It is fair to say, judging from the subjects and the tone of my posts, that the nature and predisposition of this blogger is one of doom and gloom. Abandon ye all hope who enters this new epoch of relentless decline and unimaginable suffering, I seem to be saying. Realizing this, and not necessarily disagreeing since I would largely be disagreeing with an imaginary arguer, I think it is time to write on what I think the probable future might hold for us as humans and as Americans. I will devote the next several posts to this.
Despite what some might say, everybody has some capacity to gage what is likely to happen in some measure of time and I believe we do this on a daily basis in some small way. It is a feature of the human mind to do this. Whether or not we get it exactly right is less important than getting it mostly right. This is why the gut feeling can work most of the time for most people since we don't usually demand or require much precision. But this more immediate intuitive sense for events or people needs information from or in addition to experience in order to have any accuracy at all. Babies, for example, don't have any intuition or sense of the future since they lack experience. Adults, on the other hand, and if we're lucky, have an ability to anticipate what someone will do, or what will happen if this or that occurs and therefore has a capacity to foresee outcomes with some degree of accuracy. It is a probability exercise and that is what I want to try to do now.
Probably the first question people ask when considering an issue like global warming, the peaking of global oil production, or economic collapse is "when will it happen?" (That is, if they haven't already decided that it's all a bunch of baloney). But this question is an excellent place to start and forging a rough timeline is a good way to provide a platform for discussion. The next question is, or should be, how do you know things will happen like this? The answer to this question is where all the heavy lifting lies. Because, in order to get at why we, or I, think or believe something is about to happen, we inevitably have to get at what we think is more or less real, and how do we know that.
Plenty of forecasts of various sorts and points of view are out there to be read regarding the impacts of all sorts of things. As I said in my third post, I consider the impacts of climate change, peak oil and other resource limits, and population growth to be the prime shapers the collective future. These are what happen to be the most predictable occurrences, though these too have a range of probability. What is not so easily predicted is the responses, reactions, and behavior of people as these phenomena bear down on them. The ways in which we will understand and experience the impact is through economics, societal shifts/disruptions, and government. People will, in turn, respond in ways that will be formed by whomever they happen to be, with whatever they carry with them, as events unfold. It may be the prime motivation of these blogs to at least inform people enough so that it doesn't come as a shock or surprise as they try to find some way to understand what is happening to the world.
Everything I've said up to now has perhaps been colored with a sense of urgency. I want to elucidate. I believe that there is time to adequately respond to these dilemmas we face. On the other hand, I am not confident we will do so adequately. We have a dual problem. One is of leadership. The other is of followership. The problem each has is the same: Neither is thinking about a future much beyond their own personal futures. Neither is positioned to consider longer term events that are increasingly intractable over time. The consequences of soil erosion, for example, rarely if ever gets mentioned in the media, let alone at the dinner table. And what does get mentioned, such as climate change, is so mired in the politics of ignorance and the election cycle, quarterly revenue reports style thinking that it is effectively kicked down the road or compromised in the meat grinder of Congress so that nothing meaningful comes from any measures taken.
The problem of oil depletion as the peak of global production is reached is the most immediate, most urgent condition we will have to contend with. Personally, I believe that the peak has been reached and we will be faced, from here on out, with declining production. This has indeed been the case since July of 2008. It is still not yet possible to tell for certain whether it has declined for geological reasons due to the mother of all recessions. Oil demand always drops during a recession so it comes as no surprise that production would decline as well. What is telling is that production hasn't grown from 2005 to the present despite increasing demand. That has never happened before. This is what gives me my sense of urgency. No one publicly behaves as though this is, or even might possibly be, the case.
The next post will address the time line of events starting with the oil situation.
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