Civilization Is Collapsing — What You Can Do

You can’t prevent it, but there’s something you can do for yourself and loved ones

Photo by Jonathan Forage on Unsplash

Upon casual inspection this looks like a thriving civilization. People going to the grocery store, attending church, smiling at each other on the street.

But there is an edge, a vibe that hints at wrongness. Too many days over a hundred degrees. Too much rain when it comes. Too much strange and bad news about the economy and politics and the weather. Too many bills getting harder to pay. More people looking for handouts. More people camping out under the interstate overpass.

We live in a hyper-charged civilization built on petroleum. Liquid fossils. It is condensed, transportable energy. It is so common we forget how magical it is. We can fly higher and faster than birds. We can drive three hundred miles an hour down an autobahn, build edifices half a mile into the sky, pierce the sky itself and fly into the cosmos, and shove light into every corner of darkness to allay our fears of the boogey man.

All of it needs oil. It is what makes our mining, transportation, industrialization, and agriculture possible. It is the life blood of our civilization.

We won’t “run out” of oil. It will just get too expensive to burn.

Inflation will trend upward as oil becomes harder and more expensive to extract. Governments may not be able to control it. Oil rose to $147 in September of 2007 because of high demand and a stall in production. Oil is currently about $90 a barrel and trending upward. The price was mediated by President Biden dipping into U.S. strategic oil reserves. Refilling the reserves (at its lowest in 40 some odd years) has been delayed because of, you guessed it, high oil prices.

What if it never comes down?

Instead of peak oil, the talk now is of peak oil use expected to occur around 2030. This peak in use is occurring because of the rise in electric vehicles. Unfortunately 82% of our energy still comes from fossil fuels.

What is not talked about is how every shipload, bucket, or truckload of ore containing the lithium, copper, steel, aluminum, manganese, nickel, cobalt, and silica to make that shitload of…