First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
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"Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson warns that China's current program to mitigate huge population increases with gigantic water projects may have dire consequences. Irrigation and other withdrawals have already depleted the , which, starting in 1972, has run bone-dry part of the year in province, where one-fifth of China's wheat and one-seventh of its corn is produced. In 1997, the river stopped flowing for a record 226 days. The groundwater levels of the northern China plains have plummeted. The water table in major grain-producing areas is falling at the rate of five feet a year. Of China's 617 cities, three hundred already face water shortages. Of China's approximately 23,000 miles of major rivers, 80 percent no longer support fish life. The Xiaolangdi dam project now underway along the Yellow River in north China is exceeded in size only by the on the in South China. In addition, the Chinese government intends to siphon water from the Yangtzeā¦ and send it over by a canal system to the Yellow River and Beijing, respectively. When it is running, the Yellow River is already one of the most particle-laden in the world. Because of that, it is estimated that the Xiaolangdi dam would silt up within thirty years of completion. Theā¦ project is reminiscent of another centrally planned mega-project that ended in grief: the Soviet Union's scheme to drain the to irrigate gigantic cotton farms in Kazakhstan. The project turned one of the world's largest inland bodies of fresh water into [a] salty desert. The potential for calamity in China is therefore huge as it skirts a range of forces presented by the Long Emergency, any one of which, or some combination, could send it reeling over its tipping point: the effects of global climate change, competition for [every resource including] oil, extremes of pollution, disease, and war, either with its neighbors or internally. Despite the current veneer of prosperity and stability, China has tremendous potential for political chaos. As Wilson fearlessly points out, the pressure on China's agriculture and water resources is intensified by the predicament shared by many countries: runaway population growth [caused by industrialization]. Population growth rates may be mitigatedā¦ from culture to culture by economic advance (which tends to lower reproductive rates by channeling women into the workplace), but economic development produces other not-so-benign consequences. Developing [systems like] nation[-state]s invariably increase their energy use [as they grow complex]. More cars are used, more electricity [is] generated, [and] more greenhouse emissions [are] sent into the atmosphere. In the Long Emergency, ā¦āthere will only be two types of nations: the over-developed and those which will never develop.ā China may represent an amalgamation of those two conditions in one nation-state."
"...Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's [sic] climate is inherently very unstable."
"Like China, the United States is dividedā¦ in half between wet and dry. Though the human population of the United States is proportionately much smaller than China's, the amount of effort America has expended on manipulating habitats and altering terrain is as impressive in its own way as China's birthrate. Especially significant is the stupendous amount of paving laid down in the United States during the past hundred years. It prevents rain from being absorbed as groundwater and sends it instead into rivers, andā¦ into the ocean. The effect of this is the inability of water tables and wetlands to recharge and the diminishing ability of the terrain to support life. In the United States, only 2 percent of the country's rivers and wetlands remain free-flowing and undeveloped. As a result, the country has lost more than half of its wetlands."
"As hunger and hardship increase, the world may see more than one wave of more than one disease. If and when an influenza pandemic emerges, for instance, many AIDS sufferers will succumb, but people infected with the AIDS precursor, HIV, will still survive influenza and AIDS will march on. India, for example, was among the hardest-hit nations in the 1918 flu pandemic. Today it has among the highest rates of AIDS infection. The age-old human enemies, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, streptococcus, and other members of the familiar gang will be on hand with new immunity to the old techno-tricks of the [nineteenth and] twentieth centur[ies]. Even after these diseases may have spent themselves for a while, climate change [which in turn could create new diseases] will still be with us. Nobody really knows where that is taking us, though we do know that the human race has endured more than one ice age in the past."
"In America, after the crash of 1929, the loss of faith in various forms of credit represented by abstract instruments of finance translated into a persistent lack of moneyāthat is, a means of exchangeā and the institutions devised to create it stood in disrepute. People could buy very little. Business stagnated. Companies would not hire workers when there was so little demand for products. It was a vicious cycle and it had vicious side effects. Another way of looking at the financial debacle of the 1930s is an ecological view such as ās metaphor of the industrial economy as a ādetritus ecosystem.ā Catton argues that the human race living off the ādrawdownā of nonrenewable fossil fuel resources is the equivalent of the algae in a pond enjoying a temporary rush of nutrients in one brief season. Cattonās analogy can be applied and extended to clarify the Great Depression in the context of ecological economics. After the crash of 1929, somethingā¦ definitely changed in America. But the puzzling part is that the ānutrients in the form of cheap oilāthe plentyā Roosevelt spoke ofāstill flowed. So why did the economic environment become so intractably unhealthy? From an ecological view, the Great Depression represented the effects of severe socioeconomic pollutionā produced by the oil-fueled boom of the 1920s, and this āpollutionā had the effect of āpoisoning the financial ecosystem and consequently killing off financial āorgansā that people had come to depend on in order to āthriveā (i.e., to grow wealthy and reproduce). Specifically, the āpollutionā killed off the organs that generated credit and turned it into money. This systemic āpollutionā of the financial ecosystem harmed the industrial environment enough to temporarily quash any further exuberant āgrowth.ā There was no human die-off but there was a die-off of expectations and a reduction in [the] carrying capacity of the U.S. economy. Is it fair to say that the by-product of zealous oil use literally converts into such an abstract form of "pollution" capable of poisoning what amounts to a social consensus? This must return us to the idea of entropy. Entropy is the spending down of energy and its translation into negative by-products. [ā¦] Air pollution is one expression of entropy. But so is social disorder. So is [the] institutional breakdown. Bodily death is another. These negative by-products of entropy can become interchangeable as entropy progresses, depending on any combination of variable conditions and circumstances. A careful reading of twentieth-century history would bear this out. In the modern era, entropy has been expressed in conditions as seemingly unrelated as war, industrial pollution, pornography, mass political murder, the shattering of a consensus about the value of money, and incompetent parenting. The introduction of high entropy into a given system is profoundly destabilizing in many ways."
"Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like coal,] oil [and gas] skewed the [supply-demand] equation over the past [two] hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of [a fraction of] nonrenewable condensed solar energy accumulated over eons of prehistory. The āgreen revolutionā in boosting crop yields was minimally about scientific innovation in crop genetics and mostly about dumping massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides made out of fossil fuels onto crops, as well as employing irrigation at a fantastic scale made possible by abundant oil and gas. The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plenitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years. Within that comfortable bubble, the idea took hold that only grouches, spoilsports, and godless maniacs considered population hypergrowth a problem, and that to even raise the issue was indecentā¦ [but] as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves arc toward depletion, we will indeed suddenly be left with an enormous surplus population... that the ecology of the earth will not support. No political program of birth control will [be] avail[able]. The people are already here. The journey back to non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hypergrowth was simply a side effect of the oil age. It was [more of] a condition [without a remedy], not a problem with a [direct] solution. That is what happened, and we are stuck with it."
"What is... not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the oil and gas... run out. The American way of life... can run only on reliable supplies of dependably cheap [hydrocarbons like] oil and gas. Even mild to moderate deviations in... supply will crush our economy and makeā¦ daily life impossible. Fossil fuel reserves are not scattered equitably around the world. They tend to be concentrated in places where the native peoples donāt like the West in general [...], places physically very remote, places where we realistically can exercise little control [...]. [...] We can be certain that the price and supplies of fossil fuels will suffer oscillations and disruptions in the period ahead [...]. [...] The decline of fossil fuels is certain to ignite chronic strife between nations contesting the remaining supplies. These resource wars have already begun. There will be more of them. They are... to grind on and on [...]. They will only aggravate a situation that, in and of itself, could bring down civilizations. The extent of suffering... will certainly depend on how tenaciously we attempt to cling to obsolete habits, customs, and assumptionsāfor instance, how fiercely... [we] decide to fight to maintain suburban lifestyles that simply cannot be rationalized any longer."
"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the form of environmental devastation. Of the earthās estimated 10 million species, 300,000 have vanished in the past fifty years. Each year, 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct, an all-time high for the last 65 million years. Within one hundred years, between one-third and two-thirds of all birds, animals, plants, and other species will be lost. Nearly 25 percent of the 4,630 known mammal species are now threatened with extinction, along with 34 percent of fish, 25 percent of amphibians, 20 percent of reptiles, and 11 percent of birds. Even more, species are having population declines. Environmental scientists speak of an āomega pointā at which the vast interconnected networks of Earthās ecologies are so weakened that human existence is no longer possible. This is a variant of the die-off theme [ā¦], but it does raise grave questions about the ongoing project of civilization. How long might the Long Emergency last? [ā¦] Of course, after a while, an emergency becomes the norm and is no longer an emergency. Global warming is no longer a theory being disputed by political interests, but an established scientific consensus. The possible effects range from events as drastic as a hydrothermal shutdown of the Gulf Streamāmeaning a much colder Europe with much-reduced agricultureāto [the] desertification of major world crop-growing areas, to the invasion of temperate regions by diseases formerly limited to the tropics, to the loss of harbor cities all over the world. Whether the cause of global warming is human activity and āgreenhouse emissions,ā a result of naturally occurring cycles, or a combination of the two, this does not alter the fact that it is having swift and tremendous impacts on civilization and that its effects will contribute greatly to the Long Emergency."
"The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper hand against the age-old scourges of disease. We have enjoyed the great benefits of antibiotic medicine for... a half-century. Penicillin, sulfa drugs, and their descendants briefly gave [hu]mankind the notion that diseases caused by microorganisms could, and indeed would, be systematically vanquished. Or, at least, this was the popular view. Doctors and scientists knew better. The discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, himself warned that antibiotic misuse could result in resistant strains of bacteria. The recognition is now growing that the victory over microbes was short-lived. They are back in force, including... old enemies such as tuberculosis and staphylococcus in new drug-resistant strains. Other old diseases are on the march into new territories, as a response to climate change brought on by global warming [caused by the burning of fossil fuels]. In response to unprecedented habitat destruction by humans and the invasion of [what we call] wilderness, the earth itself seems to be sending forth new and much more lethal diseases, as though it had a... protective immune system with antibody-like agents aimed with remarkable precision at the source of the problem: Homo sapiens."
