John F. Kerry will be our President, God willing, for the next four years. These two Nordic, aristocratic multi-millionaires are virtually twins, and as unlike most of the rest of us as a couple of cross-eyed albinos. But this much I find timely: 
Both candidates were and still are members of the exclusive secret society at Yale, called “Skull and Bones.”
That means that, no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones. 
Poetry!
What was the beginning of this end? Some might say Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge. I say it was Prometheus, a Titan, a son of gods, who in Greek myth stole fire from his parents and gave it to human beings. The gods were so mad they chained him naked to a rock with his back exposed, and had eagles eat his liver.
And it is now plain that the gods were right to do that. Our close cousins the gorillas and orangutans and chimps and gibbons have gotten along just fine all this time while eating raw vegetable matter, whereas we not only prepare hot meals, but have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than 200 years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels.
The Englishman Michael Faraday built the first dynamo, capable of turning mechanical energy into electricity, only 173 years ago. The first oil well in the United States, now a dry hole, was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania, by Edwin L. Drake only 145 years ago. The German Karl Benz built the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine only 119 years ago.
The American Wright brothers, of course, built and flew the first airplane only 101 years ago. It was powered by gasoline. You want to talk about irresistible whoopee?
A booby trap.
Fossil fuels, so easily set alight! Yes, and as Bush and Kerry are out campaigning, we are presently touching off nearly the very last whiffs and drops and chunks of them. All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery.
And nobody can do a thing about it. It’s too late in the game. Don’t spoil the party, but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.
So there goes the Junior Prom, but that’s not the half of it.


www.energycrisis.org/news/article.asp?id=1835&ssectionid=0
Genosuicide by Brian R
Oil Crisis News from Around the World
Seattle, WA - July 24, 2001

We are heading directly for the Olduvai cliff. Apocalypse. Ragnarok. Doomsday.
I have talked with many individuals about the coming end of cheap oil and what it means for global civilization. Done my best to explain the facts as laid out by Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Duncan, Youngquist, Ivanhoe, etc.; brought out the additional details provided on the great German website, energiekrise.de; and, above all, pointed out the incisive historical insight of Joseph A. Tainter ("The Collapse of Complex Societies"). All in vain. I am viewed by all and sundry as a "kook," an alarmist on the fringe of society who isn't quite right in the head, or a vociferator of trivial opinions. Let's all turn to the sports pages....
The utter disconnect between oil prices and oil depletion makes it impossible for any serious public consideration to be devoted to the imminent collapse of the world economy. At least, any consideration by the American electorate.
In contrast to the somnolence of the U.S. voter, the current American high command, I have discovered through careful attention, is perfectly aware of what is coming. Their goal (if any) seems to be to keep the masses absorbed in diversions like gay rights, racial profiling and free drugs for seniors while they themselves prepare for the Novus Ordo Seclorum (cf. the dollar bill) of rapid population reduction.
America's "unconditional-surrender" victory in WW II was a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. For it enabled not just the long-term survival of Communism, the most murderous ideology the world has EVER seen, but the development of fantasy as political tool. From 1945 on, the U.S. and its client states, imagining themselves possessed of divine powers, have sucked the world dry of its cheap oil - the only chance our species will have had to make the leap to a higher stage of evolution.
It is useless to try to explain to invincibly ignorant economists that their math, charts and tables are valid only within certain carefully prescribed limits. All but a few are convinced that trees can and will grow to the moon, given enough money. The Zeitgeist is too powerful. Everyone wants to jump off of the cliff at the same time, since anything else is unthinkable, and the political structure is unchangeable.
Thus we can sum it up: the American experiment has failed. The U.S. Constitution is a suicide pact. For the few who would like some faint idea of what is ahead, I suggest reading about the savagery which accompanied and followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire (ca. 450-650). When reading, remember: now we have nukes.


