A World of Limits and towering magicians

There is a Mark Twain quote I love, but cannot find the exact words. To paraphrase:

The important thing about a new idea is that once a man understands it, his mind can't snap back quite as small as it was before.

I've not done it justice, but that's close. A world of limits is a new idea for any human alive today. It is a hard idea, and it is hard to get your mind around it. In that idea is the recognition that we are the greatest extinction event in recorded history (we're getting rid of species quicker than any meter strike or glacier could). In that new idea, oil runs out, doesn't go forever. There will be continually less food, and people will die.
We who will look at this feel like the drunk who wakes up with a hangover next to, ah, someone, and wonders what he had been thinking last night? We always did live in a world of limits, but it was a big world, so big. It was such a big world that certainly we could not really affect it. Right? It is a very very big ocean, we could not fish it out, could we? It is just, it is just a little and a little. Each little left less and now we have to use a lot of energy just to stay medicated and stupid. We live in a world of limits. We should never pat ourselves on the back for waking up, we should rather wonder that we could think the rules of physics didn't apply on our space ship earth.
It is a stretch to look at peak oil, but it is not hard to do. Just google "peak Oil" and read the oil geologists and scientists you'll find there. There is no question of decreasing supply, all arguments are about how quick our energy decline will be and what comes from that. So stretch and read. Then read about global warming, don't worry about the cause - that is always up for debate, or at least where the rich choose to put their stinking red herrings. Doesn't matter what is causing global warming now - us or space fairies - the result is massive problems in food and water for everyone alive. Then read about the bird flu and what just happened this week. Then take a breath and relax.
For me, as I learned more and more, I looked harder and harder for the opposing views based in science. Then I looked for any good news -the 11th hour fix. Then I learned that the 11th hour was 1986. We're in the 12th hour. The fix it train takes decades and voluntary compliance from a population of 6.5 billion who must agree to fall to about 1.5 billion or less by 2070. NO, you can't do that by birth control. Bird flu works though, as does starvation, war, nuclear "solutions" to resource allocation problems.
You are at the height of Rome's power, and personally you command energies undreamt of for all of mankind that went before. Even in 1940 each person commanded the energy of 32,000 lbs of coal each year. Who says there isn't something for nothing. We, the cumulative we, have been wizards conducting the world with our magic wand of cheap energy. Primarily oil. It was and is liquid fuels that made us towering giants of change and magic. Technology always took the bow, but the power was the free oil from more than 100 million years ago, that lay underground, waiting to make us giants. Giants we are, giants we were, but we are in the process even now of getting small. We mistook technology as the energy, and it was just the trick, the machine of using the energy. Technology is not the energy itself.
And maybe if the energy goes away very quickly - as hard as that will be on all of us who will die because of it, then maybe our children's children will have a world left that they can live in. If we "solve" this with the well worn stick of technological "progress" - if we find a way to drag this out with nuclear and liquified coal, Colorado oil shales- we will certainly to kill our remain forests and the sea. There are just too many of us.
Before oil there were about a billion humans. Now there is 6.5 billion. That is not because we are more efficient at growing food. That is because oil energy fuels our tractors, trucks, combines, harvesters. Natural gas makes our fertilizer, and oil makes our bug sprays. When the oil is gone, nuclear, wind, solar, oil tar sands, oil shales, and Jack 5 super deep oil wells will not replace the river of oil that we feed ourselves with every day. 10 grams of sweet crude light oil puts 6 grams of carbohydrate food on your plate. Our world population is still growing. Our world is staggering under the load of us, the needs of us, the wants of us.
We have come to the age of magicians. We are standing at the back door of the oil age looking at the setting soon of our cheap energy empire. We are looking at the future through a dark glass. All the tools in our heads and hands are likely the wrong ones for what comes.
So that is the thought that is stretching my head now. It is stretching my friends, all my close people. Some are looking briefly and then going back to the "real" world. Some are brought to their emotional knees by it (me for instance), and some get angry at the messenger (even at me - imagine). Some of you are angry that I don't believe technology will fix us out of this mess.

I live in a transition state anyway, in my Airstream, mobile at a moment if I choose. So I sometimes forget that this information might impact many of you differently than hits me, and it hits me plenty hard. Maybe what you read and absorb is a round house punch to the jaw. For some of you, debt, investments, health, children and significant others make it important that this not be the end of the age of NO LIMITS.

It is hard to think that all you were told was success is in the process of ending, and that you will be hard pressed to make a cocoon of protection and comfort around your children. You are no longer the towering magician, now we will be as we were before, living by our wits, and strength, facing real risk for the first time in a long time. Those that can't stand it will group and die in crowds waiting for the help promised tomorrow by a dying federal bureaucracy.

In the beginning of Steinbeck's book, the "Grapes of Wrath" there is a scene at the end of a three day dust storm. The sun had not shown for three days, and the soil buried the farms, crops and houses in it's path. The farm families huddled indoors, blocking the door sills with towels. When they emerged everyone was stunned. They were the walking dead. Everything buried, everything lost, their lives as they had known them dead. The children wept, and the farm wives wrung their hands and knew that everything was at an end for them. The men walked through the dust, were covered in it, wraiths, the walking dead, in shock. Then Steinbeck has the women relax. They see the men starting to curse, getting angry, getting really fucking pissed. The anger is survival, whereas stunned and shocked acceptance is death.

So get mad. Get mad and working on your angles, survive. What you do once the collapse is in progress will actually count for something in your own survival unlike the lives most of us currently lead, sterile, repetitive, boring, meaningless.

So for those of you holding tight to denial, I know that when I irritate you by what I write, you may stop writing me, stop calling me, stop talking to me, but I know in my heart that your mind will not snap back quite so small, and in that you are somewhat forewarned, somewhat prepared.

mcnalan on a Friday in August, pre-collapse