"The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: theā¦ fossil fuel era. [ā¦] Factories could be started up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, where swollen populations furnished trainable workers willing to labor for much less than those back in the United States or Europe. Products then moved around the globe in a highly rationalized system, not unlike the oil allocation system, using immense vessels, automated port facilities, and truck-scaled shipping containers at a minuscule cost-per-unit of whatever was made and transported. Shirts or coffeemakers manufactured 12,000 miles away could be shipped to s all over America and sold cheaply. [ā¦] Meanwhile, among economists and government figures, globalism developed... [as] an intellectual fad. Globalism allowed them to believe that burgeoning wealth in the developed countries, and the spread of industrial activity to formerly primitive regions, was based on the potency of their own ideas and policies rather than on cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil. [ā¦] [An] overlooked [fact] is that [[Margaret Thatcher|[Margaret] Thatcher]]ās success in reviving England coincided with a fantastic new revenue stream from oil, as quaint old Britannia became energy self-sufficient and a net energy-exporting nation for the first time since the heyday of coal. Globalism then infected America when Ronald Reagan came on the scene in 1981. Reaganās āsupply-sideā economic advisors retailed a set of fiscal ideas that neatly accessorized the new notions about free trade and deregulation, chiefly that massively reducing taxes wouldā¦ result in greater revenues as the greater aggregate of business activity generated a greater aggregate of taxes even at lower rates. [ā¦] The rise of computers, in turn, promoted the fantasy that commerce in sheer information would be the long-sought replacement for all the played-out activities of the smokestack economy. A country like America, it was now thought, no longer needed steelmaking or tire factories or other harsh, dirty, troublesome enterprises. Let the poor masses of Asia and have them and lift themselves up from agricultural peonage. America would outsource all this old economy stuff and use computers to orchestrate the movement of parts and the assembly of products from distant quarters of the world, and then sell the stuff in our own s and s, which would become global juggernauts of retailing. [ā¦] It was also like a convoluted liquidation sale of the accrued wealth of two hundred years of industrial society for the benefit of a handful of financial buccaneers, with the great masses relegated to a race to the bottom as the economic assets are dismantled and sold off, and their livelihoods are closed [ā¦]. That this development was uniformly greeted as a public good by the vast majority of Americans, at the same time that their local economies were being destroyedāand with them, myriad social and civic benefitsāis one of the greater enigmas of recent social history. In effect, Americans threw away their communitiesā¦ to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying."
"At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanish influenza, which killed fifty million [and possibly more, as we will not know the real numbers] people worldwide and changed the course of history. [ā¦] Disease will certainly play a larger role in the Long Emergency than many can now imagine. An epidemic could paralyze social and economic systems, interrupt global trade, and bring down governments. [ā¦] At the very least, the Long Emergency will be a time of diminished life spans for many of us, as well as reduced standards of livingāat least as understood within the current social context. Fossil fuels had the effect of temporarily raising the carrying capacity of the earth. Our ability to resist the environmental corrective of disease will... prove to have been another temporary boon of the... [industrial] age [...]. So much of what we construe to be among our entitlements to perpetual progress may prove to have been a strange, marvelous, and anomalous moment in... history."
"The entropy produced in World War II was much more widespread and profound than that of World War I. In World War I the action had taken placeā¦ entirely on rural terrain, classic battlefields. In World War II, much of the warfare was urban. The long-range bomber had reached a high stage of refinement in the twenty-plus years between world wars. None of the major capitals had been damaged in World War I. In World War II, hundreds of towns and cities were destroyed in Europe and Asia. Berlin was reduced to gravel; London was badly mutilated; and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive ashtrays. The casualties of World War I had been enormous, astonishing, [and] appalling beyond civilized peoplesā wildest dreams, but the victims had been overwhelmingly soldiers. The casualties in World War II were overwhelmingly civilians and in much greater aggregate numbers."
"After air conditioning became widely affordable, southerners hardly went outside anymore, unless it was in a motor vehicle. Anything about southern vernacular architecture that once had been graceful in adapting to the climate was cast aside for the pleasures of air conditioning and [the] cheapness of construction."
"The Southwest also faces increasing friction with adjoining Mexico. This is not a racist provocation but a description of reality. No other first-world country has such an extensive land frontier with a third-world country. The income gap between the United States and Mexico is greater than that between any other two contiguous countries in the world."