Note: the "propaganda matrix" website now proclaims that Peak Oil does not exist. But this was a good article, despite their recent slide into sillyness.

propagandamatrix.com/010903civilization.html

Civilization to End Soon, Does Anybody Care?
Tate Ulsaker

Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.  This is not the wacky conclusion of a religious cult but rather the result of diligent analysis sourced by hard data and the insiders who study global “Peak Oil” and related geo-political events.  If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: Your self-indulgent coma is the only real slave master.  You do have control over your future.
About 99% of the people who read this will learn about Peak Oil for the first time.  We have our mass media and “public servants” to thank for that.  However, you have the power to learn enough in one day to make a difference between life and death to your loved ones.  You owe it to yourself to become educated about Peak Oil.  Getting started is simple; just do a word-search on “post-oil civilization” or “Peak Oil” for example.  Print whatever you understand and educate your family and friends.  Do it today.  Your life may depend upon it.

www.peakoil.net
www.hubbertpeak.com
www.postcarbon.org
www.dieoff.com - Highly recommended resource for laymen
www.asponews.org
www.oilempire.us/peakoil.html
www.oilcrisis.com
www.energycrisis.org
www.greatchange.org/dinosaurblood.html
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/#oil
www.museletter.com/partys-over.html
www.eia.doe.gov

Peak Oil, Peak Population and Peak Domination

Oil, the blood of our economy is running dry, threatening every nation, industry, product, and job with cataclysmic overhaul.  The world has already consumed about half of the total recoverable oil.  From here on out, greater populations will continue to demand more of the ever-dwindling and irreplaceable resource, driving living costs higher, placing most of the world into a fight for survival.
Most people alive now don’t realize how important oil is in their life.  From cheap energy came cheap food and from cheap food came you and I and our self-indulgent lifestyles.  Long ago, net consuming governments crafted a “cheap energy policy” in order to bring about economic prosperity, a one-time golden age.  During this age we exalted our power as individuals with motors and electronic devices and products from far off lands.  When this age is finished, we will return to the family and to nature.  We will again work by the sweat of our brow. 
Unfortunately, before that happens, we should first endure the coming “population correction” unlike anything in the history of mankind.  Starting slowly now and increasing with intensity along with the price of oil, billions of people will return to sustenance living, eating and burning whatever they can find.

When people are angry, politicians have one or two choices: lock them up or fight them against an enemy.  Politicians will attempt to shift the blame to an energy grid, terrorism, or any other “fightable” source.  We can’t fight peak oil but don’t worry, our leaders will find a “victorious” war for us.  Just don’t expect to learn the truth from them.
No Substitute for Oil
Contrary to popular legend, a viable alternative to the portable power of oil hasn’t materialized.  Electricity is not efficient; units of storage are too bulky.  Solar panels are even more inconvenient and they cost more energy to create than they give during their entire lifetime.  Despite pop-science affection, hydrogen and hybrid fuels are too energetically expensive to produce and so will not substitute oil.  Coal, natural gas and nuclear energy require the use of rapidly diminishing resources as well, and none of them are a viable alternative to oil anyway.  Wind and waves are continuous sources of power but will hardly jumpstart our oil-addicted economy.  In short, we are soon to be without cheap fuel for our engines to burn.
At this point, most people immediately cling to the well-worn mantra: “Oh, they will think of something.” But think for a moment whether “they” are public servants at your service or whether you are “their” public slave at their economic slaughterhouse.

The OPEC crossover point in world oil production.  Duncan and Youngquist. www.dieoff.com/page133.htm

The above chart clearly shows why we have a war in Iraq.  While terrorism is a clear and present danger, war is being used primarily as a tool to position against a post-hyper-carbon-burning world.

Who Are Our Masters?

