Those who expect we will all just crank along as we adapt to 30% less oil are not taking into account the impact on state coffers and what a breakdown of safety nets will mean to our inner cities. We have an entire society that exists on the largess of state and federal "programs" If we can't fund WIC and Head Start and food stamps and medicaid and fuel assistance and food stamps and AFDC and welfare and SSI (this is a huge one) then we will have an enormous group of angry, hungry people in a tight mass. Talk about a long, hot summer. Is it doomer to chose to live in a place that keeps one well away from large cities, in an area with reliable rainfall and good soil? I think it's nuts to be in a place without a strong social fabric and a way to provide food to it's citizens. I am still hoping that riots and civil unrest are confined to the big population centers but they may not be. I don't call myself a doomer. I call myself a realist.
I must admit that I was not fully considering the issues facing our inner cities in a budget/currency/funding crisis. Please keep in mind that I have no training in social work or policy - but the point cannot be overstated: Our cities are have all of the ingredients for a Katrina like disaster, only played out in 50 cities at once. If my vision of a 30% decline in total petroleum products in the 2006-2014 time period is correct, I think Kathy's vision is probable enough to be avoided like the plague. And no, Kathy, I would not call you a doomer. Your ability to calculate the probabilities is self evident.
The problem is that 50 million people living in and around Newark/Camden/Trenton/New York/Philidelphia/D.C./Baltimore... cannot do much about the circumstance they find themselves in.
Life will go on, even if major unrest breaks out. Just take a look at the suicide bombings that seem to occur daily over at the Middle East Nut House. Car bombs go off killing 50 here, 13 there, another 123 over there and the locals still have to go food shopping, kids gotta go to school, people gotta use the facilities... life goes on. People must accept the consequences of their actions and inactions alike. If I were an Iraqi I wouldn't keep my family in Baghdad under any circumstance, even if I had to live on a Camel Caravan or join up with the Bedouin tribes and wander the desert. Living with the real possibility that one of my kids would be killed by a suicide bomber would be enough motivation for me - but obviously not for everyone living in Baghdad. "Kathy" has made her decision, and "Bureaucrat" has made his decision. The outcomes of the myriad decisions we make in our lives casts the die as to whether you make old bones, leave descendants, live well or scrape by, etc...
In life, timing is everything. Are we 2.5 years into the 10+ year slide to zero Oil imports? Or is this just a head fake?
That, my friends, is the $64,000 question.
13 comments:
Well here is a $64,000 answer ... if the doomers and the off-the-griders and the gentleman farmers and everyone else who makes their survival plan around a "run to the countryside" strategy, I have bad news for you ... you can run and you can hide and you can "go survivalist," but somehow, someway, we starving masses are going to find your food and your energy, and we will take whatever we need to survive ourselves. You're playing kid games if you think you can separate yourselves for long. We're all stuck together. Might be nice to see if people really do believe in this "charitable Christianity" crappola, or if they are all posers.
Happy Thanksgiving! :)
My guess is that refugees on foot, with children and old people, might be able to go ten to fifteen miles per day, for about 20 days max before they poop out. So if you are at least 200 miles away from major populations centers, you'd have a chance. The rural areas would likely organize some kind of defense, and the refugees would have very mediocre weapons, considering the anti-gun culture of the cities.
Bureaucrat makes a good point, though: the average so-called survivalist would not stand a chance against a real collapse. How many people really have the stomach for the fluid responses, and brutally quick decision-making that would be required to really make it?
On the other hand, a Beirut or Baghdad scenario is more likely, where the mortality rate is high but survivable if you take smart precautions. I have a good friend who lives here now who grew up there, and it was brutal, but he and his family learned pretty quickly.
Finally, as the recommended author Ragnar Benson writes, "never become a refugee." You are much better off staying in place in the city (if you are prepared), than joining the masses on the road.
Basically, a study of the history of refugees, war, and mass migration of desperate humans throughout history can show you how to "make it." The first rule is, don't follow the herd. But I take it that anyone reading this blog knows that.