"In any case, it is human nature to consider a place āhomeā if you were born there, [ā¦] have family there, or have spent some portion of your life there, and people are naturally reluctant to leave home. I daresay that many Americans now living in the Southwest will not be disposed to understand what is really happeningāthat the carrying capacity of their home region has been suddenly and drastically reducedāand they will hunker down hoping for a return to better times. The vested owners of all those sun-drenched tract houses may stick around for a while and fight over the region, perhaps thinking that they are reenacting the great historical dramas of the nineteenth centuryāsuch is the long-term effect of canned entertainment on the collective imagination. The violence and loss of resources will surely send some American citizens fleeing. After a while, it will be obvious to even the staunch defenders that places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque will never again support the populations that were possible during the height of the cheap-oil blowoff in the late twentieth century. They will then pack up and move elsewhere, sacrificing their houses and ties to a disintegrating community. These new refugees may move into careers that they never could have conceived of twenty years earlier, when they were young college graduates: farmer, farm laborer. Wherever they go, they are going to discover a nation preoccupied with food production above all other activities."
"We shouldā¦ conclude that the abandoned big-box structures will not last more than one generation under any circumstances. [ā¦] The same thing can be said about malls, strip malls, and chain restaurant buildings. Eventually, they will be the salvage yards and mines of the future."
"Large-scale corporate enterprise has brought humankind much material comfort in two centuries but at the price of fantastic unintended consequences (externalized costs) ranging from the destruction of local communities to climate change. Large-scale corporations will be vulnerable to the collapse of capital formation markets that must accompany the end of the cheap oil fiesta. Corporate enterprise can certainly be reorganized on the small, local community scale, but it will not be the same as . Corporate enterprise in the Long Emergency may revert to being more public in nature and far less sovereign in power. There may be one exception: The most visibleā¦ corporate organization that might survive the Long Emergency may be the church. Whether Catholic or Pentecostal or something new we haven't seen yet; the church won't have to rely on oil supplies. Organized religion doesn't have to traffic in awkward material products, only in beliefs, and it can operate at many scales simultaneously. Because American culture is constitutionally allergic to religious governance, we may have problems if churches are the only large organizations left standingāthat is, assuming we still have the same constitution."
"One final thing worth noting on the subject of rail: From 1890 to about 1920, American localities managed to construct hundreds of local and interurban streetcar lines that added up to a magnificent national system (independent of the national heavy rail system). Except for two twenty-mile gaps in New York state, one could ride the trolley lines from New England clear out to Wisconsin. The story of the conspiracy by General Motors and other companies to destroy the U.S. interurban system is well documented. The salient point, however, is how rapidly the system was created in the first place, and how marvelously well it served the public in the period before the automobile became established."
"Wal-Mart will not be able to profitably run its āwarehouse on wheelsā when the price of oil fluctuates chronically. [ā¦] We will never again experience the explosion of products, choices, and nonstop marketing that characterized theā¦ twentieth century. The public may look back on the big-box shopping era with deep and mournful nostalgia, but we are apt to discover that happiness is still possible without the extraordinary advertising-driven compulsive materialism of recent decades. We will still have commerce. We will have [a] trade. There will be shopping. We will haveā¦ medium of exchange. But we are not going to live in a perpetual blue-light special sale of cornucopian wretched excess."
"The lucky suburbanites will be the ones with the forethought to trade in their suburban McHouses for property in the towns and small cities and prepare for a vocational life doing something useful and practical on the small scale."
"It has been... hard... to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in ...society. Even after the , that collapsed the twin towers of the and sliced through the Pentagon, [...] [we are] still sleepwalking into [an uncertain] [...] future. [ā¦] We are now headed off the edge of a cliff. Beyond that cliff is an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before. [ā¦] The national government will prove to be so impotent and ineffective in managing the enormous vicissitudes we face that the United States may not survive as a nation in any meaningful sense butā¦ will devolve into a set of autonomous regions."
"Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as a benefit of modern life. All the necessities, comforts, luxuries, and miracles of our timeā, , , , , , , , , , surgery, the , you name itāowe their origins or continued existence in one way or another to cheap fossil fuel. Even our nuclear power plants ultimately depend on cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil and gas for all the procedures of construction, maintenance, and extracting and processing nuclear fuels. The blandishments of cheap oil and gas were so seductive, and induced such transports of mesmerizing contentment, that we ceased paying attention to the essential nature of these miraculous gifts from the [deep] earth: that they exist in finite, nonrenewable supplies, unevenly distributed around the world. To aggravate matters, the wonders of steady technological progress under the reign of oil have tricked us... [in]to believ[ing] that anything we wish for hard enough can come true. These days, even people in our culture who ought to know better are wishing ardently that a smooth, seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements... lies just a few years aheadā¦ [but] this is a dangerous fantasy. The true best-case scenario may be that some of these technologies will take decades to developāmeaning that we can expect an extremely turbulent interval between the end of cheap oil and whatever comes next. A more likely scenario is that new fuels and technologies may never replace fossil fuels at the scale, rate, and manner at which the [industrial] world currently consumes them."
