Changes of state

Last week I began a discussion of the basic necessities that should be the questions you ask yourself in a disruption. They were shelter, water, heat, food, clothing, communication and power. Implicit but not stated was safety.

These are important observations to make of yourself and your life at any time but especially as we enter the plateau phase of the disruption. We have several pivot points under our feet now and it is somewhat depressing, nerve wracking and unproductive to reiterate the litany. However we should understand the basic periods of of this global energy realignment that we can keep straight what one might do during each phase.

Today in a hurricane, tornado, earthquake or evacuation, you might assume help is on the way and you need only survive for a few days until it gets there. That is the function of all 72 hour emergency packs - to get you noticed and to help you survive for three days until the good guys show up. Twenty years from now your emergency pack will be focused on tools, snares and long term survival, and camouflage. No one is coming to rescue you.

So it serves clarity for me at least, to lay out the states or stages of our next 70 years. These are the expected stages of change.

The Remembered Recent Past:
Energy remains abundant, science finds new answers, life is better for everyone, and third world countries look to first world to see their future. there is no concern for resources as they seem endless. The sea is so big, the fisheries are forever. The sky so large we couldn't possibly affect it. Man is the center of the world, and all resources are his tools for growth, increasing complexity and a better life for his children.

NOW - Plateau and decline. Easy energy has been used, capitalism is running out of easy raw materials, another spiecies has gone extinct while I write this, the seas are sterile in many places and the fish will be gone in 20 years. There are islands of floating plastic in the Pacific the size of the state of Texas. Global warming is happening despite our wonder that it could have occurred, wars are being fought currently over globalization, and the world stock piles of grain foods have fallen from over 100 days to 56 days. A corn to ethanol boondoggle is guarranting starvation for third world countries in the near future and our pre cheap energy population of 1 billion has grown to an oil/food assisted 6.6 billion.

We are in the bumpy plateau of the pregnant pause before collapse. Already we are beginning to take our civilization apart for the value of the raw materials. Copper is being scavenged from every dump and abandoned building. Oil, irreplaceable, continues to be pumped at the maximum capacity of wells near exhaustion. The plateau decline is in progress and will last bumping every harder downward towards global starvation, blackouts, failure of the dollar, failure of the power grid.

Deconstruction: Begins with the failure of the electrical power grid. After numerous brownouts and assurances from government that it will fixed "soon", it will go down and stay down. That is the true beginning of the dismantling of suburbia. It will be the period in history known as the salvage era. Salvage will go on for a long time, but the big salvage period will likely last less than 10 years. Electronics fail and are gone, building materials are recycled, but then even the demand for those begins to reduce as we hit a maximum die-off in the 2030s with over 300 million people dying in a single year. At that that steep decline, salvage resources will be ever more available, but the power multiplier of heavy equipment and cheap energy will be gone. Salvage will slow and become a more sane and lifetime job for more and more back to the landers.

Sustainable future. This will be who is left after 2080, and they will be living a completely different life. Their technologies will be based on personal energy levels from food resources - meaning the current sun light falling on the earth. That amount of energy will define the level of civilization , if any that is left.
This may devolve to hunter-gather stage as the earth recovers, or we may find that we pushed the global warming switch over center. There is also the very real probablity in many minds that we will enter wholesale nuclear war by 2030, and that would radically change the later sustainable future picture. That is why no one is willing to guess that far out into the future.

In the near future I would like to begin exploring the idea of what you should be doing now for the plateau phase and the coming transportation and heating crisis.