A war is waging between net consumers and net suppliers of oil.  Western counties are net consumers of oil.  Western countries would like to maintain superior geo-political hegemony against net supplier countries.  The chess board is simplified on the top, where all the action is, because leadership is being bought on all sides by International Bankers and Financiers (Globalists, New World Order proponents) who have owned the American political spectrum since at least 1913.  They triangulate above this war, and seek to organize a one-world monopoly government.  Their deadline for world domination approaches as peak oil threatens to unravel their power base.  The best way for a leader of today to stay in power is to form a world government, hoard resources, rule over a fiefdom of dying serfs while living in relative luxury, and blame as many convenient outside causes as is possible.
In his article “Neo-Conned” by Dr. Ron Paul, Congressman from Texas, we learn that our current American Presidency has more in common with the Third Reich than with the traditional conservative movement.  As a registered Republican, I can affirm with Ron Paul that the Republican Party once stood for small and non-intrusive government and strong constitution-based laws.  While having some fundamental differences with the Democratic Party, both parties sought social justice at the heart of their constituency. 
But what we have with the “Neo-Cons” of the Bush administration, according to Ron Paul (and others) is the worst of both worlds: A big corporate-based government and military machine seeking a police state and a New World Order with America at the helm.
Officials within the Bush Administration have written strategic papers on international policy using the term “Pax Americana” meaning US dominance in the world for purposes furthering global government.  Not to be ignored, US domestic policy calls for strict laws leaning towards a police state.  What better way to solidify the base at home than to throw people who demonstrate against the government into camps as terrorists?  Hey, when the starvation riots begin, leadership will have to defend itself, right?  But as they prepare of your starvation riots, most of the world is still running on the treadmill of consumerism and self-indulgent lifestyles as lemmings going over a Norwegian Fjord.
Bush is not our master, but his masters in the International Financial Cabal are our masters.  They rule over all parties, not just Bush or Clinton.  Their power to print fiat money insures their worldly position.  Also, their power is in a stupid and complacent society of self-indulgent dolts.  So wake yourself up and awaken your family and neighbor.  Your coma of ignorance is life threatening.

The Coming World-Wide Holocaust

Today, we have 6 billion people on earth.  Without oil, the earth will support 2-3 billion tops, and only if we stop desecrating our environment right now.  For as long as oil prices remain artificially cheap, we will continue to multiply until the feared “supply cliff” arrives.  When that happens, our materialistic Industrial Civilization will have a head-on crash with the Stone Age on steroids.  Avoiding this is hardly possible.  The only way to reduce starvation, wars, pestilence and cannibalism at this point is to raise the price of oil right now, forcing change earlier.

THE PEAK OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION AND THE ROAD TO THE OLDUVAI GORGE, Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D., dieoff.com/page224.htm

Either way, the hour is late.  Demand will outstrip supply sometime between 2005 and 2020.  As a rule, sooner is better than later because a more painful "die off" is produced on the "ghost acres" of abundant cheap energy through time as we continuously multiply towards the abyss. 

The Globalists have already made their calculations and they remain silent, indicating content to see us meet their dreaded supply cliff without warning.  Surely, they will have plenty of Hegelian dialectical enemies, both real and imagined, ready to divide us equally into every possible cockfight.   Predictably, the usual shadows will fight us: Left against the Right, ethnos against ethnos, rich against poor, male chauvinist against feminist, blah, blah, blah.  But in reality it’s really just the Globalist Cabal against their deliberately dumbed-down masses.  The only person with any power to warn you or save you is you, so awaken from your slumber.

Sliding towards a post-industrial stone age.  Duncan and Youngquist. http://www.dieoff.com/page125.htm You will miss oil when it is gone.  Oil is primarily responsible for giving you everything you own.  Oil is the most exploited slave that ever existed.  If you don’t know already, you need to understand some fundamental facts about the impact of oil on food, for example: An acre of land will produce up to 130 bushels of maize (that is corn for you Americans) when we use tractors running on diesel and oil, fertilizers using oil-based nitrogen, and if necessary, irrigation using oil-based water pumps plus don’t forget oil-based herbicides, pesticides.  That same acre of land will produce just 30 bushels of maize without all that stuff.  Now, let’s talk about getting that corn to the market.

