“The ingredients I like to put in my superpower collapse soup are: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget and ballooning foreign debt. The heat and agitation can be provided most efficaciously by a humiliating military defeat and widespread fear of a looming catastrophe.”
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects draws on Orlov’s travels to Russia just before the USSR collapsed, and then over a few years afterward. He thinks the US is in for a big collapse too—much bigger than what the country has seen with the housing and credit crash. (Note that he started talking about this risk of collapse around 2005 or 2006, when most everyone else thought things in the US was still thinking things were rosy.)
Here’s a few other excerpts from the chapter:
“Let’s keep in mind that in every age and circumstance, some people have always managed to find enlightenment, fulfillment and freedom: this is the best that can be hoped for.”
“Oil powers just about everything in the U.S. economy, from food production and distribution to shipping, construction and plastics manufacturing. When less oil becomes available, less is produced, but the amount of moeny in circulation remains the same, causing the prices for the now scarcer products to be bid up, causing inflation.” [Is it really that simple?]
“There is also a cottage industry of professional optimists, proudly serving teh needs of clients whose long-term investment strategy is to continually invest for the short term. Optimism is contagious, and so they are the ones who get most of the press. Not that the professional realists are in short supply. They are to be found in the ICA, the Defense Department, the General Accounting Office and the US Congress. They all insist that looming energy shortages are a severe threat and that something must be done to address it.”
“What is known on the subject [of peak oil] now is more or less what was known a decade or so ago. Thus, the lack of attention paid to the subject over the decades resulted not from ignorance but from denial: although the basic theory that is used to model and predict resources depletion has been well understood since th 1960s, most people prefer to remain in denial.”
“This highly organized, high-powered problem-solving entity [the American can-do spirit] is quickly running out of energy, and once it does, it will not be so high-powered anymore. I would like to humbly suggest that any long-term plan it attempts to undertake is doomed, simply because crisis conditions will make long-term planning, along with large, ambitious projects, impossible.”
“Economic collapse gives rise to new, smaller and poorer economies. That patternhas been repeated many times…”
“The Soviet problems seem to have been largely organizational rather than physical in nature, although the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed just three years after reaching peak oil production is hardly a coincidence.”
“The ultimate cause of the Soviet Union’s spontaneous collapse remains shrouded in mystery.”
“A slightly more commonsense explanation is this: during hte pre-perestroika ‘stagnation’ period, due to the chronic under-performance of the economy, coupled with record levels of military expenditure, trade deficit and foreign debt, it became increasingly difficult for the average Russian middle-class family of three, with both parents working, to make ends meet. (Now, isn’t that beginning to sound familiar?)”
“When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationship, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.”
“An economic arrangement can continue for quite some time after it becomes untenable, through sheer inertia. But at some point a tide of broken promises and invalidated assumptions sweeps it all out to sea. One such untenable arrangement—the one on which continued US prosperity currently rests—assumes that it is possible to perpetually borrow more and more money from abroad to pay for more and more energy imports, while the price of these imports continues to double every few years.”
Related posts:
- “The Oil Curse” by Yegor Gaidar Chapter 3 of the book "Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia"...
- Read: “Energy minister will hold summit to calm rising fears over peak oil” The UK government and industry heads met to weigh up the risk of oil going into terminal decline, the Guardian...
- Read: “Beyond the Limits to Growth” a chapter by Richard Heinberg from "The Post Carbon Reader"...
