Hey, wake up from your trance and trust your senses this is serious - Hans Tammemagi
New millennium has brought a turning point in history, yet we ignore meltdown
Hans Tammemagi, Special to the Sun
Published: Saturday, June 28, 2008
The period from 1950 to 2000 will be remembered as the Golden Era of modern civilization, the pinnacle reached by humans after a million years of evolution. This brilliant half-century was sponsored largely by fossil fuels, especially oil, which brought unprecedented economic growth, plentiful transportation and a rich and diverse lifestyle.
But the new millennium has brought the end of cheap oil, and civilization is suddenly teetering on the edge of collapse. Even if we manage to scrape through (and it would require heroic efforts), life will change. We’re at one of the most important turning points in history, yet we persistently ignore the coming meltdown and just want to party on. Nero would be proud.
So, why is civilization teetering?
Summary
- we are on the threshold of a major crisis.
- the supply of oil will diminish each year, but population and demand will continue to grow.
- renewables like wind and solar simply can’t be supplied in enough quantity to fill the enormous demand.
- the world is facing a major food shortage.
- United Nations recently announced that large segments of the world face immediate hunger now, and global food production must be doubled in the next 30 years.
- we are adding 70 million more people to the planet every year.
- our efforts to curb carbon emissions are laughable and pathetic.
- Societal breakdown won’t happen quickly nor everywhere, but be sure of this: Change is coming and although poor nations will be hardest hit, North America will not be spared.
Jerry
July 7, 2008 | 1:42 am1
I think North America will be hit just as hard if not harder, because other areas of the planet have evolved into the state they are in now, with the social fabric they have. They can roll back to that, albeit with some pain. North America will fall to it’s knees while the US points the finger and blames everyone else. Though the population will be watching Paris Hilton and walking their small dog on English Bay while listening to their iPod (or iSolaters as they are better know) will just be the irony of it all.
North America has been rapidly grown in the petri dish of excess and waste into an example of urban sprawl and potential wasteland (suburbia). Agriculture is all mega farmed and oil based, there is little or no local community, framing, interdependence or social culture (as per most of Europe for example). One farmers market on Comox or Spuds on Granville island can sort that out.
What was built in North America (though more so in the US) on the ideal of the individual, short sightedness and greed; opposed to community, a holistic approach and a social conscience, will decline and rapidly so. The irony that most people in the US think that “socialism” is a bad thing, though less that 1% can define it, is not lost of the rest of the world either.
That I am extremely thankful for as it will force an acceptance or model of community and interconnectedness that North America is so desperately lacking, it’s so sterile it hurts, and for that to end is no bad thing.
Though in the mean time the US will use the only thing it has left to get what ever it wants (in the absence of any political creditability or good will left in the world towards it by it’s own doing) and that is it’s military, the peak oil wars, as we are seeing today.
I wonder how long the draft will take ……