Are you ready to ride your horse or bicycle?  The American farmer, using oil, feeds 98 people today.  Tomorrow, he will feed his own family and about 20 other people.  So what are the other 70-something people going to do?  Probably first they will riot.  Then they will be locked into camps.  After that, they may one day look up and read as sign that says: “Work Makes One Free”.Protect Yourself

Big cities and suburbs are death traps, producing nothing.  Big cities are added-value-based structures, unsuited for a survival-based economy.  Suburbs are a great place to live when you have a car and electricity but they will be abandoned when we return to sustenance living without cheap energy.

Consider a Model for the Coming Crash

Reindeer were introduced to St. Matthew Island Alaska in 1944 and multiplied on the lush green territory unabated until 1963.  During these 19 years, the reindeer doubled in population nearly 8 times from 29 head to 6,000 head.  At that point, available resources were completely taxed, forcing a die off within just a half-year until their numbers were a scrawny 42, of which one was male.  The island still hasn’t recovered to its lush pre-1944 beauty.

Compare the graph below to the graph above and consider the obvious parallels: Oil stops providing people with abundant food supplies leading 6 billion people to rapidly degrade planet renewables, as did the 6,000 reindeer to that island.

 

Overshoot, crash and dieoff is a typical response in nature when species exhaust their carrying capacity

 

THE INTRODUCTION, INCREASE, AND CRASH OF REINDEER ON ST. MATTHEW ISLAND
By David R. Klein www.dieoff.org/page80.htm

Without doubt, our civilization is about to end.  We have a decade or two at most.  Don’t waste any tears on this false economy and false culture.  It was based upon a one-time glut of cheap energy and psychotic exploitation of our neighbors and it did more harm to us than good, socially and spiritually speaking.  We can only look to the future.  This particular correction will take everything we have and more just to survive.  It is a good time to believe in miracles.

 

 

 

Beyond Peak Announces Peak Oil Scenario Competition

Napa Valley, California (PRWEB) February 25, 2006 – BeyondPeak.com, a guide to living sustainably with Peak Oil and economic collapse, announces its First Annual “Who Knows? Things Might Get Better” Peak Oil Scenario Competition.
Is there light at the end of the Peak Oil tunnel? Most Peak Oil activists see nothing but negative results from Peak Oil—the decrease in worldwide production of oil. Most apparently feel that Peak Oil will lead, in one way or other, to The End Of The World As We Know It (or as commonly referred to during Y2K days, TEOTWAWKI).
Some Peak Oil observers predict returning to the semi-rural days of the early 1900s. Other suggest we could return to pre-industrial and even early-agricultural days. Still others suggest a return to Paleolithic times, where necessary skills include making your own obsidian knives and starting fires with a flintstone.
But are these really our only options? Is this the best humanity can do?
Beyond Peak hopes there are other, more positive, possible futures. Unfortunately, as Beyond Peak founder Mick Winter says, “even if we can see a better future, it’s very hard to see how we’d logically get from here to there.”
That’s why, says Winter, Beyond Peak invites all those interested in Peak Oil and the future to enter the website’s scenario competition. To enter, entrants simply write a scenario and submit it to BeyondPeak.com.
There is no minimum length required. Write whatever length is appropriate to your scenario, though entrants should keep in mind that this is an essay contest and not a book competition. When in doubt, check with BeyondPeak.
Scenarios must be submitted electronically on or before March 31, 2006. First place winner will receive $100 cash, second place $50, and third place $25. Fourth and fifth places get glory and Honorable Mention. All of the top five scenarios will be posted on the Beyond Peak website and shared with other websites as well.
As Winter reluctantly admits, it may be that no one concerned about Peak Oil actually has any optimism. But he hopes that some do. In fact, he encourages pessimists to write an optimistic scenario—just as an intellectual exercise, if for no other reason. They don’t even have to believe it themselves.
For full information and suggestions on scenario content for the competition, visit: www.beyondpeak.com