So, we’ve reached the limit. From this day on, we will produce less oil, less coal, less natural gas, less… everything energy related.
What does that mean to you, personally?
First – Economy
Your standard of living is going to fall dramatically. The company where you work will start losing money and will very quickly need to lay off workers. If the company can’t reduce costs fast enough, they will go out of business. More and more of your income is going to be consumed by fuel and food. The cost of heating your home in the winter is going to double and triple. Crime will increase dramatically.
Everything is going to get very, very expensive, and you are probably going to lose your job.
That’s why you need to start right now to reduce your costs as much as possible. Get a fuel-efficient car. Sell your house and rent the smallest place that you can find. Learn to grow vegetables.
Store as much food as you can, right now. If you have lots of money, buy lots of food. Good freeze-dried food can last 25 years. Just don’t let anyone know that you have it. Someone will come and take it from you.
Consider moving to a place where your neighbors are good people and won’t try to take what you have.
Second – Martial Law
Society is going to break down. The government will declare martial law and shoot people who defy it.
When people run out of food, they become barbarians. Mobs of hungry people will demand food, and the government will shoot them. The survivors will be rounded up and put in FEMA camps.
You must have a place to live that is outside of a city – far outside. And, you must be able to get there BEFORE martial law is declared. You do NOT want to wind up in a FEMA camp.
Consider moving to a place where there is a low risk of social disturbance when people start to go hungry. Also, learn to hunt and defend yourself with bow and arrow. (The government WILL take your guns.) Go crazy and learn a martial art.
Third – Unjust War
America is going to war – to take oil (and other resources) from those who have it. If you live in the US, you need to ask yourself if you want to be a part of something like this. Do you want to live in a country where they kill people for oil?
Remember, the US has a long history of taking what it wants by military force. And, the American government of today is far more corrupt and venal than it was a hundred years ago.
What do you think is going to happen when the US becomes desperate for oil?
Consider moving to a place in the world with better values, where people know how to live without oil.
Fourth – Epidemic Disease.
The sanitation system is going to fail. Cities will be unable to get rid of their garbage. Sewage systems will collapse. It takes a lot of fuel to remove garbage and to run the plants that process sewage. Cities will become disease-ridden.
Good healthcare will be available only to the very, very rich, which means that disease, once it gets started, will become epidemic.
Remember also that people suffering malnutrition will become more susceptible to disease. Hungry people are incubators for epidemics.
Those who live in areas where there are lots of mosquitoes will need to learn to live with malaria. The chemicals that we use to fight mosquitoes will no longer be available. Florida and other parts of the southeastern United States might become uninhabitable.
Consider living far away from a city larger than 100 thousand people.
Fifth – Global Devastation
In yesterday’s video, they speculated on how many people could live in a world without oil. The most optimistic figure that they came up with was two billion people. That’s the world population figure for 1927, well into the age of fossil fuel consumption. When we hit three billion in 1960, we already had modern transportation and antibiotics, but let’s go crazy and say that the world can support three billion people without oil. Think about that for a moment.
Do you know that the current population is 7.1 billion?
This means that more than four billion people are going to die when oil is gone – if we are optimistic.
Do you think that these people are going to die without a fight?
Of course not.
We’re going to see a surge of global war, global disease and global starvation that will kill far more than four billion people.
Now, we might have avoided all this if we had listened M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, but we didn’t. In fact, we laughed at him and condemned future generations to death and despair. We could have harnessed our ingenuity to find new ways to produce energy.
In fact, if we had just let our economy ‘reset’ in 2008, we might have been able to readjust to a lower level of energy consumption which might have given us a chance to approach this catastrophe in a more gradual way.
But, we didn’t let the economy reset. We pressed the accelerator harder and harder. We kept our energy consumption as high as possible, which means that a gradual, adaptable slope has turned into a cliff. And, there is NO indication that very many have woken up to this problem.
When this is over, we will be very fortunate indeed, if global population is as high as two billion.
Consider moving to a place in the world that already can support itself without oil.
——————————-
Now, think about all this for a moment. Does this sound like ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse‘ to you?