"It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was roughly about when the industrial adventure began to gain traction. It has been inferred from this that a billion people is about the limit that the planet Earth can support when it is run on a nonindustrial basis. World population is now past six and a half billion, having more than doubled since my childhood in the 1950s. The mid-twentieth century was a time of rising anxiety over the āpopulation explosion.ā The marvelous technological victory over food shortages, including the āgreen revolutionā in crop yields, accelerated that already robust leap in world population that had begun with modernity. Dramatic improvements in sanitation and medicine extended lives. Industry sopped up expanding populations and reassigned them from rural lands to work in the burgeoning cities. The perceived ability of the world to accommodate these newcomers and latecomers in a wholly new disposition of social and economic arrangements seemed [to] be the final nail in the coffin of Thomas Robert Malthus, the much-abused author of the 1798 [groundbreaking work] An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society."
"Malthusā¦ has been the whipping boy of idealists and techno-optimists for two hundred years. His famous essay proposed that human population, if unconstrained, would grow exponentially while food supplies grew only arithmetically, and that therefore population growth faced strict and inevitable natural limits. Most commentators, however, took the math at face value and overlooked the part about constraints. These āchecksā on population come in the form of famine, pestilence, war, and āmoral restraint,ā i.e., the will to postpone marriage or forgo parenthood (from a perhaps antiquated notion that the ability to support a family might enter into anyoneās plans for forming one, or even that society could influence such choices). Malthusās essay has been mostly misconstrued to mean that the human race was doomed at a certain arbitrary set point, and the pejorative āmalthusianā is attached to any idea that suggests that human ingenuity cannot make accommodation for more human beings to join the party on Spaceship Earth. Interestingly, Malthusās essay was aimed at the reigning Enlightenment idealists of his own youth, the period of the American and French Revolutions, in particular the seminal figures of William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet. Both held that mankind was infinitely improvable and that a golden age of social justice, political harmony, equality, abundance, brotherhood, happiness, and altruism loomed imminently. Although sympathetic to social improvement, Malthus deemed these claims untenable and thought it necessary to debunk them."
"Our brains are really not equipped to process events on the geologic scaleāat least in reference to how we choose to live, or what we choose to do in the here and now. Five hundred million years is a long time, but how about the mad rush of events in just the past 2,000 years [of written history] starring the human race? Rather action-packed, wouldnāt you say? Everything [that was recorded in written form] from the Roman Empire to the Twin Towers, with a cast of billionsāemperors, slaves, saviors, popes, kings, queens, armies, navies, rabbles, conquest, murder, famine, art, science, revolution, comedy, tragedy, genocide, and Michael Jackson. Enough going on in a mere 2,000 years to divert anyoneās attention from the ultimate fate of the earth, you would think. Just reflecting on the events of the twentieth century alone could take your breath away, so why get bent out of shape about the ultimate fate of the earth? Yet I was not soothed by these thoughts... because I couldnāt shake the recognition that in the short term, we are in pretty serious trouble, too."
"ā¦Global warming... happens to coincide with our imminent descent down the slippery slope of... [hydrocarbon] depletion, so that all the potential discontinuities of that epochal circumstance will be amplified, ramified, reinforced, and torqued by climate change. If global warming is a result of human activity, fossil fuel-based industrialism, ...then it seems... the prospects are poor thatā¦ human[s] ā¦will be able to do anything about it because the journey down the oil depletion arc will be much more disorderly than the journey up was. The disruptions and hardships of decelerating industrialism will destabilize governments and societies to the degree that concerted international action... will never be carried out. In the chaotic world of diminishing and contested... resources, there will simply be a mad scramble to use up whatever... people can manage to lay their hands on. The very idea that we possess any control over the process seems to me further evidence of the delusion gripping ourā¦ cultureāthe fatuous certainty that technology will save us from the diminishing returns of technology."
"Without the Gulf Stream, Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia would have a climate like Labradorās, colder by in annual mean. The Gulf Stream has been likened to an oceanic conveyor belt. The force of the warm water flowing north has been described as equal to the volume of seventy-five Amazon rivers."
"According to the , sea levels rose by ten to twenty centimeters during the twentieth century and are currently rising by about two millimeters a year, which is at the upper range of the rate of rise for the last century. With global warming accelerating, this is apt to increase. The accepted prediction is that sea levels will rise during the twenty-first century by about fifty centimeters, or a little under two feet, though some scientists predict a full meter. [ā¦] One-sixth of the people in the world live[s] in coastal zones within one meter of sea level. This is theā¦ outside context problem so alien to contemporary experience that the public and its leaders can really find no way to process the information and figure out what to do about itāand for the excellent reason that it is not a problem with a direct solution. It is more [of] a condition without a remedy. If the major shipping portsā¦ end up being submerged, humankind will just have to work around it. The disruptions to world trade might be epochal, gigantic, [ā¦] [and] tragic. It seems obvious that the human race will simply have to adjust, even if that means adjusting to a new reality of severely lower expectations in living standards, comfort, and amenities. [ā¦] When the time comes, ā¦[we] will just have to move to higher ground."
"Climate change, competition for water, and polluted water sources will also be exacerbated by failures in the electric grid caused by oil and gas supply disruptions. Even if water is available, localities may lack the power to push it through their treatment plants and municipal pipes."
