An excellent view of the challenges we face from a man who has been a comic and inspirational force. For those who choose not to read the full article, here is a summary of trends he sees:

1. Hope will fuel a mini “euphoria” for the first few months of the Obama Presidency, then reality will set in. He expects the Dow Industrial Stock Average to end up at 4000 sometime in 2009.
2. Thousands of companies will fail and millions of jobs will be lost. Downsizing will occur at all levels of society: government, business and family.
3. A new “servant class” will be created as domestic workers will start moving in with their employers.
4. A massive return to home gardening: “Gardening is the new Golf”
5. Oil and gas prices will rise and there may be spot shortages
6. The U.S. dollar will be 40% of it’s current value by the end of 2009
7. An end of robust globalism – the world is round after all, Tom Friedman.
   

Via: Clusterfuck Nation

There are two realities “out there” now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let’s call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a “consumer” economy to resume in “growth” mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament — through “innovation,” through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via “drill, baby, drill” policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current “rough patch” into a vibrant re-energized era of “green” Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.

The minority reality (let’s call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the “consumer” era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we’ve come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.

My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.

Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can’t be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won’t care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.

more…

From Culture Change:

With the IEA’s [International Energy Agency] World Energy Outlook’s assessment of depletion (including other factors such as sabotage) at 9.1% of the “natural rate,” and given the economic downturn’s momentum, we are looking into the gaping maw of collapse. This is the end of the industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution. Why am I choosing to sound so dramatic, and not call today’s “recession” a retreat from growth that we can recover from? The reason is we will be going all the way down in the trough after our rise to the top of consumption. It is the Category 5 storm we have unleashed. Now lash yourself to the mast or be swept overboard by the monster wave.

As Culture Change readers learned, agriculture is not sustainable for large populations. [Peter Salonius, author and soil scientist] And what gave us the industrial revolution? Answer: the easy coal and gushing, cheap petroleum.

Amen.

When the human population was counted in millions and resources were
sparse, people could simply move to pastures new. But with 9 billion
people expected around 2050, moving on is not an option. As
politicians reconstruct the global economy, they should take heed. If
we are to leave any kind of planet to our children we need an economic
system that lets us live within our means.

Via New Scientist