"No one lives within a day’s walk of a coal mine, an iron ore source, and a smelter that can operate without a source of electricity, plus food. The old smelters didn’t use electricity to drive the huge motors moving heavy hot metal and slag around. The first smelters were close to coal and iron ore sources, but we used them up; they no longer exist close to each other. In the year 1500, we had a world population of around 450 million and grew massively over the next 250 years to the start of the industrial revolution by increasingly using the resources of the ‘new world’. We’ve been on an upward trajectory ever since, especially since around 1800 when fossil energy came into use. People just don’t understand our extreme (and still growing) overpopulation problem given the imminent decline of oil, and especially diesel. Assuming “we’ll downsize this” or “relocalize that” ignores the fact that once oil supply shifts to contraction, the declines will be permanent year after year, and with diesel shortages the ability to build anything new all but disappears. It will be a sad sight with suffering everywhere and increasing year after year. Survivors will have to be hard people, protecting and providing for their own, at the exclusion of others. Everyone should look around their home and imagine it without the oil used to produce and deliver everything in it, because that’s the world of the future, with old decaying cold buildings and no food in cities."