"Despite miraculous advances in medical technology, genetic typing, and immunology, ā¦[we] are not much better prepared for a severe flu epidemic thanā¦ [our ancestors] were for the 1918 outbreak. Epidemic influenza is extremely difficult to counteract. Flu vaccines developed in any given year are notoriously ineffective against new strains that come along the following year. It takes seven months or more to create, test, manufacture, and distribute a vaccine developed in direct response to a new virus, and by that time the disease can burn through global populations. If a pandemic broke out today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed. Nurses and doctors would be infected along with the rest of the population."
"The germ theory, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, focused the world's attention on the specific agents responsible for... diseases, but the [physical,] social and ecological contexts are equally important [for it], and these are now coming more prominently into play with world population well beyond the limits of the earth's [sic] [...] [optimum] carrying capacity and with climate change... in progress. [...] Ecological... [pressures], rapid changes in land use, penetration of formerly inaccessible habitats, and disturbed migration routes can lead to the appearance or diffusion of a disease. While we may be able to identify [some, if not all] the microorganisms involved, we can be helpless in the face of it, and our behavior may still promote its spread."
"[...] The disturbance of global oil markets as the permanent energy crisis begins is liable to interrupt global commerce and global travel. Fewerā¦ will fly [...]. However, these same energy problems will surely reduce crop production, which would lead to reduced food aid to desperate populations [...], which would then lead to compromised immune systems and the... [invasion] of poor, hungry, and... unhealthy people [...]. This is an obvious recipe for conflict and woe. Where the refugee camps [are] set up, [the] disease will surely follow."
"The current urban population of the worldā¦ is greater than the entire population of the world in 1960. Seventy-eight percent of the urban dwellers in the so-called developing world live in slums. From the West African littoral to the mountainsides of the to the banks of the , the , the , and the Irrawaddy, new gigantic slums spread like immense laboratory growth media, waiting to host epidemic disease cultures. , Nigeria, for example, grew from a city of 300,000 in 1950 to over ten million today. But Lagos, writes Mike Davis, "is simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from to : probably the biggest continuous footprint of urban poverty on earth." Most of the world's new, exploding slums have only the most rudimentary sanitary arrangements, open sewers running along the corridor-like "streets." In the slums of Bombay, there is an estimated one toilet per five hundred inhabitants. Currently, two million children die every year from waste-contaminated water in the world's slums. The enormity of this urban disaster is poorly comprehended in advanced nations like the United States, where the drinking water is still safe and even the poor have flush toilets connected to real sewers. But the slums of the world willā¦ be the breeding ground of the next pandemic, and chances are, once it is underway, [ā¦] [we] will not be spared."
"The entropic mess that our economy has become is the final blowoff ofā¦ industrialism. The destructive practices known as "free-market globalism" were engendered by our run-up to and arrival at the world oil production peak. It was the logical climax of the oil "story." It required the breakdown of all previous constraintsā¦ to maximize the present at the expense of the future and to do so for the benefit of a very few at the expense of the many. [ā¦] Free-market globalism became the reigning orthodoxy [ā¦], challenged only by cranksā¦ at the very margins of society. The moment that the world recognizes the passing of the oil production peak as a reality, globalism will be dead both in theory and practice."
"The free-market part of the equation referred to the putative benefit of unrestrained economic competition between individuals, and because corporations enjoyed the legal status of persons, they were assumed to be on an equal footing with other persons in a given locality. Thus, Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose in the retail competition because he couldn't order 50,000 coffeemakers at a crack from a factory 12,000 miles away in , and receive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasn't as though he hadn't been given the chance."
"Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralizedā¦ diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those childrenā¦ survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldnāt compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midlandās oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. The only comparative advantage that these people possessed was their willingness to work for next to nothing. Cheap oil and free-market globalism turned comparative advantage into a new kind of feudalism, with the corporations as the lords and the overabundant locals as the serfs. And then, when the comparative advantage of cheap laborā¦ of one place, [ā¦] was superseded by the cheaper laborā¦ of another place, [ā¦] the corporations just moved their operations."
"Did Americans sell out their towns, their neighbors, the memory of their ancestors, and the future of their grandchildren because they were helplessly in thrall to the blandishments of a cheap-oil economy? I honestly donāt know, though I tend to view the outcome as the result of many collective bad choices made by the public and its leaders. But were those choices inescapable? Certainly, the process was insidious and played out over several generations."
