The Fall (Part I: Origins)
So I suppose I should discuss exactly why and how I see our society coming apart around us in the near future. I guess I should note that I used to be a far more pessimistic doomer than I am now, but I’m still pretty worried about how this whole thing will unfold. I should also note that I believe that our society has already entered this period of decline, which brings me to a good jumping off point.
The beginnings of the current decline could be seen going back as far as the seventies when the production of oil in the United States peaked, meaning it went into decline and has trended downward ever since. Maybe you didn’t know this, so let’s look at a graph illustrating this point:
But why, you might ask, is a decline in oil production representative of a decline of our society? This question has been answered so many times I feel like it’s almost redundant of me to give yet another answer so I will first point you to a fairly standard explanation:
“Oil and gas are feedstocks for plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electronic components, tires and much more. Oil is so important that the peak will have vast implications across the realms of war and geopolitics, medicine, culture, transport and trade, economic stability and food production.” - Energy Bulletin
So the short answer is that we are dependent on oil to provide for our most basic needs. Do we need to be? No. But it will do us no good if we can’t admit that we are addicted to oil in the short term. Admitting as much will focus our search for solutions to the problems that Peak Oil presents us (more on this later).
When US oil production peaked in the early 70’s the economic response was to start importing oil from overseas to fulfill rising demand. This left the US open to foreign supply constraints. In 1973 OPEC started an embargo against the U.S., refusing to sell the country oil, in response to it’s support for the Israeli Army during the Yom Kippur war.
This embargo created a crisis within the U.S. sparking a stock market crash and a resulting recession. This event demonstrates that the health of the economies of industrialized nations depends (first and foremost) on steadily rising consumption of cheap oil. In the next installment we will visit several other examples of supply constraints leading to economic downturns.