A highly recommended blog by someone who has gone through the collapse and continuing calamity that is Argentina can be found here. He's a very good, practical writer:
Surviving in Argentina blog
oh yeah, Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
We really should be thankful every day of our lives for whatever we have... in a real way, it's a miracle that nature provides for us in any way at all. Life is a mystery, and that insight is the real root of the religious impulse. The reductionism, hyper-rationalism and hubris of the modern mind is what kind of got us into this mess, if it is a mess.
For those of you who ARE gentlemen/women farmers, I take it you read or have heard of Backwoods Home magazine? I'd be surprised if you don't read it, Greg.
At WORST it would be a Beirut/Baghdad situation, and that is what should be prepared for, not wholesale, one stop shopping for the end of the world.
I think.
While I do not see roving bands of lunatics, if the food insecurity numbers doubles or triples... I would not want to be a resident of Newark, Detroit, or Oakland. I think they might be in for some rough nights.
If we are running into depletion problems; something, or a bunch of someones, needs to replace the tractor.
No need to shoot the supernumeraries when you have what they are desperate for- productive work.
My husband got a laugh out of "gentleman farmer". Is that what you call a guy covered in pig shit? I don't mean that I expect roving bands of refugees. I just expect you will see a rise in domestic violence, kidnappings, street violence, B&Es and crimes against anyone perceived as one of the Haves. There will enough distributions of emergencey food to keep people from starving and I do think people tend to stay on familiar turf if possible. Riots will be local in nature and the police will respond with brutal force to keep things in check. Not Mad Max, just grim and dangerous and not where you want to raise your babies. I would not want to be isolated either. Transition towns are a bit too touchy feely for my taste. I prefer the small town model that functions more like a large and sometimes batty family. You get enough labor and a distribution of skills and tools. We even have a couple of doctors, several nurses, lots of crafts people and a fair number of old farmers who did it by hand and still have the tools and techniques. I used to think of this somewhat as an intellectual exercise but that oil import data is really troubling.
Kathy:
I see the social outcome much the way you just described - South America style, or Beirut/Baghdad style.. take your pick - I don't want to be raising my babies in those environments.
And Isolation sucks. My small town 35 miles outside of Nashville has a big hospital, a small university, and a population in the county of 100k. Most of the county is farmland, but most of it is not in production. Factory farming in the Midwest and Plains states killed the local family farms - but they are still there.
I spend most of the school year in South Florida... but I think anybody living in a hurricane vulnerable area (HVA) needs to have a long term contingency plan. How we would rebuild Miami or Ft. Lauderdale after a Cat 5 hurricane hit in the middle of an Oil shortage is beyond me. Hurricane Charley hit the west coast of Florida in 2004 and people are still living in FEMA trailers today - as they are in New Orleans and Galveston.
We have addicted too much of the citizenry to the social programs that could very well run out of funding on a moments notice. Not that I I have any policy ideas to fix that...
I think you are all still living in a kid's pop-up book world. It isn't going to come to that. Life, in the cities and the rurals, will just get more expensive. Cheap oil covered up a LOT of inefficiencies.
Gregg:
I spent the weekend in Galveston about a month ago, don’t remember the exact dates but it was during the Phillies Vs Astros game. Didn’t see any FEMA trailers nor much damage. There were a few damaged businesses that look like they probably not reopen; bathing suit shop in a strip mall with a hole in the roof, dive shop in same mall etc.
I didn’t go disaster touring but if it was there it was nowhere near the beaches I went to or the ones I passed en route.
Galveston is mainly a vacation home community so most of the people with destroyed houses will not be refugees; they will be living in their main home.
bureaucrat:
When the starving masses go searching for larders to rape and pillage, what makes you thin the owners will meekly allow it? The true value of survivalist lifestyle is contained in the mindset and the skills; these can not be stolen, and will benefit their owners far longer than the full belly of unprepared slacker lasts him.
"Do you suppose that when the Visigoths were scaling the walls that they knew that the Holy Roman Empire was over?"
Survivalists are only as good as their supply of bullets. The American Indians tried fighting with bows and arrows ... and lost. Old men who can't believe reality are easy to overpower. I would be more concerned with the hungry, unemployed young masses who will soon find out the money is all gone, and by necessity find the food and energy whereever it is, and do whatever it takes to get it.
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