"Inefficient economies are much more complex than efficient ones. Complexity itself can be deceiving. [ā¦] Complexity constrains entropy flows with checks and balances. What we take to be man-made artificial complexity (technology) is, paradoxically, a simplification process that increases flows by editing away inefficiencies. [Because our limited knowledge prevents us to process events on the geologic scale, we think that] The ecology of prairie will keep the soil active and healthy indefinitely [but for how long?], while the ecology of a fossil-fuel-subsidized cornfield will leach the soil of useful nutrients and physically erode it in less than a human lifetime. [We think that] The ecology of a pond, with its diverse hierarchies of life and multitude of biological niches and food chains, is much more complex than the Crown Point, New York, trout hatchery with its monoculture offish, its inputs of manufactured fish food, and its staff of attendants cleaning waste out of the cement hatchery impoundments. The natural pond also has more chance of continuing indefinitely into the future [but for how long?]. The built-in constraints of inefficientā¦ economies reduce the flow of potential, often to the point where systems based on inefficient economies last for geologic epochs, not just a few decades in the case of a fish hatchery. Everything that we identify with nature takes the form of inefficient systems. Biogenic or living systems are self-stabilizing. They are self-buffered. Small differences are dampened out. Entropy is stalled within them. They exhibit negative feedback tending toward long-term stability [but for how long?]. Call this condition "negative entropy." Everything we identify with the man-made substitutes for natural bio-economies, that is, technologies, tends toward positive feedback, which is self-amplifying, self-reinforcing, and destabilizing, featuring the removal of constraints to entropy flows and leading to the certain eventual destruction of that system. Call this condition "positive entropy.""
"It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the āaffordableā range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy canāt be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite itsā¦ technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws."
"Money is a wonderful thing. It started out in human history as hard currency, generally gold or silver. These are commodities that are deemed to have intrinsic value but also act as a means of abstractly representing wealth accumulated out of other real commodities. Relatively little hard currency ever circulated freely in the preindustrial world. In that world, most wealth was actual, existing in the form of land, palaces, fleets of boats, bolts of cloth, barrels of grain, standing timber, herds of cattle, and so forth. These were generally things that could be traded, and exchanges of these items were often facilitated through the medium of gold or silver, hence the term "medium of exchange." [The] hard currency could also be acquired by theft or plunder, though that did not necessarily affect its value. Note that the value of [the] hard currency is transcultural. Gold and silver had high value to the Europeans, the Chinese of the Sung dynasty, the Inca, the Aztecs, the ancient Egyptians, and the California Forty-niners. The industrial experiment took the idea of currency (money) to the next level of abstractionāas hard currency can represent actual goods, so paper currency can represent hard currency and actual goods. As trade increased and took place over ever-greater distances, paper promises to pay hard currency began to steadily take the place of the hard stuff itself, which was cumbersome, hard to lug around in large quantities, and subject to theft in transit. So, to streamline these trades, all kinds of certificates were used as equivalents to hard currency: individual IOUs, bills of lading, letters of credit from rich people, [and] promissory notes issued by guilds. In time, the use of paper certificates becameā¦ more normative and conventionalized. Protocols of exchange were established. Institutions were created to process them. This process of managing monetary affairsāof wealth abstracted in [a] paperāwas called finance."
"Even if we canāt get all the tools and the products we currently enjoy, we will retain a lot of basic knowledge that the people of Jeffersonās day just didnāt have. For instance, we will still understand that infections and many diseases are caused by microorganisms, not bad air, phases of the moon, or evil spells, and that knowledge alone confers powerful advantages in daily living."
"It's hard to imagine a more purposeless activity than [an] American-style high school in our time. [ā¦] The public questions its basic premises or mode of operation any more than the public questions the economy of suburban sprawl. But [the] high school in our time amounts to little more than daycare for virtual adults in which some learning might incidentally take place, much of it of dubious value."
"Becauseā¦ systems are self-organizing in the face of circumstance, the big questions are how much disorder must we endure as things change, and how hard will we struggle to continue a particular way of life with no future? [ā¦] Theā¦ economy of the decades to come will center on farming, not high-tech, [ā¦] āinformation,ā or āservices,ā or space travel, [ā¦] tourism, or finance. All other activities will be secondary to food production, which will require much more human labor."
"If the folks who lived along this highway put in gardens to make up for the escalating inadequacies of an industrial farming system starved for fossil fuel āinputs,ā would they be able to feed themselves? Did any vernacular knowledge survive in a populace conditioned to think that food came from the supermarket? Did they know anything about cabbage loopers, powdery mildew, or anthracnose? Would they be able to prevent catastrophic crop loss? How would they defend their crops against deer, rabbits, [and] woodchucks? Would any of them know how to build a garden wall or even a fence? Where would they get fencing material? Would they have to sit out among the potato hills and the bean rows at night with loaded shotguns? And what would they do for light when they heard something munching out there? Would they know how to keep chicken, sheep, [and] cattle, including breeding and birthing them?"
"Banking also regained respectability after the calamities of the 1930s. Federal deposit insurance, which had been instituted in the depths of the Great Depression, and only for deposits under $2,500, was raised to $10,000 in 1950, and the middle class was induced to feel confident about keeping its money in banks again. Interest rates remained modest, but so did inflation. The influx of savings made money available in capital markets to invest in new ventures. It was real money derived from work already done, pay already earned, true capital. Before the great orgy of mergers and consolidation that began in the 1970s, retail banking wasā¦ local and community-centered. Bankers made loan decisions based on firsthand knowledge of projects going on in their communitiesānot, as today, based on bundling and selling clumps of mortgages for generic suburban developments they have never laid eyes on."
