If I should suddenly develop a fatal cancer, Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything, is definitely the person I would want to break the news. Heinberg is a soft spoken, gentle, Mahatma Gandhi kind of guy who blows you away by telling you the party is over and there is no soft landing. But in such a nice way.

There is a great YouTube video (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybRz91eimTg&feature=related) of a talk he gave a few years ago in New Zealand about what western society will look like mid-century. Heinberg admits that it’s not politically correct to tell the truth about how bleak things are. Besides having a remarkable low-keyed style that really twists the knife in, Heinberg also seems to have a clearer vision than anyone else of what the ruling elite – who have known about impending resource scarcity since the 1970s – are likely to do as things continued to deteriorate.

We’re Out of Everything

Heinberg is more about resource scarcity than climate change. He says it’s obvious that people aren’t scared enough of climate change to do anything about it. And it’s not just oil and natural gas we’re running out of. In the next 15-20 years, we will also be out of coal, uranium (there will still be coal and uranium in the ground – but extracting it will be incredibly expensive), rock phosphate (needed for industrial agriculture), fresh water, topsoil, grain, fish, arable land, minerals and precious metals (including Indium and Gallium, which are needed to make solar panels).

The hard truth is that human beings have been living for decades beyond the limits of the natural world can provide. Unfortunately people have a hard time getting their heads around this when the media continually bombards them with the message that sacrifice is bad and they have a right to expect something for nothing.

Goodbye Southern California

Heinberg makes it clear that vast urban centers like southern California will simply not exist two decades from now. For two reasons. Owing to dwindling fresh water supplies – everywhere – there will be no way to supply drinking water to millions of people between Los Angeles and the Mexican border.  And because of skyrocketing fuel costs, no one is going to transport food 5,000 miles (as they do now) to feed them.

Major Social Upheaval is Inevitable

He also makes the strong point that public dialogue needs to move beyond changing lightbulbs and carbon taxes – to the major social upheaval that no longer be avoided – as well as options for managing it. We all know damn well the ruling elite has been discussing it – at least since 2000. That’s one good thing about Republicans. They find it much harder to conceal what they’re really up to.

Heinberg lays out three broad societal changes that need to occur as fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive:  de-mechanization (replacing fossil fuel driven machines with human and animal labor), de-urbanization (moving people closer to their resource based) and a total infrastructure revamp –  as existing infrastructure is totally dependent on machines and fossil fuels.

The Role of Government in Managing Societal Change

The most interesting part of the talk was an exploration of the three possible routes government will take in managing this massive societal change. Because it suddenly becomes  clear to me why civil liberties are under such concerted attack in the US (by both Republicans and Democrats) and why the US, China and Russia continue to incarcerate minorities, dissidents and now debtors at break neck speed, putting them to work in our prison industrial complex (see http://www.opendemocracy.net/charles-shaw/essential-reading-on-us-prison-industrial-complex).

Option 1:  A kind of feudal fascism, involving forced movement of people away from cities into prisons and work camps (and slavery), which will involve continual surveillance of the rest of the population. It will be instituted by whipping up popular support for strong law enforcement and military intervention during a period of massive unemployment, homelessness, food shortages and resulting instability and chaos.

Heinberg already sees evidence the world’s most powerful countries (the US, China and Russia) have selected Option 1 and are already moving in this direction. Come to think of it, so do I.

To be continued with Option 2 and 3 – don’t hold your breath – they are a little better than Option 1, but not much.

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