"The 1973 was the precipitating incident of the OPEC embargo. On October 6, Egyptian and Syrian forces caught the Israeli military off-guard on the most solemn Jewish holiday, when many soldiers were home with their families. Because the Arab-Israeli dispute was commonly viewed as yet another cold war proxy battle, the United States and its allies naturally lined up behind Israel against the Soviet-sponsored aggressors. Egyptās President Anwar Sadat implored the Saudis and other Muslim states to use the āoil weaponā against Israelās allies. On October 12, the Saudi-led OPEC demanded of the various Western companies doing business in the Middle East, including Aramco, a 100 percent increase in the posted price of their cartel's oil. The companies stalled for time. On October 16, the Persian Gulf region OPEC members broke off negotiations with the Western oil companies and announced that thereafter they would set prices themselves. On October 17, the Israelis gained the upper hand on the battlefield, thanks in large part to aggressive American resupply efforts, and began to push the Egyptians back across the and the Syrians out of the Golan Heights. [On] the same day, the Arab oil ministers announced an oil embargo on the United States, while increasing prices by 70 percent to western Europe. Overnight, the price of a barrel of oil to these nations rose from $3 to $5.11. On October 19, President Richard M. Nixon announced a military aid package for Israel. The following day, Saudi Arabia retaliated by announcing a total cutoff of oil exports to America."
"At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by President Reagan and his advisors) that would be called āglobalism.ā It was not so much a new idea as the logical and inevitable result of mature self-organizing systems elaborating themselves under the influence of renewed, immense energy inputsāthe ultimate cheap-oil way of doing business in the closed system [in respect to matter] that is the planet Earth. It entailed the maximization of short-term profit and the minimization of care for future generations. It was the ultimate generator of entropy."
"The rebellion of the hippiesā¦ based itself on the notion that abundance was a natural entitlement, and one could "drop out" of an insecure, deadly, and frightening industrial culture to live off the fat of the land. It was inescapably a jejune philosophy, fraught with contradictions. For the hippies, the natural order of things included items such as stereo record players, electric guitars, motor vehicles for adventuring around the country, cheap bulk whole grains, and other products of anā¦ industrial way of life. The hippie platformā¦ with all its mystical incunabula, rested on the platform of ānormalā American life and would have been impossible without it."
"[Everything, and not just] all human enterprise can tend toward diminishing returns and unsustainability, but some modes have far more long-term prospects than others and some are socially suicidal, even in the short term. Many civilizations, from the Sumerians to the Maya, have faltered when overinvestments in the scale and complexity of food production produced ruinous diminishing returns. On American farms in the early 1800s, the balance between calories expended and calories produced as [the] food was about even. This occurred as tools reached a high stage of refinement but before machines replaced human labor and traditional knowledge. It implies a distinction between tools and machines, between work done with tools and work done by machines. Production improved while entropy was kept to a minimum. Under the current industrial farming system, it takes sixteen calories of āinputā to produce one calorie of grain, and seventy calories of input to produce one calorie of meat. A hundred years ago, just before the introduction ofā¦ fossil fuel-based technologies, more than 30 percent of the American population was engaged in farming. Now the figure is 1.6 percent. The issue is not moral, academic, or aesthetic. [ā¦] Itās a matter of those ratios being made possible only because cheap oil and automation made up for so much human labor. We did what we did in the twentieth century because we could. Of course, not all farm labor amounts to slavery or serfdom. Depending on how farming is organized, it can result in a very satisfactory way of life and rewarding social relations. Agriculture in the United States was organized very differently in Pennsylvania and South Carolina 150 years ago, and not simply because of climatic differences. Farmers had quickly become addicted to a new debt system of annual operation, mortgaging their farms to raise cash to pay for new machinery and fertilizerāliterally betting the farm on a good crop. With prices chronically depressed, mortgages could not be paid off. Farm foreclosures soared in the mid-1920s. Another unanticipated consequence of mechanized farming was the destruction of [the] soil. The tractor and its implements were machines that no one had previously experienced before, and it was some time before farmers noticed the insidious effects of soil compaction, rutting, and erosion that occurred. This would combine a few years later with an extended drought to produce the additional hardship of the ."
"Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operateā¦ complex systems at gigantic scales. Renewable energy sources are not compatible with those systems and scales. Renewables will not be able to take the place of oil and gas in running those systems. The systems themselves will have to go. Even many āenvironmentalistsā and āgreensā of our day seem to think that all we have to do is switch inputs. Instead of running all the air conditioners of Houston on oil- or gas-generated electricity, we'll use wind farms or massive solar arrays; we'll have super-fuel-efficient cars and keep on commuting over the interstate highway system. It isnāt going to happen. The wish to keep running the same giant systems at [a] gigantic scale using renewables is the heart of our illusions about solar, wind, and waterpower."